Scott Lee: Through the Mangrove Tunnels

An aerial image of Florida’s Weedon Island reveals miles of thick green plumes. These mangrove trees form arches over the swampy water, sheltering those who canoe through the coves and tunnels hidden underneath. This is where we find composer Scott Lee on Through the Mangrove Tunnels; he writes eight movements that illustrate the variety of experiences he had as a kid in Florida, especially remembering his visits to the Weedon Island nature preserve and its storied, eccentric history. Each movements takes on a theme: repurposed army corps tunnels and a forgotten movie studio, the boat Lee drove whose engine barely worked, jumpy mullet fish, a Spanish dance club, an unknown man whose sudden appearance frightened Lee during high school.

While those topics are diverse in scope, each movement picks up similar threads — raucous grooves, eerie chords and unbridled glissandos. Performed by JACK Quartet, pianist Steven Beck and drummer Russell Lacy, Through the Mangrove Tunnels slithers between movements, combining the power of the piano with the dexterity of the string quartet’s wispy extended techniques. The most compelling moments arrive when Lee strikes a balance between catchy grooves and dissonance. The album’s title track exemplifies this pattern by opening with a booming, syncopated piano and laidback percussion while strings pepper the background with frenzied ricochet boxing’s and sliding glissandos. Other movements showcase only one style to lesser effect, like the melodramatic romanticism of “Playthings of Desire” or the relentless agitation of “Flying Fish.”

With the captivating final track “Floating Away” the album rounds out its journey. The piece’s first theme powerfully emerges from layers of airy, sweet simplicity. Like its namesake, the music floats and hangs in the air, finally vanishing as if the canoe we were riding had been swallowed whole by the tunnel, lost among the snarled fauna.

— Vanessa Ague, 1.05.2021

Lee’s album-length work races through vastly different musical styles. Inspired by his visit to the swamps in Florida, this is a knotty, discombobulating adventure.

— Freya Parr, 1.27.2021

There is an illicit, late-night DJ set in an abandoned speakeasy surrounded by 3,000 acres of spindly mangrove roots and mosquito ditches swamped with brackish water.

Picture the music floating out to the 1,000-year-old shell mounds left by indigenous Floridians and over the overgrown remnants of the airstrip runway left by those who came much later.

You can’t go to this dance party, but maybe composer Scott Lee can take you there via Narvaez Dance Club from his new album, Through the Mangrove Tunnels, released Nov. 13 on New Focus Recordings.

Lee, a professor at the University of Florida who teaches composition and electronic music, grew up in St. Petersburg on a canal leading to Riviera Bay and the Weedon Island Preserve just beyond that.

He began volunteering at the preserve as a boy and continued through high school, leading canoe trips for summer camps and weekend visitors, and hacking down overgrown branches at the behest of the park’s naturalist. He remembers dipping a net into the muck to dredge up sand so that campers could inspect what kind of creatures it held.

He’d jog and hike the trails, and get stranded on the water in the surrounding bayous when the secondhand boat his father would allow him to take out with friends would putter out.

“We’d be out fishing and the engine wouldn’t start, so we’d always have to find creative ways to pull the boat back to shallow water,” said Lee, now 32.

That memory inspired Through the Mangrove Tunnels’ sixth movement, Engine Trouble, with scratching strings that evoke a running motor that, as Lee put it, “falls apart in different ways and tries to rebuild itself again.”

Performed by the JACK Quartet string quartet, Steven Beck on piano and Russell Lacy on drums, the entire album is inspired by Lee’s childhood memories of Weedon Island, from gleeful mullet to a mysterious man in the bayou, and his later meditations on the preserve’s historical significance, something he did not fully grasp until he began reading about it as an adult.

It’s Lee’s first full-length album, and at 45 minutes, his longest composition to date.

“Most novelists write their first novel about their home, using their own lives as inspiration,” Lee said. “I think that applies here as well. It’s the thing I know best, but it has a wider significance that others can glean from it, with stories about memory, place and the natural world.”

