Shahzad Ismaily is unable to regulate his body temperature. She was born without sweat glands, or at least not many.
When he was one month old, his parents rushed him to the hospital because he had a fever and was having trouble breathing. They learned that he has ectodermal dysplasias, a rare genetic disorder that causes abnormalities on the surface of the body. Five decades later, he has become one of music’s most in-demand collaborators, spanning genres as diverse as folk, free jazz, and spooky meditations sung in Urdu. He believes that these events are related.
“Since I move so easily with the temperatures of the outside world, is it possible that I have extra sensitivity to the tone of the world around me?” he asked by phone at a tour stop in the Netherlands.
Although he has never released a solo album, Ismaily, 51, has played or produced nearly 400 records since moving to New York in February 2000, including work by Bonnie “Prince” Billy and Yoko Ono. This year, he has played keyboards on Feist’s “Crowds” album; elastic bass on “Connection,” a rock record by Ceramic Dog, his partnership with guitarist Marc Ribot; and keyboards on “Love in Exile,” his improv group debut with singer Arooj Aftab and pianist Vijay Iyer.
But summarizing exactly what it does can feel a bit like trying to bottle up the wind. “If you listen to my last record, you might not know what’s on it,” said singer Sam Amidon, who has worked with Ismaily for nearly 20 years. “But every moment he was in the room brought out the most beautiful things in other people through his energy. He’s just sneaking in there.”
“My preferred way of working is to walk into a room and intuitively feel what we need to do today,” Ismaily said.
That self-confidence did not come easily. Shortly after that first ER visit, surgeons split Ismaily’s prematurely fused skull, adding space for him to expand. Allergies and asthma often caused him to wake up in a panic. For several months he was blind. The kids teased him asking why he dressed for Halloween all year. A high school marching band was the source of his only childhood friends.
“It’s crazy to be 51 years old and still have so much unresolved trauma,” she said. “That prevents me from making a record.”
He worries that he lacks the “artistic depth” to record something bearing his own name. For a decade, he has run a record label, Figure 8, that specializes in early albums by veteran actors and collaborators. He hopes one day to be brave enough to make his own record.
“It still feels like a non-mountainer casually passing the foot of Mount Everest, but I would be very excited about that result,” he said.
By: GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6799501, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-07-11 21:30:07
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