Maria Schneider on her hometown of Windom, leading the band and working with David Bowie

Maria Schneider by Briene Lermitte

Minnesota native Maria Schneider recently released a luminously beautiful new album, "The Thompson Fields," on the fan-funded label ArtistShare. We spoke with her shortly before her appearance at the Detroit Jazz Festival. Read it on MinnPost.

Sonny Knight onstage at 67: "It's like life started all over again for me"

Sonny Knight and the Lakers by John Whiting

We caught up with Sonny Knight at the Monterey Jazz Festival, just before his Saturday performance with the Lakers on the Garden Stage. Read it on MinnPost.

The 58th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival: What to see and hear

Geri Allen

From Friday at 6 p.m. when the gates open, through late Sunday night when the last notes sound and the final stragglers, the diehards, those who don’t want the music to end (count us in) make their way down the shadowy tree-lined paths toward the exits, the Monterey County Fairgrounds will be the jazziest place on the planet.

At the 58th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival, which happens this weekend (Sept. 18-20), jazz by many of the world’s top artists will rise to the sky above the open-air Arena and the Garden Stage, pour through the doors of the Night Club and Dizzy’s Den and curl around listeners crowded into the small, intimate Coffee House.

Jazz conversations, panel discussions, jam sessions, workshops, mixers and a film will take place throughout the grounds. Everyone you meet at a concert, in a line or around a picnic table will be a jazz fan, aficionado, performer, supporter, producer, journalist, educator, student or at least curious and willing to listen. No one you meet will claim not to like or understand jazz, or insist that it’s dead.

Monterey is a magical weekend, and addictive. This will be our 11th year, and we come all the way from Minnesota. We’re not the only ones who travel a long way to soak up the ambience of the place and the excellence of the programming, which is never the same but poses the identical hair-pulling, teeth-grinding dilemma year after year: what to see and hear? Because with 500 artists and 109 events on eight stages over just two-and-a-half days, it’s about choices. It’s also about chance and happenstance, following your ears and letting yourself be tempted, sidetracked and surprised.

But you have to start somewhere. So here’s what we like best this year.

Wynton Marsalis

Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. Why have a single Artist-in-Residence when you can have a whole band? Led by Wynton Marsalis, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is 15 exceptional soloists, ensemble players, composers and arrangers. They’ll play together in the Arena on Saturday night, then take over Dizzy’s Den on Sunday with a performance by JLCO saxophonist Walter Blanding and his sextet, followed by bassist Carlos Henriquez and an eight-member band (including guest percussionists) in a concert of his original music, ending with an everyone-but-Wynton jam session that will sound some of the Festival’s final notes. On Saturday afternoon on the Jazz Education Pavilion, JLCO saxophonist Ted Nash will lead the MJF High School All-Star Combo. On Sunday afternoon in the Arena, Nash and Marsalis will perform with the Festival’s Next Generation Jazz Orchestra.

Béla Fleck and Chick Corea

Chick Corea. Ageless and tireless, endlessly inventive and enormously creative, this year’s Showcase Artist is someone for whom the term “living legend” is an understatement. Any opportunity to see Corea play live is a gift. He’ll perform in the Arena twice: on Friday night with his superb trio Trilogy, with Christian McBride and Brian Blade, and on Sunday night, again in the Arena, in duo with virtuoso banjo player Béla Fleck, who has transformed the way his instrument is perceived and played. No one should have to choose between the two events – both are unmissable – but if our feet were held to the fire, we’d probably go with the Sunday night show because it’s not a piano-bass-drums trio. Except missing McBride and Blade is dumb.

Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet + 5: “The Forgotten Places.” One of our can’t-fail faves each year is the MJF commission. We don’t know a thing about this yet, except that Akinmusire wrote at least part of it at the Glen Deven Ranch in Big Sur, where Bill Frisell wrote his 2012 commission, a luscious hour-long suite he named “Big Sur.” We’ll hear Akinmusire’s new work on Saturday evening in the Arena. The eloquent young trumpeter/composer will also perform with his quartet in the Night Club later that night.

