WOLf + LAMB ON MArcY hOTEL / DJ PrEMIEr ON cOMINg TO NYc

DAILY NOTE
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
4 22
of
JAZZ MEETS METAL
DOWNTOWN
WOLF + LAMB on marcy hotel / DJ PREMIER on coming to nYC
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
New York is a city of dichotomies navigated
seamlessly by its residents. We travel uptown
and downtown, from Manhattan to the outer
boroughs; sometimes we hang out in obscure
Bushwick warehouses, other times we find
ourselves sipping sauvignon blanc in the
atrium at MoMA. New Yorkers are known for
their collective ability to remain opinionated
yet open-minded, brash but extremely friendly,
intellectual and highfalutin while still knowing
how to let loose.
In today’s Daily Note, critic
Hank Shteamer examines the
interconnections between jazz
and metal (they’re closer than you
think). In our archival Q&A with
hip-hop pioneer DJ Premier, we
learn that the producer isn’t even
from New York originally, and that
Gang Starr almost didn’t happen—
proving the point that this town
can knock you down, but a little
perseverance works wonders. And
author Will Hermes regales us
Clockwise from top: Erykah
Badu outside of Brooklyn
Museum before her lecture;
Rakim interviewed by Jeff
‘Chairman’ Mao; Bobbito
DJing at Mobile Mondays!.
with a 20-year-old tale of a downand-dirty show at the Mudd Club,
recognizing that the intersection
of jazz, funk, punk, and hip-hop
makes for a damn good dance
party. Just like the best nights out,
the most interesting music can be
simultaneously raw and rough,
droney and dulcet—incongruity at
its finest.
New York City is complicated
and maddening. But it’s still the
best city on earth. Enjoy it.
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editor Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Gustavo Dao
Adrienne Day
Will Hermes
Hank Shteamer
Nick Sylvester
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
Cover Photo Roberto Polillo
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
The content of the Daily Note does not
necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
ABOUT RBMA
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make
a difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in the
city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine
2
a place that’s equal parts science lab,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a
sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board,
and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection
all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has
been traversing the globe since, traveling
to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.
3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
“We didn’t think of being stars. We were
funking around for fun.”
—Bernie Worrell, founding member and keyboardist of
Parliament-Funkadelic, April 30, 2013
TONIGHT
BROOKLYN MASONIC TEMPLE
A Night Of
Improvised
Round Robin
Duets
RBMA’s Julian
Brimmers
interviewing
Bobbito.
Knockdown Center
Drone
Activity In
Progress
This Thursday, some of music’s most progressive
experimentalists will unite at Knockdown Center in
Queens for a heady few hours of heavy drone and gorgeous
reverb. Every single person on the roster has contributed
something amazing to our weird, wide musical landscape,
so we thought we’d highlight a few releases from some of
the performers to help you find your footing.
Pete Swanson
Drone Activity In Progress
Stephen O’Malley, KTL
(Stephen O’Malley & Peter Rehberg),
Body/Head (Kim Gordon & Bill
Nace), Prurient, Hunter HuntHendrix of Liturgy, Oren Ambarchi,
Alan Licht, Vatican Shadow, Pete
Swanson, Mick Barr, Kid Millions/
Jim Sauter Duo, Alberich, Pharmakon,
Noveller, grassmass and Hiram
Martinez at Knockdown Center. See
redbullmusicacademy.com for more info.
4
Prurient
Krallice
Bermuda Drain
(Hydra Head, 2011)
The very first thing you hear on “Many
Jewels Surround the Crown,” the opening track from Bermuda Drain, one of
the more “accessible” Prurient albums,
is Dominick Fernow’s throat-scorching
scream. From there, the track transitions into a decayed extraterrestrial
floating synth exploration, with Fernow muttering and whispering threateningly over the top. The rest of the
record proceeds similarly, with confrontational vocals (sample lyrics from
“Let’s Make a Slave” include “Leave
your family behind/lock the gates and
hide the key”) acting as brutal counterpoint to an often beautiful soft instrumental pulse.
