BY ANDY CUSH
Photo by Andrew Munsey
Published in print in We Jazz Magazine, issue 17 (Winter 2025)
Steph Richards and Qasim Naqvi met as fellow students at California Institute of the Arts in 2007 and have been cracking each other up ever since. Richards is a trumpeter with a deep vocabulary of viscerally expressive extended techniques and a way of stringing them together into phrases that feel almost visual in their emphasis on line: an elegant curlicue one moment, a violent plunge the next. Naqvi is a drummer with an unusual affinity for silence and space, and a modular synthesist who combines rich harmonic subtlety with uncanny timbral exploration. They are serious musicians. And they like to laugh. The latter quality is what first brought them together.
Their earliest performance together, while they were still students at CalArts, involved Naqvi coming onstage in an oversized dress and Richards hiding beneath it, revealing herself only after he’d sat down at the drum kit, allowing her legs to peek out from the train and beginning to play with her horn and most of her body still concealed. In conversation between them, searching observations about the nature of free improvised music are punctured frequently by inside jokes and self-deprecating asides. Humor, for them, is not a distraction from the seriousness of their pursuits as artists, but a way of acknowledging it honestly, of seeing the world in all of its colors, whether they be grim and foreboding or joyously strange. “It reflects the spectrum of our human experience,” Richards says, “and all the ways that we can feel the depth of our humanity together.”
After nearly two decades of collaboration, Talk Show’s Miss America is Richards and Naqvi’s first album as a duo. The name of the album and the band both reflect their interest in surveying the perverse spectacle of American life in 2025: the conflation of politics and entertainment, the persistent dread, and equally persistent absurdity. They didn’t set out to create a soundtrack for an apocalypse broadcast on reality TV, but the framing arose as they listened back to the improvisations they recorded.
Richards augments her trumpet with all manner of unusual resonators, blowing into the head of a timpani, or with the bell submerged in water, or with a takeout food container used as a mute. The sounds she gets from them suggest pained gasps, giddy shouts, creatures dying or being born, bubbles rising to the surface of primordial lakes. Naqvi’s percussion, on the title track, has a ceremonial quietude; his modular synth textures, on the album-closing “Death Bed,” are like a fog that won’t stop rolling in. The music can be quite heavy, but it never loses its sense of conversation between old friends, nor its joyful spontaneity, nor its readiness to find a laugh in even the direst of circumstances.
ANDY CUSH: Both of you have collaborated with many different musicians and artists from other disciplines. What makes this partnership distinct from the others?
STEPH RICHARDS: What’s really special about the way that Qas and I work is that there’s always an interest in pushing the form of presenting. We’ve always been excited to play with the theatrical aspect and blur the lines of what it means to be creative artists on stage. We have our musical identities, and then on top of it, there’s always an extra thing that we’re excited to explore, whether it’s working with video media or a little bit of costume and choreography, moving around a space in a very specific way.
QASIM NAQVI: And also an appreciation of the garish qualities of life and finding a counterpoint to that in sound, and an interest in the murkier and the grimier aspects of sound creation. Steph has been working on this amazing timbral language on the trumpet. And as a drummer, it’s been really fun to try to come up with some kind of language myself to fuse with what she’s doing on a textural level, thinking about drums beyond just being a rhythmic instrument.
AC: Steph, could you tell us about the role of extended techniques in your practice as an improviser? How did you come to it as a central aspect of your playing, and what do those techniques offer you that more traditional ones don’t?
SR: The best way I can hope to explain myself is that from the beginning, I’ve always felt like a wolf in sheep’s clothes, vis-à-vis the trumpet. No matter what gig I’m on, if I’m improvising, it just happens, in spite of myself. I don’t ever set out to play off the grid, but there I go again. The first time I met Butch Morris, the beautiful cornetist and inventor of Conduction, after hearing me play, he narrowed his eyes and said, “You’re not a trumpet player.” And I, to this day, still feel this was one of the highest compliments. Especially coming from him, who also played his cornet as if it were some subterranean animal from another planet.
One thing I love is to transcribe drum set music on my trumpet, but filtered through the horn. Trumpet can resonate and excite other surfaces quite easily, because it’s such a directional instrument, and the timbral possibilities just feel endless. There’s so much there to explore when you start to look a little bit beyond, at what’s happening on the other side of the bell of the trumpet.
What I love about this record, working with Qas, is that there are so many sounds where you’re like, Wait, is that coming from the synth? Are you processing the trumpet? But it’s purely acoustic. Qas was crafting the synth parts in real time, and I was exciting the surface of a timpani, or whatever, and so you get all these really buzzy, metallic, processed kinds of feelings from it. But this was a live, analog experience for us.
It’s so cheesy to say, but there always has been a spirit of adventure between us. An openness to get gritty and go into something you don’t know. We have a trust. It might go somewhere that is pretty scuzzy and dirty, but we at least tried it on. But at the same time, for all the humorous undertones that we project in our theatricism, at the end of the day, we’re highly meticulous types of artists. Although we do thrive in that kind of sphere of improvisation, it’s deeply and seriously informed. We mean it.
QN: We’re really trying to listen to each other on a very deep level. We’re not really playing at each other, or trying to play this extremely dense, crazy kind of improvisation. It’s more about constant engagement and deep listening and use of dynamics – appreciating playing very quietly, and having as wide a dynamic range as possible, so that we can hear everything we’re doing.
SR: And there’s a shared value of beauty, but maybe a bigger definition of it, or even trying to search for other ways of experiencing it. That’s what we’re leading with, even if it might sound to someone who’s not used to stuff like making gurgling sounds. Like trumpets underwater. Someone might be like, “What is that?” But to me, it’s seeking out beauty. When I play with you, Qas, that’s always the first stop.