Lee is a modern classical composer, but the album features elements of jazz, hip hop and other pop styles, such as on the track Narvaez Dance Club. In that movement, Lee imagines the Narvaez Dance Club — a real-life speakeasy that developer Eugene M. Elliott used to ply prospective Weedon Island property buyers with bootleg booze in the 1920s — as the site of an eerie, modern-day DJ set in the wilderness, through stylistic allusions to reggaeton, trap music and finally EDM.

In reality, the speakeasy named for conquistador Panfilo Narvaez, whose expedition may have landed around Tampa Bay in 1528, burned down nearly a century ago.

The album’s ethereal title track, Through The Mangrove Tunnels, evokes a sense of gliding over the water beneath the arching mangrove canopy. Weedon Island is natural Florida, but there are always traces of human activity such as long-ago plane crashes and shootouts, and the dashed hopes of capitalism. Even the miles of famed kayaking trails are actually a man-made grid of mosquito ditches dug by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1950s. The idea was to flush out stagnant water with the daily tide to combat the insects and make the island more desirable.

“There’s a groove that pulls you along,” Lee said of the opening track. “But you’re hearing these interruptions, flashbacks of history wafting through the air in this mysterious landscape, and then the groove kind of pulls you back and you’re moving again.” It can sound peaceful, but those otherworldly flourishes evoke something ominous. Lee said that in this case those feelings are complimentary.

When he visits Wheedon Island, he feels the weight of everything that has gone on there. “You can look at a picture of the mangroves, but it doesn’t quite communicate what it feels like,” he said. “That’s what I try to do.”

Playthings of Desire takes its name from the title of one of three movies filmed at Sun Haven Studios on Weedon Island in the 1930s. The short-lived movie studio had hoped to create a new Hollywood in Florida, but fizzled out.

Playthings of Desire, which Lee laughingly calls, “just a really, dramatically bad movie,” is about a playboy who goes on a honeymoon to Florida. His wife ends up with someone else, and he ends up dead in an alligator pit.

There’s a scene with a swanky, outdoor party, where a string ensemble plays very kitschy, melodramatic music that caught Lee’s attention.

“I actually transcribed that music and used it,” he said. " So you have this swampy music and then music from the film wafts in at a point and fades back out. I was imagining being in the mangrove tunnels when all the sudden you find yourself in the filming of this swanky party scene, with these old timey 1930s people dressed like they would be, but then it fades away like a mirage.”

The most epic story Lee takes on, though, is the 11-minute-long Ballad of Willie Cole, inspired by the story of a black worker living on Weedon Island in the late 1920s who awoke one morning to see smoke rising from a shed where a guest was staying. Cole found the man dead.

The police discovered it wasn’t by fire, but wounds suffered from an ax attack in a likely robbery. There were fingers in the water, and remnants of exploded blasting caps. Cole was blamed, despite no evidence he’d been involved, and sentenced to life. A lawyer took on his case and, years later, won Cole’s freedom in a retrial.

“That case was a very famous regional case in all the newspapers, if you go back and read some of the articles,” Lee said. He still has the clips saved on his computer. “They’re incredibly racist, and contradictory in that they describe Cole as sort of a criminal mastermind, but then say there’s no way a black man could have done this alone.”

The movement has a wide, narrative scope with moments of chaos, intense unease and sorrow. “You can’t tell it without having some dissonant music that illustrates that feeling.”

Lee began Through the Mangrove Tunnels several years ago as his doctoral dissertation at Duke University, but finished the album in Gainesville with support from the University of Florida.

He wasn’t expecting to get to come home to the Sunshine State. “In academia you kind of just have to apply to everything and go where you can,” he said. But there was something “poetic” about returning to release an album about natural Florida.

You can purchase a download of Through the Mangrove Tunnels at scottleemusic.bandcamp.com/album/through-the-mangrove-tunnels, stream it via Spotify or Apple Music or purchase a physical CD through Amazon.

— Christopher Spata, 11.23.2020

I was lucky to receive this album during the latest COVID-19 lockdown, as it provided a welcome escape from my own four walls. This album is great storytelling, an audio film of tales of imaginative discoveries by the composer growing up wandering the swamps and bayous of Florida. Drawn from Lee’s memories of exploring the Weedon Island nature preserve as a youth, from one movement to the next I was captivated. From the opening track, Through the Mangrove Tunnels, we are transported to a small craft, peeking around corners through overgrown channels, encountering the unexpected. This album is an expertly played audio escapade featuring pianist Steven Beck, drummer Russell Lacy and the JACK Quartet.

