Today we’d like to introduce you to Alexa Torres
Hi Alexa, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
To tell the story of my history with the violin is really to tell the story of my life. It’s not always linear, but it goes back – almost as far back as the beginning. I started playing classical violin when I was 5 years old and quickly became a very serious student. During my childhood and adolescence, I had the opportunity to work with many amazing professors. When it was time to begin high school I auditioned for the fully-funded North Carolina School of the Arts boarding school and I was selected as the only freshman violinist out of many applicants. I attended this school for two years. After moving to Austin for my junior and senior years of high school, I also had the opportunity to play at Carnegie Hall with McCallum orchestra, and was selected as the first place winner of a regional Austin school district violin competition. Because of my commitment to the violin throughout my childhood, my family and friends assumed that I would choose to study classical violin in university.
However, during my final years of high school, I began to be disenchanted with what I perceived to be the rigidity of the classical paradigm in which my musical practice was entrenched. I began to experiment outside of classical music by playing in indie rock bands such as Federal State Local and Noise Revival Orchestra around Austin. We played iconic Austin venues like The Mohawk, Cactus Café, and Stubb’s Barbeque; at music festivals like South By Southwest; and at co-op parties at places like Eden House and 21-st street co-op. I toured Europe with the Noise Revival Orchestra during the summer between high school and college. But despite, beginning to dabble in alternative styles, I was not aware that there were options for studying non-classical genres as a violinist in college. Because of this, instead of studying music, I chose to go a different route. I ended up graduating from the University of Texas, Austin with a triple major in Anthropology, Latin American Studies, and Plan II Honors. This path centered other passions of mine, such as writing, research, and narrative construction.
I continued to perform with bands throughout college and started playing with a manouche group called Chico Chico. A lot of us lived in the Austin co-ops so we would get together and jam at 21-st street, or on the porch of the co-op where I lived, Eden house. This is when I began exploring jazz and improvisation a little bit. Then, when I studied abroad a year in Santiago, Chile, in 2014, I began to meet and collaborate with musicians who were established in the Chilean scene. Because of this, after finishing my degree from UT Austin, I decided to move back to Chile and pursue music fulltime. I lived in Santiago from 2016 to 2019. During this time, I had the opportunity to play with a lot of musicians who were prominent in the Chilean scene such (now) grammy-winner Mon Laferte. I also recorded an album – Mundo Cero – as a core member of the jazz fusion group Ensamble de Luz which was nominated for a Premio Pulsar – a Chilean Grammy. Throughout this time, I continued exploring jazz and improvisation on the violin, and played throughout the cities jazz clubs. I was largely self-taught, but learned a lot from the musicians I was collaborating with. However, I felt that I wanted more time and formal study to really learn and integrate jazz theory, repertoire, and the history embodied in the genre’s practice. So, in the summer of 2019, I moved back to Austin with the goal of applying for a master’s degree in jazz performance. While back in Austin, I got a job as a server, and I began to prepare my Master’s auditions. I also put together a manouche group that played regularly at the Elephant Room and events at the Austin Convention Center. I recognized that it was a lofty goal to apply to a master’s in performance without having an undergraduate degree in music. Up until this point, I was largely self-taught in jazz, and I honestly wasn’t sure I could to it. But I knew I had to try, so during this time, I also took some jazz courses at the University of Texas to help me prepare to enter the world of jazz academia.
I was thrilled when I was accepted to the University of North Texas (UNT) Jazz Program to pursue a master’s in jazz performance in Denton, Texas. This is one of the best jazz programs in the country. They had a new, recently established Jazz Strings Program, led by the incredible violinist Scott Tixier. I moved to Denton at the end of 2019 to begin the program, right before COVID changed our world in March 2020. I learned so much during my two and a half years at school! While at UNT, even though I was in a performance program, I began to reconnect with my passion for research. In 2022, I became the first violinist and the first woman to graduate from UNT’s jazz string program when I obtained my MM in Jazz Performance. Before graduating, I was awarded two prestigious research grants to conduct ethnographic research in Europe: 1) The Presser Graduate Music Award and; 2) The Fulbright Research Grant. These grants funded a year of research and performance in Belgium, France, and Poland, from July 2022 to August 2023. During this research-performance sojourn, I conducted interviews and collaborated with jazz violinists in the three countries.
However, before setting out on this trip, right after graduating from my masters, I recorded my debut album as a bandleader, In Situ. I saw it as a way of reflecting personally on my musical journey before turning my gaze outwards for the year of research.
I recorded the album with some incredible musicians: Jordan Proffer on Drums, Josh Newburry on bass, and Mario Wellmann on guitar. To make the album, I drew on what I learned about jazz idioms during my master’s, my time performing in Chile, my Cuban heritage, and my experiences studying anthropology.