Stephen O’Malley
Body/Head
(Kim Gordon & Bill Nace)
Prurient + 13 More
Krallice
(Profound Lore, 2008)
Virtuoso musicians can be impressive; they can also be pretty boring.
All the technical skill in the world
doesn’ t mean you know how to
write a compelling song. Guitarist
Mick Barr is an exception. In Krallice, Barr, guitarist Colin Marston
and drummer Lev Weinstein prove
that there’s actually a way to combine lightning-quick fretwork with
a sense of power and structure.
“Cnestoral” is a whirlwind of tangled shredding that transcends dry
technical know-how to become meditative and beautiful, and just when
you think it can’t be topped, “Energy
Chasms” layers even more complex
instrumentation into a frantic build
and release.
MAY
02
145 W 32nd St
Brian
Eno: 77
Million
Paintings
Sunn O)))
Monoliths & Dimensions
(Southern Lord, 2011)
Listening to Sunn O))) requires patience.
Slow guitar drones expand and refract
on themselves with the density of concrete in the seconds before it hardens.
On Monoliths & Dimensions, core members Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, along with a cast of experimental
music luminaries (Oren Ambarchi,
Dylan Carlson of Earth, Eyvind Kang,
and more) created an album where unrelenting waves of gut-liquifying bass
are punctured by angelic choirs and—
not that you can make it out—actual
conch shells. There are full orchestras
worth of instruments coming together
in the service of pure sound. What you
can’t hear is just as important as what
you can.
01
UPCOMING
EVENTS
STURM UND
DRONE
Man With Potential
(Type, 2012)
After the dissolution of Yellow Swans,
the apocalyptic (and, inexplicably, sometimes calming) drone and
field-recording duo of Pete Swanson
and Gabriel Saloman, Swanson went
back to the drawing board. Rather
than continue to work with pure noise,
he applied his understanding of harsh
sounds to a rigid dance structure. Instead of filling every available space
with clusters of skittering, grinding
electronics, he added empty space
and a strong backbeat to create songs
couched in classic techno. Swanson’s
music still sounds like the end of the
world, only now we’ll have something
to dance to if everything comes crumbling down.
20+ Artists
from Jazz to
Electronic
MAY
ON-AIR
you too can get in on the Red Bull Music Academy without missing a beat. As the Academy unfolds, RBMA Radio is the sonic gateway
to everything going down—live and on-demand. Since 2005, RBMA Radio
has been at the center of each Academy edition; it broadcasts to over 60
countries and has built a network of music lovers around the world. They’ll
be capturing the New York madness as it unfolds—a daily update from
the Academy airs each weeknight at 6pm (EST). The radio team transmits
live from the belly of the Academy, condensing 23 hours of near-constant
activity into an at-a-glance overview for those who can’t attend. And every
Thursday they team up with local favorite East Village Radio (evr.com) for
a two-hour program full of exclusive interviews and the freshest tracks.
Listen for new music from Academy participants, glimpses into the most
recent lectures, guest DJ appearances, and the best live moments captured
from around town. Tune in now to rbmaradio.com.
–Olivia Graham
MAY
03
Le Bain
Masters
At Work
& Special
Guests
MAY
03
Smorgasburg
Brooklyn
Flea Record
Fair
Special
MAY
04
The Bunker @ Public Assembly
FIRST
BLUSH
Participants
remember their
early musical
inspirations.
On Friday night, Red
Bull Music Academy 2013
participants Knox,
QuietDust, August
Rosenbaum, and Jimi Nxir
perform live at Le Poisson
Rouge in the West Village
(the club used to be the
famous jazz room the
Village Gate). We asked
these four talents to tell
us about the first record
they ever bought and why
it’s so special.
Andy Stott
Atom TM
Objekt
Octo Octa
More
MAY
04
New Museum
KNOX
(Queens, NY)
“The first record I
ever bought with my own
money was No Doubt’s
Tragic Kingdom. It was
the alternative tough
tween’s pop anthem.