Part historical narrative, and part personal reflection, Lee manages to engage the listener with his blend of contemporary classical and extended jazz techniques, travelling seamlessly between tonalities and polyrhythmic styles without a single extraneous or gratuitous beat. Each track is expertly crafted to tell a tale of mystery: from shootouts, strange figures, ceremonial Native American gatherings, bootlegging, plane crashes and marvellous natural phenomena, the accompanying stories are fantasmic sketches perfectly enhancing each gorgeous composition almost to the scale of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. The tracks Playthings of Desire and The Ballad of Willie Cole are both full compositions almost on their own, but presented here they remind us that although the album provides some entertaining and humorous listening, these are compositions of great depth. The final track, Floating Away, takes us home in a way that evokes the end of a long and mysterious voyage.

Be sure to get a hard copy or a download of the booklet if possible, and follow along with the stories, as this is an album that deserves to be experienced as we used to, when a composer shared a journey with us, and we stayed in one place to listen and receive it in full. Perfect lockdown listening.

— Cheryl Ockrant, 2.06.2021

By the time that Rock began intertwining seriously with Jazz and New Music Classical as a three-way meld, the term "Third Stream" to describe Jazz and Classical combinations was somewhat on the wane. But the various possibilities of two- and three-way amalgamations continued to develop through to today. Frank Zappa was a foundational pioneer and a brilliant practitioner of the three-fold possibility and of course there were others. Fast forward to the present and a new release worth considering.

So what, then, about today's music, a CD of a long Scott Lee composition entitled Through the Mangrove Tunnels (Panoramic Recordings PAN20)? It comprises the title work of eight movements featuring a premier New Music string ensemble--the Jack Quartet, plus pianist Steven Beck and Russell Lacy on the drum set.

The all-acoustic ensemble functions as a "group" in the Jazz and Rock sense--they perform mostly together with the drums playing a Rock or Jazz-Rock beat as the foundation with piano and string quartet there to play out the primary composed parts that deliberately contrast and alternately conjoin with the drums for a continuingly fascinating blend.

Through the Mangrove Tunnels flows together in its eight-part sequence to illustrate in music the experiential and historical flow of things in the swamps and bayous of Florida where the composer grew up.

The ensemble engages rhythmically in ways that combine New Music Classical abstractions along with figures that suggest Rock and sometimes Jazz phrasings. Melodically and harmonically there are at times suggestions of relatedness to Jazz-Rock but nearly always while referencing New Music elements.

Sometimes harmonically and rhythmically there are more direct Rock-Pop referencing in the strings and piano, for example on "The Ballad of Willie Cole." which goes its way without drums. "Playthings of Dance" gives out with a kind of old school pop-jazz theme that then expands outward into Modern territory before returning as a kind of "Sweet Band" gush. It is unexpected and amusing to boot. "Engine Trouble" for quartet alone has definite rhythmic bite to it.

The music consistently stimulates and retains its refreshing originality throughout. I highly recommended this one for all who like to explore the possibilities of genre gap spanning. Bravo!

— Grego Applegate Edwards, 2.10.2021

Through the Mangrove Tunnels unfolds like a collection of eight short stories by a Southern writer such as Flannery O'Connor, with each musical treatment telling its own unique tale. That impression is especially strong in this case because composer Scott Lee deliberately crafted his material using childhood memories of Florida's swamps and bayous as a wellspring from which to draw. Personal experiences of canoeing through those titular tunnels and exploring Weedon Island, a nature preserve in St. Petersburg, inform the work's character, the result a vivid and highly personalized evocation conveyed through performances by the JACK Quartet (violinists Christopher Otto and Ari Streisfeld, violist John Pickford Richards, and cellist Kevin McFarland), pianist Steven Beck, and drummer Russell Lacy. The unusual instrumental combination alone attests to the idiosyncratic nature of the project.

