Instrumentalist David Lord returns to Wichita to lead Air House Music in person – Kansas City Pitch

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David Lord. // image courtesy the artist
For the past three years, Air House Music, a music academy and recording studio based in a low-slung ranch house in Wichita, has been run remotely, most lessons given online, while its founder, guitarist and composer David Lord, was living elsewhere, first in Santa Fe and then in Montreal. But as of the second week of August, Lord has returned to his native Wichita, his wilderness years in desert burgs and Canadian metropolises over.
“I feel a little out of touch,” Lord said in an email exchange with The Pitch, when asked what the Wichita scene was like. “I’ve only been back a few weeks, so everything is a little surreal at this point.”
Lord, who has been in several bands and makes alchemical instrumental music under his own name, might have an easier time in a bigger city, where opportunities to play live are more abundant and bigger audiences for his sort of formally inventive, hard-to-categorize style are built in. Instead, Lord has built a business and a home, and though he frequently goes to Los Angeles to record, Wichita remains his base.
“I already have so much in place in Wichita, that it would be hard to replicate in a bigger city,” Lord says. Those things in place include not just his business–which currently has about 20 teachers offering lessons to students of all ages, and studio facilities built by Lord, Ryan Rodine and former Wichita resident Micajah Ryan, who’s worked with Bob Dylan, Guns ‘N Roses and Megadeth, among others–but his deep roots in the community.
After a childhood of piano lessons and choir practice, Lord took up the guitar in seventh grade, inspired by his father, who played the instrument. In high school, he was in jazz band while moonlighting in several extracurricular rock groups. At Friends University, he gained a “good understanding of music theory and provided a lot of performance opportunities” and was “forced to study classical guitar, which ended up being important to my own music.”
Lord began making his own music in earnest, first in the instrumental band Solagget, which bridged the difference between his jazz background and the rhythm-heavy postrock sounds coming out of Chicago. “The early 2000s was a very special time in the Wichita music scene. There were so many amazing bands, each doing their own thing—Paper Airplanes, The World Palestine, The Monoplex, This Great October, etc.,” Lord recalls. “There weren’t many venues for that type of music, so we would usually rent out spaces and throw DIY all-ages shows and hundreds of people would come out. There was a sense of freedom to do whatever you want and there was great community to support it.”
This experience, built around individual innovation and underground communal support, would prove formative for Lord’s music and career. While on tour with Solagget in Los Angeles in 2005, Lord met musician Chris Schlarb. A decade or so later, Schlarb wanted to play Wichita, and he called Lord for help setting up a show. Lord got it done, and after the concert, he and Schlarb started talking about the latter’s new studio, Big Ego, and work with prominent Chicago drummer Chad Taylor (in the band Psychic Temple), of whom Lord was a fan. This ultimately led to the planning of what would become the sessions for Lord’s first album with Schlarb as producer and Taylor on drums, Forest Standards Volume 1, released in 2018, on Schlarb’s house label, Big Ego Records. Volume 2 arrived two years later, and Vol. 3, perhaps the most impressive of the series thus far, dropped earlier this year.

The Forest Standards records form a remarkable portrait of Lord’s preoccupations, developing skills and growing ambition. Some things are constant–Taylor on drums, Schlarb producing, a lot of songs named after mushrooms and plant species–while other aspects change–frequent Taylor colleague and avowed Lord influence Jeff Parker (Tortoise, Chicago Underground Orchestra, Isotope 217) plays guitar on Vol. 2, while Vol. 3 revolves around the nimble flute of Christine Tavolacci. But at the center of it all is Lord’s distinct, unmistakable playing, which blends sweeping classical intricacy, innovative polychordal jazz and the immediacy of rock. Lord’s style and tone have definite ancestors–Parker, David Grubbs, Jim Hall, maybe Bill Frisell–but his music has grown increasingly singular and esoteric. Much of that ineffable quality comes from a process of his own devising, a product of his college years.