Geri Allen Presents The Erroll Garner Project: Concert by the Sea. This is both a live performance and a major CD release. Recorded on a reel-to-reel machine near Carmel in 1955, two years before the first Monterey Jazz Festival, Garner’s “Concert by the Sea” is one of the most popular jazz albums ever released. Almost 60 years later, it has finally gotten the serious and loving archival treatment it has long deserved. On Friday, the same day as this concert, Sony Legacy releases “The Complete Concert by the Sea,” with 11 previously unissued tracks from the original performance. Pianist Geri Allen, who counts the old album as one of her major influences and co-produced the new one with Steve Rosenthal, will lead a celebratory concert also featuring pianists Jason Moran and Christian Sands, guitarist Russell Malone, bassist Darek Oles and drummer Victor Lewis. On Saturday afternoon, Dizzy’s Den will host a panel discussion about Garner’s legacy with Allen, Rosenthal, UCLA professor (and Thelonious Monk biographer) Robin Kelley and Festival board member Jim Costello, who was at Garner’s original “Concert by the Sea” performance. The discussion will be moderated by Erroll Garner Jazz Project manager Jocelyn Arem. The Festival has gone very deep on this, and for those who are interested, it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dig in, learn from the experts and come away knowing a lot more than you did going in. Meanwhile, there’s good information on the Festival’s website, plus an article by Nate Chinen that will appear in Sunday’s New York Times but is available now online.

Sonny Knight and the Lakers

Sonny Knight & The Lakers. This is a straight-out hometown shout. Sonny Knight and the Lakers are a Minneapolis soul band, touring behind a new album recorded live at the Dakota, a club where we have spent countless nights and too many dollars, and issued on the Minneapolis label Secret Stash Records. We’ll see them on the Garden Stage on Saturday afternoon. Look for this to be one of those concerts where the crowd builds and overflows onto the sidewalk. Like the Davina & The Vagabonds show two years ago. Ahem, they’re from Minneapolis, too.

Monty Alexander Trio. We can’t remember a Festival year when all six nighttime sets at the Coffee House were given to a single pianist. With John Clayton on bass and Jeff Hamilton on drums, Alexander will take us to Jamaica and back again. This is an old-fashioned residency, something that hardly ever happens anymore outside New York, and what a treat that it’s happening here.

Rudresh Mahanthappa

Rudresh Mahanthappa’s Bird Calls. After several excellent albums and heady collaborations with artists including Vijay Iyer, Kadri Gopalnath, Rez Abbasi, Bunky Green, David Gilmore and Steve Lehman, second-generation Indian-American saxophonist Mahanthappa hit one out of the park with “Bird Calls.” Inspired by Charlie Parker, but without any covers or tunes built on Parker’s chord changes, it leaped onto Top Ten lists everywhere and earned Mahanthappa a triple crown in the latest DownBeat Critics Poll: Jazz Album of the Year, Alto Saxophone and Rising Star-Composer. Mahanthappa plays with fierce energy and intelligence, and his current quintet – 20-year-old trumpeter Adam O’Farrill (Arturo’s son), pianist Matt Mitchell, bassist François Moutin and drummer Rudy Royston – is amazing. They play Sunday night in the Night Club. Earlier that day in Dizzy’s Den, Mahanthappa joins Ravi Coltrane for a conversation about John Coltrane’s “A Love Supreme” hosted by Ashley Kahn.

As always, Monterey is jam-packed and there’s so much more. Her Majesty Dianne Reeves in the Arena on Sunday night. A Jaco Pastorius party led (and arranged) by Vince Mendoza, in the Arena on Friday night. Terence Blanchard’s new E-Collective in Dizzy’s Den on Friday night. The enchanting Lizz Wright in Dizzy’s on Saturday, touring behind her soulful, sensual new album “Freedom & Surrender.” The first public performances of this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival on Tour band of jazz all-stars, Saturday in the Arena and Sunday in the Night Club. The incendiary Latin rhythms of the Escovedo clan on Saturday at Dizzy’s and Sunday in the Arena. And the grand finale? Superstar trumpeter Chris Botti in the Arena, sending lambent golden notes into the night.