The short description posted at Lee's Bandcamp page characterizes his music as marrying “the intricacy of classical form with the more visceral rhythmic language of contemporary popular music, creating a complex music of the present with broad appeal.” That's a pretty accurate assessment, insofar as it captures in simplest terms what happens on Through the Mangrove Tunnels. Had the JACK Quartet alone been involved, the work would have assumed a more formal classical quality; with Beck and Lacy included, its music feels more spontaneous. While through-composed passages are present, there are others that feel more improvised, Lee likely having integrated that dimension into the work to loosen it up and capture the spirit of the movement in question. Through the Mangrove Tunnels is hardly jazz, but certain moments partake of its free-wheeling spirit.

The work is both impressionistic and programmatic: each part comes with a backstory that helps clarify why the material assumes the form it does. Lee uses ominous piano chords in the opening title movement, for example, to allude to the mysteries within the titular tunnels. “Flying Fish” evokes the leaping movements of the mullet, a fish that commonly appears in large schools around Weedon Island, and “The Man in the Water” conveys the unnerving image of a lone figure encountered by youngsters during a boat ride. In “The Ballad of Willie Cole,” the work's most programmatic movement, Lee recounts the saga of an African-American resident of Weedon Island wrongfully convicted of murder and arson but eventually exonerated and freed from prison. Other parts draw for inspiration from more area-related stories, with details about Spanish conquistadors, plane crashes, Native Americans, a failed movie studio, and other topics used as foundations to build upon. (In addition to photos depicting the swampy locale, the booklet included with the release provides in-depth background for each movement.)

As different as its parts are, Lee smartly gives the work unifying shape by revisiting the brooding opening statement during the concluding one, “Floating Away.” His musical design often mirrors the narrative content; frenzied passages within “The Man in the Water,” for instance, suggest the panic of boys running away from the figure they've unwittingly encountered. The fluid, high-energy intro of “Engine Trouble” intimates that the family boat Lee once took for a spin is in fine working order, but thereafter repeated breakdowns and attempted re-starts show not everything went according to plan.“The Ballad of Willie Cole” is so episodic in design, it veritably cries out for an accompanying film treatment to depict Cole's adventure. The instruments hurtle forth at one moment, collapse into chaos at another as the drama unfolds.

The sound design in “Narvaez Dance Club” proves particularly arresting when a pulse materializes from the union of diverse string effects (pizzicato, scratch tones, glissandi, etc.) with insistent piano chords and bass drum accents. Its title taken from a film produced by a studio on Weedon Island in the 1920s,“Playthings of Desire” alternates between turbulent episodes and sweetly nostalgic ones, all of it delivered with characteristic aplomb by the pianist and string players. On an album whose music is often urgent, elegiac passages in the Copland-esque closing movement offer a soothing respite.

Lee's work clearly benefits from the enthusiastic participation of Beck, Lacy, and especially the JACK Quartet. A project such as Through the Mangrove Tunnels poses considerable challenges to a classical ensemble, even one accustomed to executing demanding contemporary material, but the JACK Quartet handles its part like a regular day at the office, so to speak. As it has so often, the intrepid outfit shows itself to be a string quartet capable of handling anything thrown its way.

— Ron Schepper, 1.11.2021

Somehow conjuring everything from noirish swagger to chamber jazz with a string quartet, piano, and percussion, Lee has crafted an album-length piece that is a cinematic blast from start to finish. Having it played by the ever-amazing JACK Quartet with Steven Beck (of my beloved Talea Ensemble) and Russel Harty (a drummer equally comfortable in classical and jazz) doesn't hurt in the least. Based on the history of Florida's Weedon Island (an axe murder! a failed movie studio!), I only hope that when the inevitable Netflix docu-series is made, they're smart enough to use this delightful and highly original music.

— Jeremy Shatan, 12.26.2020

Scott Lee is a composer who grew up “wandering the swamps and bayous of Florida,” thus he wrote this suite based on “my memories as well as the colorful history Weedon Island, a nature preserve in St. Petersburg that I spent my childhood exploring. The island’s many legends include ceremonial gatherings of Native Americans, landings by Spanish conquistadors, burned-down speakeasies, shootouts, bootlegging, a failed movie studio, plane crashes, and an axe-murder.” So we can surely expect a jolly time as we listen to this music!

