ELECTRIC WIND

Interview with clarinet musician Jessie Demaree (Yessi)
 Words by Ellier English

6.20.25

I was sitting with my back against the wall directly in front of Yessi and her partner as they were plugging in to perform for a night at MySpace. Listening to music is one experience, feeling it move through the walls is another. I was able to hop on the phone with Yessi for an hour to talk about how it feels to make music, what feelings drive us to do so and where experimental inspiration is found.

EE - Yessi! When I saw you and your partner play at the Intervention show curated by A.M.O.,  I was so impressed. Connecting your wind instrument to a pedal board to manipulate the sound was something I've never seen before. How did you get around to this idea?

Yessi - That's a big one to unpack, it's been a long saga of where I came from to how I ended up with this insane petal board and gadgets. It didn't happen overnight. If you look at my musical career, most classically trained people focus on tone and the base foundation of sound and putting together an ensemble. There was a lot of resentment in my early years towards electronics, which was narrow minded, but I've opened my mind since then. The tone of my clarinet is what matters most to me. I got into my 20’s and thought “Why do I have to be so team acoustic?” [chuckles] It was elitist.

In my 20’s I saw a lot of instrumentalists that weren't making mainstream music, I saw a saxophonist amplified with a backing track and I thought it sounded amazing, they're not just using the effects to ditch their tone or technique, but using it to elevate and showcase what the saxophone can do. It really changed my opinion and that's when me and my partner started to experiment with pedals.

While working on my solo projects, Desert Breath and Jerusafunk I started playing psychedelic solos with the delay lab and then incorporated loop pedals with my clarinet. It was how I was connecting to the pedals that made it so interesting. There were limitations at first and as more technology was made available to clarinetists things became easier. Over the last 10-15 years I’ve just really evolved from being a purist to an experimental gearhead.

EE - What was your first pedal?

Y - My first pedal was my Vox delay lab. I think I'm up to 8 pedals without the sound going hay-wire [chuckles] . I don't know at what point to tell when you're a gearhead or what, like 10 pedals or how you use them?

EE - Everyone has their own unique journey through music and it's fascinating to see where it leads them. People pick things up, switch them around, drop things that don't work and reroute to the sound they make best so it's really interesting to hear you do what you do with your clarinet.

Y - There were a lot of musicians who permitted me safe passage through being a part of the PHX music scene. We have an organization called Oh My Ears and their mission is to give a platform to new ideas in music and to keep it on the tinge of weird. It allows for this space where it's no longer an inhibition as to “if there's ears for it to land on”. So places like MySpace and Oh My Ears are doing such great work to encourage people like me that make alternative music to thrive.

EE - That's so cool, we are so lucky to have an organization and a location to open their doors for local musicians in PHX. Especially with how much the music industry and mainstream music can take up a lot of space in influencing musicians personal routes. Going to My Space for the first time was explorative and intimate in a way that larger venues lack, and with the pressure of marketing yourself as a musician it can feel really stifling to play at a venue that doesn't prioritize your sound.

Y- Because we're in the day and age where big talking heads and streaming services are the ones who are the tastemakers. The musicians who are deemed the sound of our era- In a way we thought the internet could be a place for any musicians to thrive with internet access to DAWS and uploading music online.. It seems like a perfect time to democratize music because now we aren't gate kept by labels… but the labels are still paying to take up the most space and rack up the most streams and still gain the most capital [chuckles] . It's like the state of the music industry is still very frustrating and at times deflating. I’ve had many years of creative dry spells like an existential crisis of “what the fuck is the point in making an album” if the algorithms make it unavailable to everyone. And PHX feels like, while it doesn't have a singular music identity, we’re definitely on the map and whatever is happening on the internet is affecting the music scene here right now. You can see it, you can find a band you never knew existed on the other side of the world when before you could only find new music from local tours.

