Sweet World was recorded in the summer of 2023 in Brooklyn. It features a book of songs that my trio with drummer Nathan Ellman-Bell, and cellist Christopher Hoffman performed for a year or so leading up to the recording. I wrote most of these songs with Nathan and Chris in mind. I tried to bring my whole musical self to this project. I love so many kinds of music. Improvisation is central to everything I do. The written material for these pieces all fit on one or two pages and each of them creates a little world for the three of us to play around in.

As a rule, I don’t like to write with genre in mind. I prefer everything to be sublimated into something more mysterious. While writing this book of songs however, I may have occasionally broken my own rule. You will likely hear some of my many influences reveal themselves.

Doin’ the Danube and Sunshine Collection have the feel of miniature romantic pieces. Fartsy also has a bit of European classical counterpoint. Respectfulee is sort of a bebop head that I wrote in memoriam for Lee Konitz. Three Like Fields is named after a very special cantina in Tokyo, but its sound is New York downtown through and through. On all of the tracks, and in everything I do, I hope you will hear my love for the late great Ron Miles.

The title Sweet World just made me chuckle. It’s a cheeky pun, a way of making fun of myself for letting my genre defenses down a bit and writing a suite of world music songs. “World music” is of course the most absurd of all genre nomenclature, its closest rivals being “new music” and “creative music.” New York is my favorite city in the world because it is home to people from every culture on the planet. None of these songs are literally in the style of anything in particular, but I think you will hear some of those multi-cultural elements step forward. Angels Migration has some Mexican banda elements played with some Serbian ornamentation, Piqueo was inspired by the Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegue-Maryam, Postcard’s melody feels North African, but it’s sped up and in a Bulgarian dance rhythm. Similarly, Q to Canal Light Show is in a 9/8 meter and uses some maqam melodic elements. Heart Eats Mind is meditative and built on a scale common in North and South Indian classical music. The cringey term “World Music” is used to signify that something is ‘other’ from a Western/Eurocentric lens. I guess we’re all others to everyone else. I’ve wrestled with the ethics of appropriation and exoiticization, but at the end of the day, I can’t deny that as a curious new yorker with omnivorous ears, all of these sounds are a part of me. It’s cliche, but music really is universal. The city and music have been my tickets to the world.

I wrote a suite of pieces that I called Sweet World, because the pun made me laugh. The world is, to state the obvious, not always sweet: white supremacy, genocide in Gaza, the ever present threat of nuclear holocaust, the returning rise of fascism, and the increasingly irreparable damage we are doing to our planet’s ecosystems with greenhouse gasses, deforestation and single use plastics. I wrestled with the idea of changing the name, Sweet World. What a callous, stupid name. I recognize that my life is privileged. Why should I be able to spend my days making art when other people spend theirs fighting for survival, fleeing violence, migrating on foot through the desert or the jungle. People who live in fear of being killed by bombs, many of them made in the USA by companies whose profits pad the stock market. It’s all too much. If you really think about it, it is paralyzing. Maybe I should at least use my music to raise awareness, like so many of my brave friends are doing.

But I didn’t write this music with tragedy, with anger, with evil in mind. I wrote this music because it was fun to write. I play music because I love to play music, and because no one tells me I can’t. No one is asking me to make another record. I will almost certainly lose money on it, like I have with every other record I’ve ever made. And it’s not going to change the world. It’s simply for the joy of making live art with and for the people I love. It’s silly and absurd, and sweet. It makes me feel good, and hopefully it will make some other people feel good too when they listen to it. Maybe it will make somebody wonder, or make them want to try something weird and beautiful, if, inshallah, they have the space to do so. I’m taking the good with the bad. I’m trying to live a life guided by love and honesty, even when the world fills me with existential dread. I have to believe that in dark times, simple acts of humanity are akin to acts of resistance. Sweet World.

--Kenny Warren, January 2024