***

Related: John Whiting's photos from the 57th Annual Monterey Jazz Festival (2014).

Jazz trumpeter John Raymond brings "Foreign Territory" home to Minnesota

Originally published in MinnPost, July 21, 2015

John Raymond
Photo by Ryan Anderson

Minneapolis native John Raymond left for New York in 2009 as a young jazz hopeful on his way to grad school. He comes through this week as an accomplished and lauded musician with two albums to his credit and a third on the way.

His latest, “Foreign Territory,” has its hometown release Thursday at the Dakota. The reviews have been glowing. Writing for the New York Times, jazz critic Nate Chinen called it “impressive” and “a substantial leap forward.” The jazz magazine DownBeat proclaimed that “Raymond is steering jazz in the right direction.”

The new recording has the right stuff: strong concept, fine players, and music that straddles the line between straight-ahead and avant-garde. You don’t have to know a thing about jazz to enjoy these thoughtful, often beautiful, sometimes playful melodies and sonic explorations.

The concept took shape in late 2013, when Raymond realized that originality didn’t have to mean writing music from scratch. He could return to the standards – the songs all jazz musicians and a lot of listeners know – and “just deconstruct and mess with them.” He could start with the chord changes, a song’s harmonic foundations, and see where they led.

Several tunes on “Foreign Territory” are built on other songs. “What Do You Hear” came out of “I Hear a Rhapsody.” “Rest/Peace” has roots in Horace Silver’s “Peace.” “Deeper” began as Irving Berlin’s “How Deep is the Ocean?”

For his band, Raymond turned to pianist Dan Tepfer and bassist Joe Martin, both established young musicians with solid reputations and open minds. On the advice of his producer, esteemed trumpeter John McNeil, he asked Billy Hart to play drums.

A major figure in jazz for half a century, and an artist who has helped to shape the landscape, Hart has worked with Herbie Hancock, Wes Montgomery, Charles Lloyd, McCoy Tyner and Stan Getz, to name a few. Today he teaches at Oberlin and the New England Conservatory and has his own quartet with Ethan Iverson, Mark Turner and Ben Street. He’s a member of the jazz supergroup The Cookers. His name on a CD is a guaranteed attention-getter.

Which is why Raymond hesitated.

“I obviously knew who he was, and I knew a little about him, but I wasn’t that familiar with his playing,” Raymond said in an interview Sunday. He didn’t want to just add a big-name drummer. “So I did my homework. I looked up a bunch of records he was on, bought a few, listened, and thought – wow. Ok, I get it.”

From left to right: Dan Tepfer, John Raymond, Billy Hart and Joe Martin
Photo by John Rogers

Hart won’t be at the Dakota on Thursday; an artist of his stature commands steep fees, and Raymond couldn’t afford to bring him in. Martin was unable to make the date. Raymond’s band here will be Tepfer, Chris Tordini on bass (Tordini was last at the Dakota in June with Becca Stevens) and drummer Jay Sawyer, who studied with Hart.

We spoke with Raymond about his life in New York, the state of jazz, and the challenges of making a living as a jazz musician.

MinnPost: What were your goals when you moved to New York in 2009?

John Raymond: Ever since high school, I had this dream of being a jazz trumpet player. I got hooked in the summer between my sophomore and junior years, when I heard a bootleg of [trumpeter] Nichols Payton playing live at the old Dakota [in Bandana Square].

I just wanted to play this music. I knew that to do that, I would have to be immersed in it, and New York seemed like the place to be.

MP: Six years later, are you where you hoped you would be?

JR:  I probably imagined myself further along. It takes a lot more to be a jazz trumpet player than I ever thought it would. The business of jazz is more nuanced than I had any idea about. There’s a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff. At the end of the day, it’s an industry and a money thing.

My favorite trumpet player of all time is now Art Farmer. Art is well-known among people who know jazz, but he’s not Miles Davis, he’s not Dizzy Gillespie. There are reasons why certain people get the limelight. Some of those reasons are musical, some aren’t. I get the bigger picture now.

MP: What are your goals today?