In situ is an archaeological term which refers to the original position of an artifact found in place. When I was 21, during my undergrad, I spent five weeks excavating Maya ruins in the Belizean jungle. We spent 8 or 9 hours a day digging in the wet dirt, often without finding much. But I remember the sense of awe I felt when I finally dug up an artifact. It was a scraper – a type of tool, carved out of stone. As I held it, I thought about how I was likely the first person to touch it in over a thousand years, and I imagined stories about the people who had used the tool before me so long ago. I wanted to bring that very particular feeling of awe to this album. The term in situ evokes a sense of rediscovery and recontextualization which are processes that I think play a big role in improvisation. It also conveys a feeling of connection between past, present, and future. Artifacts found in situ represent material culture which we use to construct narratives of the past in order to better understand our present and our future. Because of this, I saw the album as a bridge in a lot of ways – a bridge between past, present and future; a bridge between different places and times in my life; a bridge between musical genres; and a bridge between my music and my research. I was awarded the Austin Live Music Event Fund grant from the City of Austin to support the release of the album.
On June 14th, 2024, about two years after recording it, I finally released In Situ out into the world! It can be found on all major streaming platforms. For the release, I organized a series of concerts in Austin, including at Monk’s Jazz, and one at the Dougherty Art’s Center in collaboration with the Mexican American Cultural Center. I also played release concerts in New York City at The Django and Soapbox Gallery. In December 2023, I did a pre-release tour in Chile which was really a full circle moment for me since my time living there was so musically formative.
Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in Jazz Performance at New York University, fully-funded by the five-year Steinhardt fellowship. This unique degree is ideal for unifying my diverse interests since it allows me to pursue both performance and research. Because my family is in Austin and I consider Austin my home, I travel back and forth between New York City and Austin.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It has not been a smooth road! There have definitely been challenges that come with being a woman in jazz, which is a very male-dominated field. I have found that my knowledge base is more likely to be questioned than that of my male colleagues which can be very frustrating. I’m happy to see initiatives to try to address gender-based inequities in jazz environments, but I think we still have improvements to make in this regard.
Another challenge has been that the violin is not very common in jazz. Because of this, some people don’t see the violin as a jazz instrument, and will sometimes question the ability of a violinist to play jazz, or wonder if the violin should even exist in jazz spaces. In reality, the violin played an important role in the development of early jazz. A lot of New Orleans early jazz bandleaders were violinists! One of the things I hoped to accomplish with my album In Situ is to help show that the violin can be a modern jazz instrument.
I also struggle with imposter syndrome and performance anxiety (like a lot of other musicians I know). But I really try my best not to let these things get in the way of opportunities! Exercises to stay materially grounded in the present moment can help overcome negative self-talk and focus on the task at hand.
Finally, the fact that, as a musician, you can practice something so many times and then you have “one shot” to get “get it right” in public can also be really overwhelming. In improvisation especially, it can take a really long time to integrate new musical devices into your personal improvisational language. When you learn a new musical device for improvisation, you begin a process of really beginning to embody this new idea — of integrating it deeply into your body and mind in way that allows you to play it in many different contexts, and allows it to eventually arise naturally on stage. That process can be a real challenge and can also take a lot of time.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am an improvising violinist with a background in jazz. During my musical career, I have performed throughout the US, Latin America, and Europe and I have had the privilege of sharing the stage with renowned, Grammy-winning artists such as Kurt Elling and Mon Laferte. I have played in a diverse array of venues and festivals including Carnegie Hall (NYC), Teatro Caupolicán (SCL), The Elephant Room Jazz Club (ATX), South by Southwest, Festival Internacional Django Reinhardt Chile, Denton Jazz and Arts Festival, Soapbox Gallery, and the Django Jazz Club. Breaking new ground in the world of improvised strings, in 2022 I became the first woman and the first violinist to graduate from the University of North Texas (UNT) Jazz Strings program when I obtained a Master of Music in Jazz Performance from the acclaimed Jazz Studies department. In addition to being a musician, I am also an ethnographic researcher with publications in peer-reviewed journals of music education and social sciences. I view my ethnographic and performance practices as reciprocal; my playing is deeply informed by my research as I aim to construct a musical lexicon which temporally connects the past, present, and future.
My recently released album In Situ exemplifies this nexus of music and research in my life. In July 2022, I set out on a one-year trip to interview and collaborate with improvising violinists across Belgium, France, and Poland. My hybrid research and performance sojourn was funded by two prestigious awards: The Presser Graduate Music Award and The Fulbright Grant. I recorded In Situ, in preparation for this journey, to reflect internally on the sound cultures that shape my personal musical milieu before turning her gaze externally to new soundscapes. In Situ brings together original compositions as well as contemporary arrangements of jazz standards. The result reflects an intimate engagement with jazz idioms and my own Latinx heritage by synthesizing Latinx rhythms, modern jazz devices, and improvisation.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I can’t say I’m “not afraid of failure” because I most certainly am, but I don’t let that fear of failure hold me back. I go for opportunities and really give it my all even when I’m not sure that things will work out. Sometimes, I end up surprising myself!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.alexatorresmusic.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alexatorresmusic/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alexatorresmusic
- Other: https://open.spotify.com/album/1Ys9558sdbUzXJ1ipq7XAN?si=fm8i6zKRR-m1MB00N1pKlA
Image Credits
Iván Rodriguez, Alicja Debęk, Letitia Smith. Jesus Garcia at Ancho Media.