“When I was studying with (Wichita jazz fixture and Bodo Ensemble leader) Craig Owens in college, he challenged me to create my own musical system,” Lord says. “I worked with Craig for many years, and we played very little guitar. Our primary focus was studying musicians/artists/architects/film makers etc., who had created their own systems or worlds.”
Lord’s system is based on the Lydian chromatic scale of composer and musician George Lewis, which inspired the modal work of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and others. Lewis’ approach creates a faintly unsettling, elusive sound, imparting neither the overt melancholy of minor key tonality nor the hearty punch of a major chord, and replacing the frenetic chord changes of bop with the languid scale-based explorations of modal jazz. Lord’s method takes Lewis’ open-ended scalar technique and applies it to chords, stacked notes and tone clusters, giving the largely horizontal flow of modal jazz vertical layers and additional angles. “I’m specifically drawn toward sounds that blur the line between being ‘pretty’ and ‘dissonant,’ Lord says, music that is “both peaceful and eerie at the same time.”
Lord uses these building blocks to create rich, complicated ecosystems teeming with allusions, codes and secret cities–crafting songs that resemble the forest life they’re named after. Many of the Forest Standards songs are based on actual standards, but transmuted through the subterfuge and centrifuge of Lord’s elaborately playful techniques. One example: “(T)he bass player plays the changes to a jazz standard like ‘Just Friends’ while I superimpose another chord progression (or two) on top, to the point where the standard chord progression is completely unintelligible, transforming ‘Just Friends’ into ‘Just Fungus,’ Lord says. “I think of it as playing a trick on the bass player, because it makes it sound like the bass is making strange note choices, playing notes like the major 7th or #5th over a major chord, when in actuality, the bass player is simply playing the chord tones of a standard.”
That sense of the everyday transformed, broken down or recreated suffuses Lord’s work. Achieving it requires both careful planning and a reliance on the intricate whims of chance. Forest Standards Vol. 3, for instance, has as its starting point John Coltrane’s Ballads–there’s a track-by-track relation in both song titles and individual vibes–but it’s also enriched by compositional tricks that rival John Cage’s chance operations.
Using special decks of playing cards adorned with different nature art–“a mushroom deck, a butterfly deck, a bird deck, a tree deck and an insect deck”–Lord has created a way to efficiently and fruitfully direct his songwriting.
“I composed a micro song for each of these cards,” Lord says. He assigns a certain set of chords to each suit, and the number of the card decides the number of chords used in each micro song. “I think of these micro songs as “scenery,” Lord states. “Then, using a pendulum, I determine the scenery within each piece of music. I might determine that a composition has two mushrooms, three butterflies and one tree. Then, I draw from the deck two mushroom cards, three butterfly cards and one tree card, and incorporate those micro songs into the overall composition. Typically, mushrooms are electric or classical guitar, butterflies are Nashville-strung guitar, insects and birds are melodies and trees are bass lines or ostinatos. In the same way that while walking in the forest a butterfly or mushroom could appear at any time, in a composition, a butterfly or mushroom micro song could appear at any time.”
It’s a complicated way of working that yields deceptively elegant material, just as the basis in jazz standards both grounds Lord’s music in tradition and frees it to shoot for completely new horizons. There’s something paradoxical about Lord’s work: it’s information-rich and logically driven yet mystical and intuitive; avant-garde in principle but comfortable and accessible to the ear; restlessly forward-thinking but firmly rooted in the soil of the past.
Fascinated by forests, Lord lives in the middle of the Great Plains and travels to urban California to record. Fittingly, his time away from Wichita has put him in greater touch with the power of his native turf. An early review of Lord’s band Solagget compared his style to Missouri guitar legend Pat Metheny, which left him confused.
“At the time, I didn’t quite understand the comparison, but looking back, I get it,” he reflects. “I think there’s something about being from the Midwest that connects us and our approaches. Until moving away from the Midwest, I couldn’t identify this quality, but now I can very much hear my music as being from the Midwest.”
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