Louis Cole was one of the last people to play music with Austin Peralta. On November 20, 2012, both musicians—Cole on drums and Peralta on keys—accompanied vocalist Natasha Agrama for an evening at the Blue Whale, LA’s hub for jazz music. When Cole recalls that evening as we chat about it over 11 years later, one word comes up repeatedly in his description of Peralta. “He was burning at maximum intensity,” Cole says. “As a drummer playing with him, that was really fun. I played with him five times, and there was an upper ceiling of intensity that we would reach.”
Cole also recalls the night before the gig when they were rehearsing with Agrama. He felt like he and Peralta became friends that night. “Our sense of humor aligned that day,” Cole says. “It took us a few months of knowing each other. Then there’s this one rehearsal and everything started to fall into place.” Cole wasn’t just playing with another intense musician that evening. He was playing with a friend. However, their friendship would unfortunately not go any further than that. Hours after they left the stage at the Blue Whale, Peralta tragically passed away at the age of 22. He’s survived by his family, friends, and a musical legacy that still resonates to this day.
In his short life, Peralta was already a globally recognized pianist. He performed and recorded with jazz greats such as Ron Carter and Chick Corea, as well as other iconic artists like Erykah Badu. Peralta’s final solo offering to the world was his 2011 album Endless Planets. Brainfeeder, Flying Lotus’s label which originally released the album, just reissued Endless Planets on vinyl for the first time earlier this year. “Maybe the most important record to me since I’ve been doing this,” wrote Adam Stover, Brainfeeder’s label manager, on Instagram about the reissue. “Important to me and important to Brainfeeder, because he is, and this is the catalyst for everything we’ve done.”
Stover considers the album a catalyst because it was the first jazz album Brainfeeder ever released. Since then the label has shared forward-thinking releases from Kamasi Washington, Hiatus Kaiyote, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Louis Cole, and many more. Before Peralta, Brainfeeder was grounded in LA’s beat scene—a small community of artists layering hip-hop instrumentals and experimental electronic sounds, with Samiyam, Ras G, Teebs, and Steven Ellison (a.k.a. Flying Lotus) on their roster. But jazz is literally in Ellison’s blood. His great-aunt is jazz icon Alice Coltrane. It was only natural he wanted to integrate jazz elements into his music.
“It was a musical mutual understanding. Everything he did made sense in the moment and felt right to me. It was a symbiotic vibe between the two of us.” — Louis Cole
On his second album, Cosmogramma, Ellison invited a prodigious bassist and a close friend named Stephen Bruner (a.k.a. Thundercat) to play on the track “MmmHmm.” Bruner and Peralta were already very close friends at that time. “[Thundercat and Austin] would come play on the spot,” Stover tells me. “No drummer. No nothing. Austin on keys and Thunder on bass and singing. They would play a bunch of Thunder’s tracks that were on his first album. Or they would just jam, because they’re both amazing players.”
Being in that sphere, Ellison quickly formed a community of jazz players and soon invited all of them into the Brainfeeder family. A few days after Stover met Peralta, Ellison told him they’d release Endless Planets. “I questioned it a little bit—I was like, ‘Is anyone into this?’” Stover recalls. “Even though it’s amazing, and Austin is amazing.” Ellison wasn’t shy about releasing jazz music, though, because Endless Planets isn’t suit-and-tie, cocktail-party jazz. “It’s its own breed of jazz—or fusion of jazz,” Stover continues. “Whatever you might want to call it. Maybe it’s electronic music with jazz elements. Maybe it’s jazz with electronic elements. Maybe it’s something completely different.” One instance of this crossover lives on Peralta’s track “Algiers.” After over 10 minutes of expert improvisation riding a spiraling bass line, it closes with a wash of electronic ambient soundscapes.
For Peralta, playing music was a spiritual practice. Before Endless Planets, he recorded two albums—2005’s Maiden Voyage and 2006’s Mantra—but he didn’t promote them because he said the producer caged his vision. On Endless Planets, Ellison gave him the space to explore different genres and express his spirituality.
This spirit created space for other experimental jazz on Brainfeeder. Kamasi Washington’s 2015 debut for the label, The Epic, is just under three hours long, and features two bass players (including Thundercat), two drummers, and a choir. On Louis Cole’s upcoming album Nothing, he fused jazz with the sounds of the Dutch orchestra Metropole Orkest. Cole also received and fueled Peralta’s spirituality when they played together. “[Austin] would have these songs that were frames—foundations for us to lift off from and improvise and find something new,” Cole says. “You’d be across the stage. He’d just be pushing for something, and I was so ready to go there with him. He never asked me to do anything different. It was a musical mutual understanding. Everything he did made sense in the moment and felt right to me. It was a symbiotic vibe between the two of us.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever really met anyone like Austin. Everything that he did had that spirituality, but it’s not your typical spirituality. It’s his own universe that he created.” — Adam Stover
Stover didn’t have the same musical relationship with Peralta as Cole, but he has many fond memories of him as a person. “Austin is a very distinct character. I don’t think I’ve ever really met anyone like Austin. He had a whole philosophy about things,” Stover says. “Everything that he did had that spirituality, but it’s not your typical spirituality. It’s his own universe that he created.”
“I don’t think art can or should be classified into earthly conventions,” Peralta mused on the vinyl sleeve of Endless Planets. “True art defies categorization and transcends boundaries and shouldn’t be looked at through a lens of ‘Earthly’ or ‘not Earthly.’ If you let it wash over you and carry you away, that experience may not feel like anything you’ve ever experienced here on Earth. It can be the doorway into an infinitude of worlds.”
Peralta is now out there in that infinitude of worlds, and he’s still opening that doorway over a decade after he left Earth. FL