JR: I want to be able to make some kind of income playing jazz, playing my own music, being a jazz trumpet player. I don’t want to be on the road six or eight months out of the year. I have no desire for that because I have a family. [Note: Raymond and his wife, Dani, have a five-month-old daughter.]

I also want to invest in the community I’m in, the musicians I’m around. We need to support each other. There’s no doubt there’s really not much money in jazz. Many players have to fight to make a living as musicians, and they’re some of the best jazz improvising musicians in the world.

Even if I were in the top 15 or 20 jazz trumpet players, could I make a living? I was so naïve about all of this until I moved to New York. Which probably worked out to my benefit. I was most concerned with what I was passionate about, so my naïvete actually helped me.

MP: What has been the best part of being in New York?

JR: I’m always thinking about growing, being better at whatever I’m doing. For me, being here affords me the opportunity to be around musicians who push me. I’m never in a comfortable musical environment here, and I mean that in a good sense.

I had a gig [recently] at Dizzy’s where the saxophone player threw down the most epic solo, as they do, and I was next. Sometimes I struggle with that because I’m thinking – whoa, that’s hard to top! But the goal isn’t to get the most applause and make the people in the audience go the most nuts. Or maybe that’s some people’s goal. It isn’t mine.

Ultimately, I want to play something singular to me, whatever that looks and sounds like. Jazz has got to be a very personal thing. The people who are able to communicate themselves are the ones who stand out.

I want to make a personal stamp on this music. To play it in a way where you might hear it and say, “Oh, that’s John.”

MP: What has been the worst part of being in the city?

JR: The wear and tear on you, emotionally and physically. It’s such a competitive, high-energy, high-octane place. Dani and I have found that we need to take regular trips out of the city, whether that’s up to New Jersey along the Hudson or coming back home [to the Midwest].

Sometimes you get so insulated here that you start to believe you’re the center of the universe and everything has to revolve around you. You get outside the city and realize that’s not the case at all.

MP: Has playing with Billy Hart changed you?

JR: It definitely has. He’s helped me be much more cognizant of playing to the audience. And he plays every single note at such a level of intensity. There’s so much commitment, authority and conviction [to Hart’s playing]. Especially as a horn player, I’ve learned how crucial it is for me to be as strong as possible. Not domineering strong, or tight-fisted strong, but having a lot of conviction. So whenever I play with him, I have to bring that on a different level.

MP: The title of your new album is “Foreign Territory.” What does that mean?

JR: The premise of the album is to take something familiar to us jazz musicians, and to jazz-educated audiences, and use it as a jumping-off point. To stretch it, change it, mutate and distort it and see where it goes. To take it into foreign territory. I think real magic happens on the bandstand, and for the audience, when you get into foreign territory.

What we’re going after is to be honest, spontaneous and in the moment. When you really have to use your ears and trust each other on the bandstand, exciting things can happen. That’s what makes jazz improvisation so thrilling.

MP: What will we hear Thursday at the Dakota?

JR: We’ll be playing all the music from the album. We’ll probably split it up over the two sets. The only addition might be a tune I first played with [Twin Cities-based pianist] Bryan Nichols last summer, a Charlie Haden tune called “Silence.”

MP: Why should people come to see you?

JR: I’m really excited to bring this band home and play this music at home. A lot has happened with me in New York, and in the past couple of years with this record, and I want to come home and say “Hey! Here’s what I’m doing. I still think about you all the time, Minnesota, and I still love you, and I want to share this with you because you had a part in this, too.”

Everybody hopes to have their hometown, their roots, cheer them on and support them.

MP: You’ve heard the saying that a prophet is never recognized in his own hometown.

JR: I know. I thought that immediately as I said that.

The John Raymond New York Quartet CD release show for “Foreign Territory” is Thursday, July 23, at 7 p.m. at the Dakota. Tickets ($25) are available online or by calling the box office at 612-332-5299.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Six reasons to hit the Iowa City Jazz Festival this Fourth of July weekend

Charles Lloyd is the superstar headliner

of this year's Iowa City Jazz Festival, July 2-4

Photo by John Whiting

We love the annual Iowa City Jazz Festival, held over the Fourth of July weekend, and go whenever we can. It’s a road trip from Minneapolis, but you can take a detour en route and visit a Frank Lloyd Wright site or two: Cedar Rock in Independence, the Wright-designed Historic Park Inn Hotel and the Stockman House (with interpretive center) in Mason City.

