It's kind of like being a writer in the sense that you always hear other writers say, 'Well, the best way to start writing is to just start writing.' The same goes for improvisation. You want to start improvising, just start playing notes. And the more you do that, the more comfortable - or not comfortable - but I guess how you're able to adapt to situations. You become more familiar with your instrument. As soon as you have a musical thought, you can go ahead and add to that musical thought and know your way around.

People always say that music is a universal language. It was very, very true. We could show up anywhere with any people speaking different languages and we could just be like, "You want to play that song? Yeah, okay." We would usually want to play Latin American songs, and they would usually want to play Santana or Jimi Hendrix and stuff like that. So we would trade off. So yeah, we were able to make a lot of friends that way and meet a lot of local musicians. It was a great experience.

Of course, right away I got more interested in the far-out jazz than the traditional jazz, so I quickly was turned onto the John Zorn scene and all the wild stuff coming out of New York and Europe. Improvising is a pretty natural thing for me.

I remember being on Hawaii when I sailed to Hawaii. It felt unsettling to be walking around there because I was thinking, "This place could just sink at any second." In actuality, it totally can. But it really felt like, I am this teeny, tiny speck out in the middle of all that water, I feel so unprotected right now. It almost felt creepier than being on a boat, which is an even smaller speck out in the middle of nowhere. But I felt like I had some control over that situation.

Arranging is sort of the most exciting part of making music right now for me. I really enjoy the process of arranging because you're given all the time that you need to decide on every single note.

I guess travelling that kind of long distance and travelling at such a slow pace, it wasn't something that I was thinking about when I was inside of the cistern, but when I started hearing the music played back to me for the first time by an ensemble, it totally brought me back, immediately, to memories of sailing. And it really became apparent that this was some sort of a through line in my life that I was excited to explore more.

I was going to say is that I come from a rock background, but also I was super interested in jazz for a long time. I was training to be a jazz musician for quite a while. I never trained to be a classical composer or player, but I did train to play jazz.