AC: You were talking about the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration and working with different mediums. But we’re here talking about an album, where sound is operating on its own as the medium through which the ideas are expressed. So I’m curious, are there ways that you try to bring your interest in theater and dance into a recording that ultimately is only going to be experienced as an auditory thing?
SR: I was looking at photos from our studio session this morning, and because we were using so many different surfaces and instruments, there was a bit of choreography to that session. We had to be physically moving between these different stations. It would bring us closer together, and then other things would make us really far apart and isolated. We had to hear and feel each other in a spectrum of ways that I wouldn’t experience in a typical studio session.
QN: For me, it’s been an interesting challenge moving back and forth between the drums and the modular synthesizer, because they still occupy very different parts of my thinking. This is the first project where I’m trying to do both at the same time, and it’s been interesting to try to merge those two types of thinking together. With the drums, it’s totally in the moment and instinctual, whereas with the synthesizer, it’s so much more deliberate, and the process is slowed down a lot more.
AC: The album starts with trumpet and drums, and the playful and frantic elements of the music are maybe a little bit more towards the fore, and then as Qasim begins to move toward the synth in the second half, it gets to a place that feels a little more solemn and reflective to me. How do you hold those two sides of what you’re doing together?
SR: For me, it took a little courage in post-production and mixing. In my own projects, my tendency is to find concision. But with this particular record – and this is to your credit, Qas – it was more about giving the stuff space to breathe. It takes a type of courage to reveal that more vulnerable part of yourself, one that isn’t just like, “Yeah, check this out!” And with this record, there is that slowness and heaviness, like you say, that you feel sometimes. And we stay there. We don’t move away from it.
QN: There were some early edits, right in the beginning, where you did some more fine-grained editing, and I laughed, “What the hell are you doing? Don’t do that.” I’m guilty of that too: “I sound better here, therefore we’re going to keep this part.” That’s been a very interesting lesson over the years, where you may not want to use something because you’re not sounding as good, but the totality of what’s happening is interesting, and that’s more important than what you’re doing individually. On this album, there was very little editing.
SR: We’re both highly cognizant of form, because we compose in other ways as well. I felt in that session that we were cognizant of being in the space and taking our time, instead of moving this way and that. Not just indulging in following your nose to whatever feels interesting—which sometimes does feel a bit indulgent to me—but having an awareness of this aerial view of the experience. Even though we’re down here in it, I can still see the map of this crazy, demonic world that we’re building right now.
AC: With music that’s so abstract, it’s tempting to look to the titles and the visuals for context about what is being expressed. The album is called Miss America, and there’s a crying beauty queen on the cover. One piece is called “Mom’s Night Out.” Is there something about femininity that’s being explored in the music?
SR: I will say that for both Qas and me, our journeys of trying to have children with our respective partners were a shared experience, and it was not necessarily a breeze. The question about femininity doesn’t really resonate, but maybe a shared life-giving experience that we’ve had, one that is very raw and kind of ugly sometimes. But it’s real, and deep, and you’re brought down to the bone by the experience. That’s something that we both have together, and something that I don’t have with a lot of other people I collaborate with.
QN: The titles and the visuals weren’t something that we discussed at all before or while making the music, or while we were making music. But honestly, a lot of it was more tied into the horrible feeling of being in America, and being an American, and the garishness, and the ugliness, and the ugly beauty of that.
SR: That is a genuine part of the record. We really did deeply discuss “Mom’s Night Out” as a title, going back and forth, and then decided months later to use it. We like to ride the line of levity and weight. It’s a joke, but this is actually life or death. It’s both. And we decided to try to reveal that even more clearly with the way the album is packaged.
QN: There’s a deep connection between us through our sense of humor, and I think that’s grown in tandem with the music we make. There’s some of it in the music, too – this weird, dark, comedic strangeness. But it’s light at the same time.
AC: How does that impulse toward humor come out when you’re improvising? Are you ever deliberately seeking to be funny with what you play?
SR: It’s never a joke. But there are definitely times when we’ll listen back and start laughing. Because there’s an absurdity to this extremely sacred world that we live in. It’s both, and if you’re not able to zoom out, it’s an injustice to the music. Sometimes, if you frame it with such seriousness, or you put up so many levels of complexity in front of it, it can do a disservice to the whole point of it all. If you take it too seriously, that can break it. And so, if ours is wrapped up in a “Mom’s Night Out” kind of a title, but also, as a mom with young children, “Mom’s Night Out” has a lot of weight to it.
QR: We’ll listen back, or we’ll be playing, and something will just be so strange and unusual that you can’t help but laugh. When something is so bizarre that it just makes you feel good inside, there’s definitely some of that.
AC: I appreciate that, because discussions about avant-garde art sometimes miss the idea that it’s OK for this thing that is very serious to also be playful, and funny, and childlike. Maybe because it’s easy for an outsider to say the whole thing seems like a big joke. And it’s like, no, it’s not, but there is space for joking within it.
QN: I’m like, “Yeah, it is a joke. Come on in!” It’s totally a joke. It’s completely ridiculous, what we’re doing. I’ll be playing something, and then I’ll look at Steph, and she has this Mexican takeout container and she’s using it as a mute, and it’s just vibrating in this totally insane way that sounds like an electric guitar, and you just feel like you’re in this magical environment that’s totally new. There’s a real joy and childlike wonder in that. You’ve never inhabited that space before.
Miss America is out now on We Jazz Records.