The 2024 “season” of the Burning Ambulance podcast is in full swing at this point. The first episode featured a conversation with pianist Ethan Iverson, the second was an encounter with bassist Rufus Reid, the third featured modular synth composer Arushi Jain, and the fourth offered an interview with saxophonist Kenny Garrett. For this month’s episode, I talked to noted percussionist, producer, and all-around L.A. scene guy Carlos Niño.

Carlos Niño is from Los Angeles, and has been a vital part of that city’s music scene for almost 30 years. He started out as a radio DJ when he was still a teenager, and expanded from that into putting on shows, releasing records, producing sessions for artists, performing and doing just about everything else that a life in music will eventually drop in someone’s lap. He’s developed really long creative relationships with two other people who’ve been on this podcast in the past, vocalist Dwight Trible and percussionist Adam Rudolph, both of whom work at least part of the time in an area that’s currently governed by the term spiritual jazz.

If you look around, you’ll see Carlos’s name on a lot of really fascinating projects. He makes records as Carlos Niño and Friends, which is a good way of summarizing his methods and his aesthetic — he gets together with people who he considers friends and kindred spirits, they make music together, and he assembles it all. But the people he calls friends are some of the most fascinating musicians around right now. He’s worked with Shabaka Hutchings, with Kamasi Washington, with Makaya McCraven, with Laraaji, and right now he’s very involved with André 3000’s New Blue Sun project. He was one of the leaders of the sessions that produced the album, and he’s also part of Andre’s live band.

Carlos has a new album coming out later this month called Placenta. It’s his third release for International Anthem, following a previous Carlos Niño and Friends album and a duo release with South African pianist Thandi Ntuli, and it features a ton of guests, including frequent collaborators like Nate Mercereau and Surya Botofasina, as well as saxophonist Sam Gendel, drummer Deantoni Parks, Adam Rudolph, André 3000, and many, many others. It’s a mix of live recordings and studio sessions, some of which go as far back as 2018, and they’ve all been reconstituted and overdubbed and collaged with vocals, field recordings, and all kinds of sound design into something really unique and kaleidoscopic. Although it’s got elements of jazz and elements of New Age music, it’s really hard to describe or categorize and it’s not the kind of thing you can just put on in the background and chill with. It demands your attention. When it comes out, I recommend you sit with it and see what you get out of it. I think you’ll find it very rewarding.

I’m really glad I had the chance to talk to Carlos Niño. He’s a really interesting guy with a very open and optimistic creative philosophy that I think will be inspiring to those of you who make art yourselves, whether it’s music or something else, and even to those of you who are just interested in art and creativity generally. So enjoy our conversation, and thanks as always for listening.

A short excerpt from our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, is below.

I’m curious because, looking at the different things that you’ve done and the different sort of areas that they fall into — and by the way, I’ve had both Adam Rudolph and Dwight Trible on this podcast before. So we’re kind of, you know, I’m familiar with some of the territory that you’re occupying and, you know, some of the same names have come up in the past. So I’m curious about what your thoughts are on music with a function. Like ritual music, sacred music, dance music, you know, music that’s explicitly like, this is intended to make people dance? You know, stuff like that. What do you think about those roles and how does it impact the music that you create? Do you go into a record and say, this record is intended to to do this for the listener?

I think everything is multi-dimensional. I think that music with a function, which is a good term, that function does not decide or that intention does not decide what it’s going to actually mean for someone. Someone dancing can be, like, a totally spiritual experience. It can be a total experience of them connecting with their body and having, like, a sweat that is profoundly important to their life on many levels. So the function, the intention, the form, I love it. I love anyone’s interest in creating in that way, but then it’s not up to them to decide how it actually affects someone. They might want it to affect someone in a certain way, or they might want to say, like, I really want this to make somebody like, just so excited they cannot not dance. Or in a ritual, you know, the function of dance or the function of entrancement has many meanings and many experiences. So I think similarly about my music. I don’t think about it in terms of the form. My intention is to share from a really deep experiential reality of my own, because I feel like my life and my feelings are things that I want to offer to people and what they get from it is up to them and may be different at different times. And that’s kind of what it’s for. I feel like ritual is very similar. Yes, you can have very specific goals or guidances or, you know, thoughts about what a specific ritual is for, what it could potentially do, what it could potentially accomplish. You can have, like, an objective, you could have something that is almost like surgical or therapeutic or meant to be transformative, but what it actually will do for each person involved and/or interacting with it is not decided. So that openness, that multidimensionality, that potential for things that we know or that we don’t know, things that could, you know, arise that we haven’t even charted yet, that’s amazing. That’s just an awesome thing. So I don’t really see any of it as different. I see it as all potential for many, many things, you know, like really almost infinite possibilities or infinite, like, micro-possibilities. Maybe there’s similarities in general to how people are feeling, but like, you know, and this is something that goes back to the thought — I remember reading Charles Mingus’ book really, really early on, and he he was referencing the experience that he felt he had and that, you know, greats like Duke Ellington had, having to play not only in like, you know, racist and violent environments toward them, but in ones that confined them to being quote-unquote, entertainers, you know, or the difference between what it would be like if Duke Ellington had had the support of an institution and could have just developed anything he wanted, with Billy Strayhorn or anyone else in, like, a conservatory environment. And I remember really having a particular interpretation of that and feeling very, like, upset for a long time that it was such a disparity or division that people were being forced to survive in conditions that were just like, you know, really, really insane, and mean. And they were still developing, like, some of the greatest music we’ve ever heard. And then I remember talking with somebody who said, Hey, wait a minute. There’s actually like some people who really were interested in and thrived in creating for those environments too. So don’t be so quick to just decide that it’s one thing. You know?