After building a career in New York City, with no plans to return to Arizona, Arthur Vint’s life was unexpectedly uprooted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting a move back to the alluvial soil of Tucson, his native home.

As a result, a studio album — recorded in October 2019 before an unseen virus wreaked havoc and death upon the city that never sleeps — would exist in limbo for the next five years.

Conjuring the type of mental imagery that manifests from reading a Cormac McCarthy novel, the compositions found on this country-jazz album — ruminations on Arizona’s rich folklore and the beauty of its vast expanses — were initially intended to be a love letter sent from afar.

Now, Vint is finally poised to release “Copper State” (Desert Spoon Records, 2024), Arthur Vint & Associates’ lost third album.

Prequel

Bringing together his love for country and jazz, multi-talented musician Arthur Vint began the process of writing the songs that would flower, like a desert spoon, in 2017.

“It oddly was after my wife and I had put down roots in New York,” he said. “Our son Henry was born in Brooklyn. We had just bought an apartment there and decided to be New Yorkers.”

Vint’s wife Lindsay is also from Arizona: Phoenix.

“That set me off thinking more about my upbringing in Arizona,” Vint said.

“We bought a piano for the apartment. That was very inspiring,” Vint told the Tucson Sentinel. “So I was starting to sit to write music at the piano.”

During this time, in addition to raising a family, Vint was bartending at the Village Vanguard. Ever-enterprising, he was also drumming three or four nights a week with different groups about town.

“I was playing a lot of country music then,” he recalled. “There is actually a lot of crossover in New York between the country and jazz scene.”

“There is a honky-tonk in Brooklyn called Skinny Dennis.” Vint often performed at this down-home saloon named after Dennis A. “Skinny” Sanchez. An L.A.-based session musician, Sanchez is best known for having played upright bass in Nashville legend Guy Clark’s band. “He had Marfan syndrome.” Those with this genetic disorder tend to be very tall and thin; Sanchez stood 6’11” and weighed 135 lbs. He died of heart failure in 1975 while playing on stage at age 28.

“He gets namechecked in Guy Clark’s song ‘L.A. Freeway.'”

“So I was playing a bunch of country gigs with a lot of jazz-trained guitarists and bassists. We had a shared love of American music,” he said. “You don’t get much more American than country and jazz.”

Vint was also touring with Postmodern Jukebox and gigging with Vince Giordano and The Nighthawks. Specializing in jazz from the 1920s and ’30s, Giordano is a saxophonist and bandleader who has appeared in films such as “The Cotton Club” (1984), “The Aviator” (2004), HBOs crime-drama series “Boardwalk Empire” (2010-2014) for which he won a Grammy, and recently in “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023).

“My own band was always trying to connect those two worlds: country and straight-ahead jazz,” said Vint.

Contrafact

“I was sitting at the piano figuring out this chord progression. I thought to myself, ‘Wow, I am onto something.'”

Initially, old fiddle tunes stimulated Vint’s imagination.

“Compositional elements like odd numbers of bars,” he said. “I was also thinking about the way a violin is tuned and put the song in a key that is friendly for the fiddle.”

As the songwriting process progressed, Vint turned to a time-honored tradition in the development of jazz as a litmus test.

With roots in New Orleans’ Storyville neighborhood — a legalized red-light district (in effect from 1897 to 1917) romanticized by historians as the birth-place of jazz — the phrase “jam session” may have originated during late-night impromptu sessions where Black and white musicians would gather to play music, in the safety of the underground, that they couldn’t play to mainstream audiences where the reprehensible specter of racism sought to tyrannize and segregate the early Southern jazz industry.

“At the time, I had a monthly residency at a club in Brooklyn called Barbés,” Vint noted. “That is where I was workshopping a lot of this music with my band. For a period of time I had Tony Garnier playing with me.”

Garnier is best known as a bassist for Bob Dylan, whom he has worked with since 1989.

During a rehearsal in Brooklyn, Vint proudly announced, “Hey, I’ve got this new song that I am really excited about hearing the band play.”

They leaned into it. No sooner had the band arrived at the first chord progression when Garnier abruptly stopped playing.