But PHX has had so much going on in real life. I think we have the help of social media and Bandcamp to portray the vast genre of what PHX loves and we have such a thriving Cumbia population, it's been my favorite genre to play for the last 15 years. It makes me so happy because it's not happening everywhere, just the important pockets like here, Texas and New York. We’re doing this Psychedelic Rock Cumbia that you can't find anywhere else. The grunge scene is back in action… our shoegaze and noise scene is up there with New York's noise scene. It wouldn't be apparent if we didn't have the visuals on social media and sharing that part of the community.

Arizona is a good place to get started. It's not overplayed like Austin, Nashville, Seattle. There's people that have the dream of up and moving to another city to start a band until they get into the scene, which can take like 10 years, but PHX doesn't take 10 years to get into the scene, you can just show up to My Space [chuckles] you just have to show up and meet people and after a few years you're in the scene. At least that's the energy I project and cultivate. I’m not here to define the definite sound of PHX. Everyones has to be able to bring in all their ideas.

EE - Right, there has to be space for it, even if it's a “weird idea”, if you can bring it up in a space where everyone has the same goal, which is to “make the sound work” then you can really take ideas and fly. Teaching moment for some, learning moment for others. It just cultivates this collaborative, organic growth that I’ve seen is very prevalent. Musicians here are a lot more willing to follow through with unique and experimental ideas.

Y - I have lots of beautiful friends that are in LA and they really do exemplify the true spirit of music and creativity, however, when you're in the grind it spoils it. You start to turn music into a product and you're not trying to create art anymore. The line is very thin, and I don't mean to dog on any of these places but there are a lot of people that can't sell out because they're f#cking REAL, they're real and they're doing their thing and creating weird music and sometimes it STICKS. Our homie here in Tucson, Deerhoof, they kind of live all over the place but they are ubiquitous. They're out there everyday talking about Palestine Liberation and Indigenous Rights. Not in it for their career at all. There's so many musicians afraid to say things like that. I really value them because they are really popular and still they use their platform to spread social justice and it works for them. Some people get into the grind and forget about everything else.

EE - I think a lot of people forget that the most important factor of all creativity is authenticity- and longevity thrives off that. Like you said, you stop being authentic in order to sell out and the artistry becomes a product and all of a sudden the art is no longer significant because a product can't be authentic. It’s easy to become washed in that sense.

Y - 100% and you know, we have PHX here with a bunch of random recording studios here and it's like, “okay, you'll pay for the weekend, come in here and play your crazy sh!t, and we’ll just all take a chance on that” [chuckles] in LA it's like “ohhh we're so backed up.. We’re only taking on what WE think in our opinion is going to be worth it”.

EE - The little “what can we make money off of” scheme.

Y - Yes and that's the bottom line. There's nothing really I would change about the Arizona scene outside of what our local government spends on arts. Like specifically PHX, being able to have a couple representatives that have a background in arts would be amazing. Somebody that comes up to bat for us so we can have some funds to help make more music events happen. We have a lot of visual art funding but music funding would be awesome. Music grants could change a lot [chuckles]. Out of all the other non profits going on Rosie’s House and Oh My Ears these are all private donors, it's not city or state money so any nonprofit you see… it's not the city of PHX allotting us money to help younger musicians, it's privately funded. I wish they could see the benefit of growing the culture of having events in the parks at any given day, and spend money on an amphitheater where we can have weekly concerts that are free to the public, how beautiful that would be.

As I get older in my musical journey I feel like (in a behind the scenes way) I can help with and dedicate my time to make even more space for other weird musicians trying to experiment with music.

EE - So I did some sleuthing on you, and I see such a big emphasis on Yiddish music or Yiddish influence, I thought that was so interesting. You know, living in Arizona, there's a lot of latin influence in the art and music so I wanted to pick your brain about incorporating Yiddish sound into your own projects, what inspired that and why you chose to use that as foundation in your music.