You can get lost and stumble across a farmers’ market. You can get distracted by wind farms, green fields, and silos, forget to pay attention, and end up crossing the Dubuque Bridge into Illinois. That adds a lot of miles. Don’t ask how I know that.

But if it’s a nice day, the drive can be the perfect head-clearing transition between life in the city and three days of music in a charming university town in the heartland.

Here’s why this year’s festival is so worth attending.

1. Awesome headliners. This is the festival’s 25th year, and the organizers have gone all out to make it truly memorable. These are the headliners, in alpha order: Ben Allison Think Free. Brian Charette Trio. Dave Douglas and High Risk. Julian Lage Trio. Charles Lloyd Quartet. Rudresh Mahanthappa Bird Calls. Becca Stevens Band.

In a word, wow.

2. Variety. Let’s look more closely at the headliners.

Ben Allison Think Free: A bassist-led band including Jenny Scheinman on violin and Rudy Royston on drums.

Brian Charette Trio: A B3 player/pianist-led band including Rudy Royston on drums.

Dave Douglas and High Risk: A trumpeter-led electro-acoustic quartet, with a DJ. Apparently this comes out of an earlier ensemble called Keystone, which we saw at the Walker in 2010, so we’re really intrigued.

Julian Lage Trio: A guitarist-led trio. Vibraphonist Gary Burton knows how to pick guitarists for his band; Lage was the successor to Pat Metheny and Larry Coryell. Lage is a beautiful player. 

Charles Lloyd Quartet: A saxophonist-flutist-guru led band. Lloyd is one of our most important living musicians, a jazz giant and newly minted NEA Jazz Master whose influence is far-reaching and whose music is profound. Festival committee chair Don Thompson told the Iowa City Press-Citizen: “I’ve dreamed of having Charles Lloyd play our festival since I became involved many years ago.” Lloyd’s band: Gerald Clayton, Joe Sanders, Kendrick Scott. We’ll see them in Minneapolis a few days before Iowa City, because missing a live Charles Lloyd performance is not an option, and seeing him twice in one week on two different stages is an impossibly rare opportunity.

Rudresh Mahanthappa Bird Calls: A saxophonist-led band, a fusion of modern jazz with South Indian classical music. Mahanthappa is a Doris Duke Performing Artist and a very powerful player; Bird Calls is his take on Charlie Parker. Can’t wait to hear it live.

(Too many saxophones? No. Lloyd and Mahanthappa are totally different. What they have in common is knock-your-socks-off excellence.)

Becca Stevens Band: A ukulele-playing-singer-led band. Kurt Elling has called Stevens one of his favorite jazz vocalists. Her new album, Perfect Animal, the one she’s touring behind and will feature in Iowa City, leans more pop than jazz, but her band is so tight, her voice and style so appealing that it’s all about good music. (We saw her in Minneapolis earlier this week and liked her very much.)

Also on the main stage: Atlantis Quartet. The popular and beloved Minneapolis modern jazz group recently won a prestigious McKnight Musician Fellowship. We’ll be cheering especially loudly for them. They write strong, solid original music and they play it very well.

There’s more. Following Dave Douglas on Friday night, Ron Miles and his group Whirlpool play at the Englert Theater starting at 11 p.m. Miles is a brilliant, elegant trumpeter-cornetist who often plays with Bill Frisell. (They played Iowa City together in 2009.)

And this, recently added: Charles Lloyd’s wife, artist and filmmaker Dorothy Darr, made a documentary film about Lloyd called Arrows Into Infinity that chronicles his life in music, his spiritual journey, his great friendship with the drummer Billy Higgins and more. The film screens at the Iowa City Public Library at 2 p.m. on Friday, to be followed by a q-and-a with Lloyd and Darr.