It gave me something
to relate to outside
of the sugar-toothed,
glittered-girl-power
kaleidoscope. I remember playing the record
and belting along the
whole way through. My
poor parents!”
knoxtheband.com
AUGUST
ROSENBAUM
(Copenhagen,
Denmark)
“I started breaking
away from listening
to my parents’ records
when I got Wu-Tang Forever, Miles Davis’ Kind
of Blue, and Queen’s
Greatest Hits for my
tenth birthday. I loved
them equally!”
augustrosenbaum.com
JIMI NXIR
QUIETDUST
(Washington, D.C.)
(Dublin, Ireland)
“I bought Al Green’s
I’m Still in Love with
You, D’Angelo’s Voodoo,
and Pink Floyd’s Dark
Side of the Moon around
my junior year; it was
with money I saved from
not buying lunch. They
really changed my viewpoint on music. Voodoo
got me at the perfect
time —all the issues in
that record hit home. I
wasn’t really into rock
then but I bought Dark
Side of the Moon and it
did so much for me.”
jiminxir.com
“The first record I
bought was Spice Girls’
Spice World when I was
about six. It was special because I saved up
my own money to buy it.
Also it’s a reminder
that my taste in music
is always evolving!”
soundcloud.com/
quietdust
Classic Album
Sundays: A
David Bowie
Special
Nile Rodgers, Tony
Visconti, Ken Scott
MAY
05
Terminal 5
Flying MAY
Lotus
Ultraísta,
Thundercat & Band
05
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
dj premier
The legendary producer on life before Gang Starr.
What was your first exposure to hip-hop? Seeing the
b-boys breaking when my grandfather took me to Times
Square. We’d always go to Times Square—that’s when it was
really grimy and people were getting robbed left and right.
Now it’s all cleaned up since Giuliani came into office and
made it all pretty for the tourists. It’s not the same Times
Square that I remember. So during that time going into Midtown and seeing all the sights and everything; all the b-boys
used to be breaking for money, it was crazy. The Rock Steady
Crew was one of the first that I saw, where the Marriott Marquis is—right there off Seventh Avenue and, like, 44th. They
were right there and they had the Rock Steady Crew outfits
on and I was like, “Man, this is ill.” And they kept cutting up
Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache”—you know, the break part
of “Apache” with the bongos. And then they’d go into “It’s
6
Just Begun” by Jimmy Castor Bunch and they had a cassette
tape that was remade by whoever cut it up and it kept being repeated on the breakdowns, and every time it went to the breakdown, another cat would go off and do his thing. The way they
were doing all these moves was just amazing.
So you attended Prairie View University in Texas? Where I
met my man Biggest Gord. He’s now one of my partners. I’ve been
down with him since college. Yeah, I’ll elaborate on it more, but
that’s where we met. He’s from Brooklyn, New York.
And that’s where you formed your first group as well? I
formed this group with my man Top-Ski—who’s from Boston,
ironically, like Guru—and two of our friends that we went to college with. We were called MCs In Control and later we changed
our name to the Inner Circle Posse—why I don’t know, because
I thought MCs In Control was a dope name. We formed and I
used to do all the parties because I always had every record.
So how did MCs In Control evolve, or how did that group
lead you to Gang Starr? The first summer when we were together, I moved in with [Biggest Gord’s] family. It was Gord’s
first year in college and he was like, “Look, you can crash at
our place in Brooklyn.” So I moved to East New York and again
we spent the whole summer there and, rest in peace to Gord’s
dad, Arden Franklin, he made us get a job. I got a job at a
young peoples’ daycare as a counselor. I had no experience
but they had a shortage of counselors. Top, my MC, came with
me and we both got the job together. We actually became cool
counselors. Like, some of the kids that we counseled are now
successful in business; two of them have their own clothing
companies, they’re doing real well. Actually, when M.O.P. did
the “Ante Up” video, the wardrobe that they wore was by the
kid that I actually taught when he was 11 or 12 years old. And I
was young! I wasn’t even 24 yet. We used to do that every day
and that’s when I went to Staten Island and saw Ghostface Killah way back. We got into a fight in Stapleton projects, which
is where he’s from, with the other kids that were trying to fight
our kids from Brooklyn. When we went back to school the following year, I said, “You know what? Forget it.” I asked Gord,
“I’m going to move and is it possible to stay with you a little
while until I get on my feet?”