Y - I fell in love with Klezmer music, k.Klezmer is Yiddish wedding dance music from the Balkans in Eastern Europe. It has many names but Klezmer is the umbrella term. It really just means musician in Yiddish but it became the umbrella for the whole genre. As a clarinetist, you quickly dive into the folk genres of your instrument. Like saxophone is heard in Banda and Jazz, if you're playing the flute you can hear it in Chinese and Japanese music that dates back hundreds of years so Klezmer was brought to me through my instrument and the clarinet is a main melody instrument and my professor in college, he was really performance heavy, wanted me to learn Mozart, learn to play Weber.  Anyway he made me play all this crazy hard sh!t and I told him I wasn't vibing with the dead white guy music, so he showed me, Giora Feidman  album and I started crying, I thought this is amazing, this is the perfect music. He wasn't playing cute music in a black suit with an entire orchestra behind him, he's just up there giving his entire soul.

What really attracted me was the soul of the music because I'm Gentile, I'm not Jewish but I'm part of the Nomadic, Balkan, Eastern European people that fell in love with the music. It was not historically a music that was played in service or in the synagogue because it's secular music, it's the primary music. It's not inherently religious, although there are some Yiddish songs that do focus on religious text. This music was played by everyone in the area whether you were Jewish or not and that's something I grappled with in that era and the ethics of playing it… is it cultural appropriation or appreciation or just a big no-no. But playing it and growing the audience of Yiddish music is where I ground myself because it's a style of music that has gone through so many hardships and especially now with Israel being the bullshit that it is, drumming up a lot more anti-semitism than before. It almost feels like [chuckles] Klezmer music is something we can't listen to because of its associations. The thing with playing Klezmer music is that it hit me so hard and I wanted to engrain myself in this genre because it has such a voice in the clarinet that can be translated to other music because it is a folk based music. There are songs in Mexico and Peru and further east that have the same chord progressions and same sound and it's easier to buy into this global sound with it. I feel like that meme of Charlie from Always Sunny in Philadelphia where he's got this crazy flow chart and red lines connecting all these things. Making all these connections with music, it felt like a really great hub for launching off into all the other amazing genres we celebrate from around the world.

So yeah it was almost an immediate new path that I could see. I wasn't going to go down the classical path, I wasn't going to do auditions for 1st chair clarinet in any orchestra, I wanted to start my own band and see how that went with Yiddish music. I’ve been learning Yiddish dancing and that adds another layer of understanding to the music. We were mostly learning tunes and making them our own, writing tunes based on the history, but seeing people actually dance to it has rewired my brain. Right now we’re focusing on an all new traditional klezmer album and taking Jerusafunk to a traditional realm before we blast off and finish our psych album. So it's been quite a journey through that music.

A lot of it was lost with the holocaust and a lot of musicians in the Soviet era were not allowed to play the music because it sounded too Jewish. It's a Jewish conundrum because you don't want to lose the Yiddish traditions but Israel helped with the erasure of those traditions because it's been turned to a point of shame. “No more speaking Yiddish, no you can't play Klezmer, we don't want to sound like we’re Jewish” so a lot of those Yiddish tunes were lost. In the modern era we have a lot of little bands that are doing modernized versions of Klezmer music with the goal to humanize the people that are and have played this music for centuries. The best way to humanize is to go back to the roots of humanity, the food, poetry, music and dance, all these things are so vital to humanity. It keeps us sane on the inside. We’re just imperfect people, we’re just musicians. All this is to say that's why I continue to play Klezmer music. There's nothing more confusing and unique than to continue to play music and try to change peoples minds about it. It's like a whole identity crisis, yeah we have Jewish members but the people writing the sidings are not Jewish. It's never been a 100% Jewish genre. It belongs to everybody living in the balkans. Jewish people didn't have a state, they were nomadic and living in the diaspora. It's the sound of an entire region of europe and it definitely does not belong to israel since it's been around a millennia before and the roma people that traveled the Roma trail from Spain to India and that's the part of the music that gets me. It's a telephone line of different people traveling and mixing music together. All of these Balkan bands are products of people traveling and mingling and sharing ideas and that's so beautiful.


EE - The context I had of Yiddish music and influence before our conversation was really limited and it was so awesome to learn from you, thank you so much. It's so beautiful to see you as a musician and hear about your journey, the real, the raw, the in-betweens and insights you’ve shared. I wanted to ask if you had anything else you wanted to say for our readers?


Y - Listen to Sun Ra!