Asked to pin down his role in the vast array projects in which he’s been involved over the course of his career, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson explains that he sees himself as “a doula for the music.” It’s an apt description. Atwood-Ferguson has midwifed countless recordings into being as a producer, composer, conductor, arranger, music director, curator, and multi-instrumentalist.
The “doula” descriptor also captures the unique blend of the spiritual and the laborious that marks Atwood-Ferguson’s career. A self-described perfectionist, he shies away from the term “workaholic,” despite having routinely put in, by his estimation, an average of 16 to 20 hours per day on music.
The result is a staggering résumé that boasts more than 600 recordings and 2,500 concerts over the past 35 years, with a host of musicians that includes Ray Charles, Mary J. Blige, Kamasi Washington, Ryuichi Sakamoto, The Roots, Ravi Coltrane, Robert Glasper, Makaya McCraven, Bebel Gilberto, and Wadada Leo Smith, just to name a very few, and regular collaborations with the likes of Flying Lotus, Thundercat, Carlos Niño, and Bonobo.
Somehow, amidst all that, Atwood-Ferguson has found the time to become a parent himself—both literally and musically. He now has a three-year-old at the Los Angeles home that he shares with his fiancée, and released his own debut album late last year. Released on Brainfeeder, Les Jardins Mystiques Vol. 1 is a monumental undertaking, with more than 50 tracks featuring a similar number of musicians extending over three-and-a-half hours. If that weren’t ambitious enough, it’s merely the first installment of a planned trilogy, with each of the two sequels intended to unfold over a similarly massive scale.
“I wanted the right time to be many years prior, but I didn’t want to force anything,” said Atwood-Ferguson. “I would do a session every once in a while in between working for other people, and then the waters of the dam just began rising—not in an aggressive or negative way, but in a really beautiful way. All this material was percolating and bubbling and speaking to me.”
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl Box Set
Though he now says that his “main calling” is composing, writing, and producing his own music, Atwood-Ferguson didn’t launch his music career with that goal in mind. Raised in Topanga Canyon by a musician father and educator mother, he began violin lessons at the age of four and was composing orchestral music by 10. In a reversal of the usual situation, Atwood-Ferguson set out with a more practical approach than his father, convinced that he would become a workaday studio musician who composed on the side.
“My father was this genius musician who everyone loved, but he was failing because he didn’t want to put up with any crap,” he says. “So he sequestered himself in this beautiful mansion up in Topanga, and his vibe was, ‘I don’t want to be a part of the music industry.’ I really want to be a functioning human being in society, in control of my own shit but with enough residual good energy to be supportive of others.”
In some ways, Atwood-Ferguson has stayed on that path; he remains an in-demand contributor, most famously crafting string orchestras comprised entirely of his own playing. He performs each part, one by one, layering them atop one another until he achieves the scale required by the project in question. As some musicians develop a recognizable voice on their instrument, discernible from a single note or phrase, Atwood-Ferguson has garnered a similar notoriety in the guise of this one-man symphony.
But he diverged onto a parallel track beginning in the mid-‘00s when he met producer and percussionist Carlos Niño. Now best known for his work on André 3000’s New Blue Sun, Niño hosted the influential Spaceways Radio show on KPFK in L.A. while producing a number of artists who fit with the program’s heady blend of psychedelia; electronica; hip-hop; African and Brazilian rhythms; and ambient music.
While Atwood-Ferguson had performed earlier on Spaceways Radio, the two really connected when he was enlisted to play strings on a 2005 session Niño produced for vocalist Dwight Trible. The two immediately hit it off, ushering Atwood-Ferguson into a new world of forward-searching collaborators. Unusually, both men refer to each other as mentors in different ways. According to Niño, he has Atwood-Ferguson to thank for encouraging him to step out from behind the mixing board and onto the stage.
“Miguel can write brilliant compositions for a symphony orchestra, and he can literally improvise with anyone who plays any kind of music, anywhere in the entire world,” Niño says. “He’s one of very, very, very few people that can drop into any session and make something special happen.”
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl Box Set
That approach has become the lodestar for Atwood-Ferguson’s mammoth solo project. Les Jardins Mystiques Vol. 1 convenes dozens of musicians in varying configurations, with a number of tracks featuring the composer alone or in ensembles of himself. It’s a mesmerizing, exploratory outing as easy to get lost within as focus upon, guided by a balance of Atwood-Ferguson’s Buddhist spirituality, virtuosic imagination, and indefatigable work ethic.
“Music is a very special, magical, holy thing to me,” he says. “I’ll take as many day jobs as I need to in order to allow me to carve out the space to have this relationship with the music.” Both, he says, are equally authentic representatives of his musical identity—from the personal expression of releases under his own name to the vision he brings to collaborations to the joy of playing in an orchestra, which he likens to “swimming in an ocean of sound.”
With such a dauntingly prolific and disparate catalog, it’s impossible to boil Atwood-Ferguson’s career down to a representative sampling. With that disclaimer out of the way, here is a guide to several touchstones, day jobs, and passion projects.
Timeless
Suite for Ma Dukes
Atwood-Ferguson transitioned from a ubiquitous behind-the-scenes presence to a renowned artist in his own right with this project, launched in 2007, for which he arranged the music of the late, influential hip-hop producer J Dilla for a 60-piece orchestra. The effort was a landmark not only in his own career, but as a lesson in approaching music by non-classical composers in the symphonic realm, a hybrid for which Atwood-Ferguson is uniquely qualified. “It’s one thing [for an orchestra] to play the music of a great Western European classical musician,” he says. “The times that we don’t, it can get really cheesy, really fast. Suite for Ma Dukes is a testament to how young of a genre it is, to bring the same intent and depth of humanity that’s in the music of Ravel or Bach or Debussy to other cultures.”