3. Smart scheduling. The headliners are on the main stage. No one else plays during their performances. In between the headliners, who perform every two hours, three side stages light up with local musicians and young musicians. 

Guitarist Steve Grismore, a co-founder of the festival, plays with his trio on Thursday. The electro-jazz ensemble Koplant No plays Saturday. So does the Dakota Combo, a group of high school musicians from Minneapolis. View the whole schedule here.

4. Location, location. Iowa City is compact, idyllic and scenic. A university town on the Iowa River, it’s lovely to walk around, with shops and galleries (AKAR, Iowa Artisans Gallery) and restaurants, patios, and places to sit. 

The city is home to the University of Iowa, which is home to the world-famous Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so all along Iowa Avenue you’ll find bronze plaques in the sidewalks with authors’ names and passages from their works. The city is one of just eight UNESCO-designed “Cities of Literature” in the world, and the only one in the United States.

The festival takes place on a lush green lawn in front of the Old Capitol, and on Clinton Street and Iowa Avenue, which are closed to traffic and open to aimless rambling. Following the final headliner (this year, Charles Lloyd), there will be fireworks over the river, visible from the festival site. The fireworks are always a perfect ending to the festival.

As a university town, Iowa City is full of students. It can be noisy at night, and the bars are usually ear-splitting and overflowing. If you’re not in your early 20s, there will be moments when you feel old. That’s just how it is. On the other hand, it’s kind of nice to be among all of those short shorts, halter tops and beards, even as a tourist.

And – this is one of the small miracles of the Iowa City Jazz Festival – you can take your chair to the festival site mid-morning, set it up where you want it, return hours later for the music, and your chair will still be there. 

Only once have we had cause to doubt that. Last year, we spent the last hour or so of the final night wandering, meeting friends, and taking photos. We returned and our chairs were not where we had left them. They had been moved about 10 feet and turned to face the fireworks. Two strangers were in them. We walked in their direction, they saw us, stood up immediately, and said “Sorry, we thought someone had forgotten them.”

Iowa City, never change.

5. Good fair food. Seriously. You can buy fried stuff if you want, but you can also buy amazing grilled and roasted stuff, and Indian food and other spicy, tasty edibles. You might want to make a dinner reservation for one night, but you can eat well on the street, without a reservation.

6. It’s free. Because of the generosity and civic-mindedness of many sponsors and supporters, every second of music at the festival is free. So thanks to the University of Iowa Community Credit Union, and MidWestOneBank, and Integrated DNA Technologies, and Oaknoll Retirement Community, and everyone else who stepped forward and put money in the bucket. Volunteers will be carrying buckets through the crowd during the festival, if you feel moved to make a contribution.

Related:

Iowa City Jazz Festival website

My interview with Dorothy Darr about Arrows Into Infinity

Interview with an astronaut: Talking with NASA’s Michael E. Fossum

Mike Fossum by John Whiting

NASA astronaut Mike Fossum is in St. Paul this week to help launch the Science Museum’s new exhibition, “SPACE: An Out-of-Gravity Experience.” If you’ve ever thought that being an astronaut is all glamor and glory, “SPACE” will disabuse you of that notion. It’s hard, exacting, dangerous and sometimes smelly work. And yet there are men (and women) who dream of going into space and eventually become part of what is truly an elite group.

Mike Fossum is one. He grew up poor (he didn’t tell us he’d grown up the grandson of sharecroppers, but we overheard him telling someone else), he prayed, he tried and tried again, and now he’s one of the few. To be honest, it was a thrill to speak with him. I’m not often star-struck, but I was around him.

PLE: How long are you in St. Paul?

Mike Fossum: I’m just here for a few days. The main events are today, associated with the opening of the new exhibit. Then back home, back to Houston.

Did I hear you say you were ready to return to the Space Station again?

I am ready. I have a chance. We’ll see. My doctors and my wife are conspiring against me.

I was reading your biography and learned that you have traveled some 77 million miles in space. I can’t get my head around that.

It’s kind of hard to even imagine. But you make enough trips around the planet – sixteen a day – and they add up over 194 days.