Through the Mangrove Tunnels opens with somber, slow bass notes played on the piano, behind which one eventually hears the string quartet making some bizarre sounds, to which the drums are added. Ambient music, perhaps, but ambient music with an edge, and it is developed in an interesting manner. My sole complaint was the bias of the drummer towards a rock beat. This I could have lived without.

But the music is no stranger than Weedon Island itself. Judging from the photo in the booklet, it doesn’t even look like an island, but rather like a series of huge mossy growths sticking up out of the water like fungus. I can well imagine the impression this made on a young boy, especially when combined with tales of criminal activity and violence. The second piece on this CD, “The Man in the Water,” sounds like a riot of psychopaths against sanity—not too far removed from latter-day rioters on both sides of the political spectrum.

The music written for the piano, though edgy, is relatively conventional, but the music written for the string quartet is anything but. The JACK Quartet puts itself through some remarkable musical contortions in each of these pieces, seldom playing as one would expect a string quartet to play; it must have taken them hours and hours to master this music. “Naravez Dance Club” has a rhythm simulating American Indian music but combined with a bit of an R&B swagger before moving, once again, into a rock beat. (Note to modern classical composers: Please can the rock beat. It doesn’t fit in with your music. Thank you.) Finally, in “Flying Fish,” the viola gets something to play that almost sounds like conventional music, albeit atonal music, with the other three instruments occasionally joining in for some swirling figures.

Yet without a score, technical description of each of these pieces is a bit difficult, as one often gets lost in counting beats, as in the opening of “Playthings of Desire” until it settles down into a strangely Chopin-like melody before deconstructing itself over amorphous rhythms and modal harmonies.

When the quartet enters, we suddenly return to echt-Romantic melodies, almost slurpy and soothing. As if to offset this, however, “Engine Trouble” is comprised of chaotic, bouncing rhythmic figures played solely by the quartet.“The Ballad of Willie Cole” is also fast and edgy, starting out with the quartet until the piano and drums enter behind them. The quality of this music is primarily in the modern “shock” style of today, yet with interesting modifications, and in this piece the music suddenly veers towards the soft rock genre. Please, Scott, stop the rock nonsense. Later in the same piece, after a pause, Lee involves the piano quintet in a sort of minimalist fantasy, with the cello playing stretched-out musical lines across the ostinato rhythm…until the rock beat returns and the tempo increases.

In short, it’s an interesting album, full of novel ideas that are for the most part well crafted and extremely fascinating. If your tolerance for rock music is higher than mine, you’ll surely enjoy it.

— Lynn Bailey, 11.22.2020

Even more than other works by this composer, the eight-movement Through the Mangrove Tunnels reflects the environment of Scott Lee's native Florida. The work has a basis of percussive, pointillist sounds that evoke the swamps' spooky atmosphere, but Lee adds to this basis a host of other sounds that reflect the stories of their human inhabitants, and the music is "polyphonic" in the broadest sense. The work is for string quartet, piano, and drum set, and Lee's treatment of all his instruments is flexible. The quartet weaves in and out of the basic texture, and the percussion instruments sometimes fall into fixed rhythms, which may be drawn from jazz or rock music. These junctures have important structural significance, introducing episodes that relate to the history of Lee's mangrove tunnels and Weedon Island nature preserve. This history includes Native American meetings, a movie studio, speakeasies, and other events dating back to the time of the Spanish conquistadors. The musical construction is eclectic, to be sure, but also logically put together, and overall, this is an exciting work that is both rigorously contemporary and fully accessible.

— James Mannheim, 1.08.2021

Did crime jazz really get its start in the Florida swamps? The ominous piano work here makes you think that’s where the inspiration for the genre came from. Posited somewhere in that place where instrumental music provides a shield for jazz and classical, pop music heads won’t get it but it has a dexterity that makes it fall well short of egghead stuff. Great stuff for when you’ve got a taste for something deep that won’t leave you cold.

— Chris Spector, 11.14.2020