“‘Hey man, that’s a Bob song,'” Vint recalled with embarrassment. “And I say, ‘What?'”

“Yeah, that’s ‘In The Garden.’ You know, Christian Bob. That’s a great song, man.”

“I’m like, ‘Oh shit,'” Vint said.

Recorded at the fabled Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, “In The Garden” — from “Saved” (Columbia Records, 1980), the second album of Bob Dylan’s Christian trilogy — a favorite of his that appeared on setlists for approximately 23 years.

“I go back and sure enough, I had totally ripped off the chord progression, from Bob Dylan of all people.”

“The songs are completely different,” Vint stated. “They start the same, but end in different places. That happens sometimes. You realize that some of your best ideas were borrowed from someone else.”

“In jazz there is a longstanding tradition of writing new melodies over existing chord changes,” he explained. “Jazz musicians have a name for it: contrafact.”

The term comes from classical music where contrafacts have been employed since the 16th century in parody masses where voices were added or subtracted from the original composition, effectively creating a new piece.

“I wasn’t worried that I was in legal trouble with Bob Dylan’s publishing company.” Vint expanded, “You can copyright lyrics and melodies, but you can’t copyright chord changes.”

This is because a chord progression is considered a fundamental musical building block — like the ubiquitous 12 bar blues (I-IV-V) sequence — that cannot be owned by any one person and is considered public domain.

“I ended up calling the song “Show Low.”

A town in Arizona’s White Mountains, Show Low sits nestled among the Ponderosa pine, apple and Siberian elm trees at an elevation of 6,345 feet.

“There was something about fiddle music and the pines that made sense to me,” Vint imparted.

“That’s kind of where it all started.”

Copper State

“This whole record was written on the piano,” Vint said.

“Copper State” consists of 11 original compositions and two covers.

“Every song on the album is connected to a place in Arizona; cities that I had been to and had memories from,” Vint said. “I was going for a theme.”

“I called one of the songs ‘Brewery Gulch,’ which is where my grandma lived in Bisbee. My grandma lived there for almost 20 years, starting in the late ’70s.”

The opening sentence of the Bisbee Gulch historical marker reads, “In the early 1900s the rough edges of Bisbee’s mining camps could be found here in the notorious Brewery Gulch with its dozens of saloons, gambling halls and crib houses.”

“We’d go down there for holidays; Thanksgiving, Easter, that kind of thing. She had a really magical house on top of a hill in Brewery Gulch,” Vint recalled fondly. “That was the inspiration for that song.”

Vint recalled time spent with family on trips to the Grand Canyon; a destination they visited almost every year.

“I wrote a song for the Grand Canyon called “Phantom Ranch,” he said. “I took bits and pieces from ‘The Grand Canyon Suite,’ a famous classical composition by Ferdi Grofé.

To get to the bottom of the Grand Canyon there are only two paths to take; you either descend 9.6 miles along the Bright Angel Trail (by foot or atop a mule) or 7.8 miles down the Kaibab Trail. Phantom Ranch lodge sits at the bottom of what is widely considered one of the world’s most spectacular gorges.

“I’ve not hiked the Grand Canyon, so I have never actually been to the Phantom Ranch,” Vint said with a laugh. “I did get to ride a mule for the first time with my dad. We rode along the rim.”

The song “Phantom Ranch” is a bit mysterious and has a plodding mule groove.”

It would be remiss not to mention “Tuzigoot,” an homage to the Verde Valley, in which Vint indulges in a tasteful solo passage, exhibiting his masterful percussion skills.

Tuzigoot National Monument, once inhabited by the Sinagua people — builders of pit houses and towering multi-level cliff dwellings — between 1125 and 1400 CE, is home to the best preserved Sinagua pueblo ruins in all of the Verde Valley.

“There are also two covers on the album: “By The Time I Get To Phoenix” — which was a hit for Glen Campbell in 1967 — and a version of the Western classic “3:10 to Yuma.”

“Which is where my uncle lives,” Vint added. “I spent time there growing up.”

Written by George Duning and Ned Washington as the theme song to director Delmer Daves’ 1957 Western action-drama “3:10 to Yuma,” in 2012, the film was selected for preservation by the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.