And now I realize I’m talking to a real astronaut and my mind has just gone blank.

[Laughs] I’m a normal guy with an outrageous job.

I’m in the generation where we followed everything the astronauts were doing. We watched the launches in school.

We watched them together.

And now it seems like there’s almost an indifference to the space program. What would you say to people to get them excited about it again, or at least pay attention?

Come to see [the “SPACE” show at the Science Museum]. Hear President Kennedy giving us his challenge to go to the moon, which was an outrageous challenge – we had barely launched rockets, to go to the moon in that amount of time took huge national resources, and we know there were geopolitical reasons for doing it, too. Then come through and see some of what the space shuttle program did. It was built to deliver big pieces of space stations to space, and it finally did it. Then see what we’re doing now with the space station, some of the science exhibits that are in here.

Then dream about where we’re looking for the future. Can you see yourself on Mars? There will be human footprints on Mars someday. I hope that there’s an American flag on their shoulder.

About motivating kids: In a lot of ways, they think space is impossible. I was born in Sioux Falls and grew up in one of the poorest parts of the country, down on the Mexican border in South Texas. This was an impossible dream for me, too. I found a way to get through college – it took an Air Force scholarship to help me pay for college, then the Air Force gave me opportunities to go to graduate school, and then I worked in flight test and went to test pilot school. I tried to take the best advantage of my opportunities – to study hard, to do well, to stand out as one of the best.

Maybe motivating school kids to study the science, technology, engineering, math, the STEM fields … but it’s not just about grade school kids. All of us are inspired by this. We did an astronaut selection about two years ago, and we had 6,000 people apply to be astronauts. These are people at the peak of their professional careers. They’re in math, science, engineering, medicine. There were teachers and test pilots. All are working their hearts out to be the best that they can be, and this is one of the things that’s inspiring them. I know it inspired me to reach a little deeper, to dig in and try a little harder to be the best, to be as good as I could be.

All of these people want my job. And there are people who don’t want my job, but they want to be part of something that’s big, huge, outrageous. Putting mankind, putting humans on Mars is an outrageous challenge. And it is hard. We do need the financial support to do it. And the nation has a lot of priorities for how we spend our money. I recognize that. I’m not saying it should be budgeted differently. I can’t make that claim. But it’s the reality of what we do.

But there’s a lot of good that comes from space, too. We’re learning so much now. We have over 2,000 different scientific investigations completed on the space station. Some are to help us develop systems that support the people that keep us healthy for a six, seven or eight month trip to Mars and back again. Some are to research what’s going on here.

The classic one is osteoporosis, bone loss. Without gravity, you begin losing bone ten time faster than a 70-year-old osteoporotic woman. We find that with the right exercise regimen – I came back [from 164 days in space] with essentially no change to my bones and muscles. I exercised, and I also tested a medicine. With the accelerated effects in space, you can test a medicine that would take a long period of time to investigate and prove side effects, prove benefits on the ground.

Mike Fossum by John Whiting

How many astronauts are there now?

There are only 42 active astronauts right now. We have eight junior guys in training that aren’t yet certified as astronauts. That’s down. Not that many years ago, we had 135 astronauts. We were flying 30 to 40 a year in the space shuttle. Right now we’re flying four a year on the space station. It’s a longer grind. It’s a two to two-and-a-half year training flow for a six-month mission. Shuttle missions were about a one-year training after you completed all of your initial training to get ready for assignment.

When you’re not flying, we’re all very, very busy. We’re supporting the development of the Orion capsule, which we tested back in December with great success. That’ll be our exploration vehicle to go further, beyond Earth orbit. I’m supporting the real-time operations on the space station right now. I work with crews in training, I work with the crews on orbit, I work with the mission control team and the mission managers as we’re juggling priorities, working through challenges. There are big meetings going on right now to see if we’re ready to do a space walk tomorrow, for instance. If I was in Houston, I would be doing that. I’m involved with those kinds of things.

Boeing and SpaceX are two companies that were selected to build human ships to get us to and from the space station so we will no longer be reliant solely on the Russians and their Soyuz space craft. That’s a good thing. The Russians have been great partners. There’s a lot of other challenges right now, including with our partnership, but we’re fortunate to be working with them.