Flying Lotus
Cosmogramma
While he’s recorded in any number of roles, Atwood-Ferguson is most famous for his ability to build sweeping orchestral sounds solely through his own virtuosity. He applied those gifts to five tracks on FlyLo’s Cosmogramma, including the lush yet hip and grooving string parts on “Do the Astral Plane.” With the unique background radiation of his influences, Atwood-Ferguson crafts arrangements that sound like samples, ideally suited for the song at hand while seeming to stem from some other, familiar but distinctive source. “It’s great if other people want to just be a good carbon copy of this artist of that artist,” Atwood-Ferguson says, “but it’s imperative to me to develop enough as a human being that I have something unique to say, and Lotus is the same way.”
Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
Chicago Waves
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Cassette
The blissed-out Chicago Waves was never intended for release. It was simply a duo performance in the Windy City that ended up being such a transcendent, hypnotic communion that International Anthem was determined to release it. Niño was initially hesitant, believing that the pair had other ideas in the works that should take precedence. Eventually, he gave in to the enthusiasm of his duo partner and the label. “For me, it was an exercise in agreeing to someone else’s vision for music that I was centrally involved with, maybe for the first time ever,” Niño says. As for Atwood-Ferguson, he simply recalls that the evening “was really magical. Carlos and I have spent so much time building our lives individually and together that there’s a deep symbiosis and brotherhood there.”
Thundercat
It Is What It Is
Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Atwood-Ferguson has made vital contributions to many albums, but only one (so far) features a song named after him. The buoyant “Miguel’s Happy Dance” is credited to Atwood-Ferguson, Stephen “Thundercat” Bruner, and Flying Lotus, but the co-composer is still puzzled by why his name is in the title—and what exactly that title refers to. “I don’t have a trademark happy dance,” Atwood-Ferguson laughs. “I’m a person that has struggled with depression but I haven’t really struggled with it for the last 20 years, so most people know me as someone who makes a conscious effort to embrace things in a positive way. Maybe he’s calling that a happy dance, but I haven’t asked him yet.”
Matthew Liam Nicholson
“Nine Movements”
Australian-born composer Matthew Liam Nicholson creates ethereal, immersive sound baths, shimmering drones spinning in zero gravity. He and Atwood-Ferguson bonded around their shared Buddhist faith, and “Nine Movements” was imagined in a familiar meditative space. Nicholson handed off the piece to Atwood-Ferguson, who improvised over the musical bed in two complete passes, which the composer then manipulated and edited. None of that back and forth or surgery is evident in the final piece, which feels like a single, cohesive emanation.
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
“Life on Mars” from Modern Love
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Given that both are renowned sonic chameleons with a spectrum-wide embrace of musical approaches, it would be natural to assume that David Bowie was a key influence on Atwood-Ferguson. That was not the case, however. While he did mix classic rock into his classical music diet in his formative years—Atwood-Ferguson cites Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles as inspirations—he hadn’t taken the time to explore the Thin White Duke’s discography until BBE invited him to contribute to their tribute compilation. “I’m a very stubborn person that doesn’t jump on bandwagons,” he says, “so the fact that I’ve been around a lot of people that really adored Bowie all my life meant that I never felt inclined to do a deep dive. Thanks to that project, I’m now a fully fledged Bowie fan.”
Daedelus & Joshua Idehen
Holy Water Over Sons
Atwood-Ferguson has forged relationships with a number of electronic music producers who value the simultaneous singularity and malleability of his contributions, including Gaslamp Killer and Natureboy Flako. As Atwood-Ferguson describes his process, he’s not one for a lot of back and forth with his collaborators. He prefers to “live with the music” and generate his piece of the whole through the bond that forms. The artist is then free to do whatever they like with what emerges. “Standing In My Own Way” is a stark, confessional cut from an album pairing beat master Daedelus (aka Alfred Darlington) with British-Nigerian-Swedish spoken word artist Joshua Idehen. Atwood-Ferguson’s crystalline string swells bolster the mood of heart-aching fragility.
Bonobo
“Polyghost” from Fragments
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl Box Set
The brief, shimmering “Polyghost” stems from another fertile creative partnership, this one with the British producer Bonobo aka Simon Green. The album’s opening track is a shimmering curtain-raiser featuring tidal currents of harp over a textured drone cushion and mournful strings, punctuated by glitchy electronic blasts.
Miguel Atwood-Ferguson
Les Jardins Mystiques Vol. 1
Compact Disc (CD), Vinyl Box Set
The numberless hours and diversity of opportunities that Atwood-Ferguson has enjoyed throughout his career all bleed together kaleidoscopically on his wide-ranging solo debut like the vibrant colors of a tie-dyed shirt. “Kairos (Kefi)” is a manic merge of drum & bass and jazz courtesy of the contributions of young new wave jazz duo DOMi and JD Beck, underlined by the resonant groove of bassist Burniss Travis II. Another track might point to the influence of dub or rock or chamber music or various folk traditions, or the contributions of guitarist Jeff Parker or multi-reedist Bennie Maupin or synth wizard Benjamin Fredrick Vukelić. Any one would be an equally valid, dizzyingly captivating entry point.