Desert Spoon

“So, in the last few weeks, I have been revisiting the record, getting it ready for release.”

“I’ve actually started my own record label,” Vint enthused. “Desert Spoon Records — like the sotol plant. “Copper State” will be the label’s first release.”

The desert spoon (dasylirion wheeleri), known in Spanish as sotol, has been used for millennia by Indigenous peoples. During the Colonial era, Spaniards introduced distillation techniques, refining the spirit. Considered moonshine by the Mexican government — after being bootlegged across the border to thirsty Americans — the spirit was outlawed in 1944. Today, sotol is enjoying a modern revival.

“Desert Spoon Records is mainly going to focus on doing live recordings from The Century Room. We have been recording shows here for the last couple of months,” Vint said.

The crew

“The album features musicians from different musical backgrounds.”

“Russell Hall — best known for being in the Emmet Cohen Trio — is a straight-ahead jazz bassist interested in playing more country. He brought great energy and feel to the session.”

“The piano player on the record is my friend Danny Fox; a great jazz player with an interest in exploring other music.” After graduating from Harvard University, with a degree in psychology, Fox moved back to his hometown of New York City to study classical piano with internationally-known pianist John Kamitsuka.

“Luca Benedetti played guitar. He is Italian and moved to New York in the ’90s to attend music school. Then he acquired a Fender Telecaster and got really into playing country, chicken pickin’, and all those kinds of things. He is another jazz guy, turned country.”

“Violinist Gabriel Terracciano is another one of those simpatico musicians with all of these different influences in his playing. He’s a genius,” Vint enthused. Terracciano has been a member of Turtle Island Quartet, a groundbreaking force in chamber music, since 2018. “He also plays country fiddle. The fiddle was definitely the main focus of this project.”

Sam Reider, a Latin Grammy-nominated pianist, accordionist, composer, and educator from San Francisco, contributed on the organ.

Engineered by Todd Carder and mixed by Robin MacMillan, “Copper State” was recorded on October 1, 2019, at The Bunker Studio in Brooklyn, N.Y.

“I don’t know, I may be superstitious?” Vint mused. “I’ve recorded all of my records at the same studio. They are easily one of the top studios in New York.”

“Recording a jazz album is easier than doing a pop record — you never want to play anything the same way twice — it’s more about the energy.”

By that point, this band of professionals had rehearsed and played numerous gigs together. They entered the studio chasing the elusive, on a mission to capture a desert thunderstorm in a Mexican Coke bottle.

“Often, we would end up using the first take of the song,” said Vint, who wanted the recordings to have the spontaneity of a jazz album with the more nuanced production of a country record. “I spent a lot of time after the live sessions overdubbing things: triangle, maracas, vibraphone, autoharp, and bongos.”

Vint’s friend, Josh Shannon, added tres Cubano — a small guitar-like instrument with three paired strings commonly played in Afro-Cuban music — on “3:10 to Yuma,” adding a distinct cha-cha-chá flavor.

Then, in December 2019, as the first reported cases of COVID-19 began emerging in Wuhan, China, the world began to shut down.

“That’s when I got distracted.”

The tracks cut at The Bunker would gather dust on a shelf.

Lost, but not forgotten

“Things were really, really bad in New York and my parents freaked out,” Vint recalled. “They were like, ‘You’ve got to get on the next flight to Tucson where there is some fresh air. You can stay in our guest house.'”

“New York began to shut down on March 15th. By March 17th we were on a flight to Tucson. We lived for three months in a tiny guesthouse in my parents backyard.”

Soon, PPE became part of navigating the everyday uncertainties of life in a virulent new world.

“I got so busy,” Vint declared. “I started teaching at the University of Arizona and took on the task of opening up The Century Room; releasing the album went on the backburner.”

“I honestly forgot about it for a while.”

In part due to the impact of a global pandemic, the album took an interesting trajectory.

“It was recorded live in Brooklyn, overdubbed in Tucson, edited in New York, and mixed in Los Angeles.”

For a time, Vint felt conflicted about releasing “Copper State.”

“That music was written, recorded, and played in New York,” he said. “It was a love letter.”

“Now that I am back in Tucson, I need to release it to the world to end a chapter.”