I was a cold warrior. I spent the first half of my career as a cold warrior. Now I’m speaking Russian and walking across Red Square at will – not speaking Russian real well, but I can get by. It’s a dramatic change to the way things were. It’s an example of where we can cooperate and work together. We have 15 nations all bound at the hip, that are working together on this, and we need each other. The U.S. and Russia can’t walk away. The space station cannot function without both of us. We both bring critical things to the mission that have to be there to continue the mission.

In some ways, you could say, “Boy, what a dumb decision,” but in other ways, that’s how we saved some money, saved some costs, and we’ve got to find a way to get along. If you think about Earth as a spaceship, wouldn’t it be better if we just had to find a way to get along and resolve issues? Because it’s just imperative. Instead, we sit across borders and cause trouble with each other.

Out of all your high moments, and there have been many, what stands out for you as the highest?

For me, it was the first launch. I applied to over seven selection cycles over 13 years. I interviewed five times before I was selected. That set a record. Five interviews was a record. Somebody’s tied it. It’ll be hard to beat it, and I don’t wish that on anybody.

I have a passion to pursue this. Beyond passion, for me, it’s a calling. It’s a spiritual calling, that I was supposed to reach in this way. I never felt any guarantee that it would work out the way I dreamed it would, that I prayed it would.

Are you a religious man?

I am a religious man.

What faith, if you don’t mind my asking?

I’m a Christian. Lutheran.

I was Missouri Synod Lutheran.

I’m Missouri Synod Lutheran.

(We shake hands.)

After all of those years – 13 years of applying, the years before that dreaming, but now getting serious about it, working my heart out, trying to do as well as I could do in the educational opportunities and career opportunities, being selected as an astronaut – we had an accident that slowed things down, and it was eight more years from the time I was selected until I was strapping in.

Mike Fossum by John Whiting

Which accident?

Columbia. And so now, finally, it’s the Fourth of July in 2006, we’re sitting on the pad, we’ve had a couple of [delays] due to weather, but now it’s looking real, the weather’s good and the systems are coming up. There was some down time and I took a nap on the launch pad, sitting on four million pounds of explosive rocket fuel. I took a nap because I could feel the prayers lifting us up, and I felt – okay, I can release it for just a few minutes here.

I took about a 15-minute nap, and then it’s “Hey, Mike, wake up! We’re getting close!” Because you’re rush, rush, rush, and you’re in there, and now it’s like, what do you do? There’s some time built in for that purpose – not naps, but in case they need to work on communication or something.

So. Here we are. The engines come to life. I’ve dreamed about it forever. This ship that is now a living beast, you can feel it rumble as the main engines come to life. They do a quick gimbal check of them, and you can feel that – the ship itself does kind of a twang, it pushes over because the engines are at a little bit of an angle, they’re doing some quick checks in just a few seconds.

Then the solid rockets light and you are off like a scalded dog, as we say down in Texas. And you feel this incredible surge underneath you, and as you’re burning fuel you’re getting lighter, and so the pressures build and build and build. Eight and a half minutes later, boom, the engines cut off, your arms and your checklist float up off your lap, and you go “Wow!”

But I couldn’t just sit there and go “Wow,” I had a job to do. My job was to jump out of my seat quick as I could, grab still and video cameras and get to the window. We needed to get pictures of our external fuel tanks as they floated away, looking at foam damage to see if we’d been hit by any big pieces.

The tank wasn’t in view yet, so I’m sitting there looking out the window of the shuttle at the North Atlantic, and there’s this blue ocean with a dappling of white clouds, an impossibly black sky, and this curved horizon with a little thin band of atmosphere that’s very visible. And I realized with a shock, this isn’t a picture, this is not a video, it’s my eyeballs looking through some glass at God’s creation down below. And I thought, this is what it looks like when God’s looking down, and I said a prayer of thanks for making the dream come true, for getting us here safely, and – now I’ve got work to do, there’s the tank.

You had three launches?

Yes.

I hope you get to go back.

Me, too.