Catching up with Ben Lumsdaine

The Indiana native has found a new home facilitating contemporary jazz in Los Angeles.

“I was born outside Boston, but my dad is a professor,” Ben Lumsdaine said. “He taught at Notre Dame for a while. Then we moved down to Bloomington and he taught at IU, thankfully. South Bend is pretty dismal.”

Lumsdaine moved to Bloomington in 2001. He cut his first records in a band called Alexander The Great he started when we was 13 years old. Even at that early age, Lumsdaine surrounded himself with people with whom he would collaborate for years. “I met Mike [Bridavsky] as a teenager,” Lumsdaine said of the Russian Recording founder. “I worked with him on the first record I ever released.”

The Alexander The Great material was released on Crossroads of America, a label started by Warsaw native and Bloomington institution Mike Adams. Adams would go from releasing Lumsdaine’s music to recruiting him to anchor Mike Adams at His Honest Weight. 

“In some ways, I feel incredibly lucky that I’ve had a clear direction in my life for a long time,” Lumsdaine said. “I’ve been playing music since I was 13. It has taken a lot of different shapes, but it has always been a forward, linear progression in some way.”

Lumsdaine spent nearly two decades in Bloomington, much of it as an active member of Indiana’s music scene. Bridavsky would book him for session work. He toured extensively with Mike Adams at His Honest Weight. He formed and released music as Spissy with his Honest Weight bandmate Aaron Denton. He played regular gigs at the Chatterbox as part of Sophie Faught Trio with Faught on sax and Nick Tucker on bass, releasing a record called Three Muses in 2015. 

“There were a few years there, where it was like, ‘I’m going to be a jazz drummer. I’m going to move to New York and be a jazz drummer,’” Lumsdaine said. “But after I graduated [from IU], I joined multiple rock bands, got into country music, and all of this stuff. At the same time, I was still playing at the Chatterbox every week. So the jazz shit was still happening.”

Around the time of the Three Muses release, Lumsdaine began to work at Russian Recording as a sound engineer. 

“Originally, I was just going to intern to learn some new skills,” Lumsdaine said. “Then I ended up getting hired. Mike needed an engineer. A spot opened up. So, I spent a week watching ProTools tutorials on YouTube and just started working. I was there for two-and-a-half years.”

Some of the work Lumsdaine captured at Russian Recording is starting to surface. Indianapolis band Wishy’s record Triple Seven has been heralded by Pitchfork as a high watermark for a new generation of shoegaze bands. On September 21, rapper Oreo Jones will celebrate the release of his latest solo LP Nephew at Radio Radio, a record Lumsdaine recorded in 2019. 

Shortly after recording Nephew, Lumsdaine made the leap from Bloomington to Los Angeles. I asked him if it was tough to make that jump, given the success and stable work he had found in Indiana. 

“I had been in Bloomington for around 20 years,” he said. “I just felt like I had hit the end of what I could do there, in some respects. Working at Russian Recording was one way to extend my stay. I always thought I would move after school, but I was involved in a lot of bands. Things were exciting for a moment, and I wanted to see some of those things through.”

Lumsdaine had also launched a jazz series titled “Call and Response” at Blockhouse Bar. It  continues.

“A lot of times, if you want something cool to exist [in Indiana], you have to make it happen yourself,” he said. “There’s a lot of that that’s really great, and a lot of that that’s really tiring. I want to be careful about how I talk about this, because there’s no intention to disparage anybody or anything. I just wanted to be around a larger pool of musicians, and to be around more opportunities that were already there instead of having to create them myself.”

Since moving to L.A., Lumsdaine has quickly found steady work as both a musician and engineer. Last year, he released Murmuration Without End on International Anthem–a label with Midwestern roots (the most important contemporary jazz label, in this writer’s less-than-humble opinion). 

“I really like their ethos,” Lumsdaine said. “My release was really small, comparatively. But that didn’t really mean anything. They took it really seriously and treated it with the same kind of care they would’ve given a larger release.”

Lumsdaine knew International Anthem co-founder and A&R leader Scottie McNeice from playing Bloomington house shows as a teenager. McNeice is a native of Crown Point and lived in Bloomington for a while. 

“I don’t know how you want to describe the Midwestern personality or work ethic,” Lumsdaine said. “I think we recognize that in one another. I definitely feel more comfortable working with somebody like that. There is something about working with someone from Indiana that’s reassuring to me.”

Lumsdaine has played on and engineered releases for other International Anthem artists, including Chicago and Los Angeles-based, Panama-native fellow drummer, Daniel Villareal. Lumsdaine recorded Villareal’s debut Panama 77 on a mobile rig on Villareal’s L.A. patio in the middle of the pandemic. 

“They took it and did some overdubs and stuff after the fact, but it was during COVID. So that was kind of the only way to do it,” Lumsdaine said. “Everyone was outside. I was pretty shocked. Not to toot my own horn. It really was a surprise that it sounded so good. He had a concrete patio in his backyard. I just put some room mics quote/unquote on a concrete slab, and they sounded amazing. It was just a lucky situation, in that regard.”

Lumsdaine gives a significant amount of credit for Villareal’s sessions to guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist (and fellow IU Jacobs School of Music grad) Anna Butterss. 

“Creatively, they were heavy lifting,” Lumsdaine said. “Honestly, I think the best thing I can do, as an engineer, is just not get in the way of things. I’m so aware, as a musician, of the things I would like an engineer to be doing or not doing. My main goal is to facilitate the work that the musicians are doing as quickly and effectively as possible, without too much time wasted on trouble-shooting.”

Lumsdaine recorded on Butterss’s sophomore LP Mighty Vertebrate in L.A. at Big Ego Studios, a recording space operated by Chris Schlarb, Lumsdaine’s former Joyful Noise Recordings labelmate. (I booked Chris for a Psychic Temple solo set when I managed the former JNR space in the Murphy Arts Center in 2016. He played one of the best covers of Bobby Charles’s “Tennessee Blues.” I still get goosebumps when I think about that cover.) 

“Chris is the shit,” Lumsdaine said. “He hires me for a lot of work, which I’m very grateful for. I met him at the Joyful Noise holiday party in 2017 or 2018. It turns out we just had a bunch of mutual friends and liked all the same music. I told him I was thinking about moving, and he was like, ‘Well, you know. Let me know when you’re out here. I’ll get you some work.’ He actually really, truly did. He has hired me for probably one session a month since I’ve been out here.” 

Ben Lumsdaine is an artist we should keep our eyes and ears on. Not just because of his prowess as a jazz drummer, not from his extensive experience as an engineer, and not just because he’s working with the hottest musicians in L.A. Let’s listen intently, because this Indiana native is applying what he learned here to exciting, new projects that are transforming contemporary, experimental music. .