But your demo… Yeah, I’ll explain that. When I was in Texas
I worked at a record store called Soundwaves; it was like the
neighborhood store that everybody who was “ghetto” would
shop at. For one, we all had to know our music. You had to know
blues; you had to know zydeco because Louisiana and all that
was close enough so a lot of people shop there. You had to know
rock, hip-hop, and soul. My man Carlos Garza, who already
[worked] there, got me the job based on my knowledge of music. During that time Carlos used to still report to all the independent hip-hop companies and he told Stu Fine at Wild Pitch,
“Hey, this guy…” I was called Waxmaster C at that time because
my name is Chris and everyone had Jam Master or Grandmaster.
I just wanted some type of master so I was Waxmaster C, and he
told them about me. So Stu said, “Man, I got this group Gang
Starr that has three members right now but they’re really not
getting along with each other. The DJ is fighting with the MC,
the other MC doesn’t like the rhymes, and the other guy is really
great but he just needs a tight team.” So I was like, “Tell him I’ll
be in the group.” I wanted my guys to be in the group with them,
so it’d be like Top and me and we’d join him and help him out.
[Top] wasn’t trying to see that. So then I said, “Alright, I’m not
interested. Let’s try to shop my group.” The demo happened to
run across Stu Fine’s office but they were just a husband-andwife company so they had nobody to really A&R for them. Guru
used to listen to all the demos and Carlos copied my cassette
tape demo and snuck it to New York. And all of a sudden he
was like, “Man, I’ve got to tell you something. I sent that cassette, they like it.” And they were like, “Hey, we’re going to fly
you up.” Me and Top went up there, but they didn’t like Top’s
voice; they were like, “Nah, he doesn’t have any flow.” So I
said, “Well, put us in a real studio and maybe we can make it
sound better.” Went to the real studio, still didn’t like it and I
still wasn’t interested. I stayed in New York and Gord took me
everywhere; he took me to WBLS and I saw Marley Marl open
the door to wait for Heavy D to walk in. They were like, “Yeah,
we’re still waiting for Biz [Markie] to get here.” I’m like, “Wow,
Biz is coming.” And that’s the era. I remember Heavy D had
on an all-grey sweatsuit—the regular grey sweats that people
wear—he had the matching grey top and he had the big fat
dookie cable underneath but you could see it bulging out the
neck and I was like, “Damn, this is real.”
Interviewed by Jeff ‘Chairman’ Mao at Red Bull
Music Academy Toronto 2007. For the full Q&A, head
to redbullmusicacademy.com/lectures.
inset Photo: Matt Barnes. opposite photo: May Truong
Those who’ve been closely associated with the New York
hip-hop sound might be surprised to learn you’re not actually from New York. Where are you from and how did
you get to New York? I was born in Houston, Texas, and then
moved. My mother is from Baltimore and my father is from
South Carolina. They’re both teachers. My mother’s an art
teacher so that’s how I learned to draw and do all that—by force.
But now, since graffiti came out, I guess it’s all tied in to hiphop. So thanks to my mom for that; she’s a very big music woman. So through all of that, my upbringing… I was born in ’66, so
I have a lot more understanding and experience of the music.
To be from Texas gives me an advantage over anybody that gets
into the music business in the 21st century, unless they do their
homework on the origins of music that came before hip-hop. I
didn’t have any rap records when I was a kid; we only had soul
music. My grandfather lived in Brooklyn so we used to go visit
him all the time when I was young. We used to always stay with
him every Christmas, every Thanksgiving, every summer. My
older sister was tired of doing it because we were older and she
wanted to hang out with her friends but I kept wanting to go
because I was just so into the whole scene. The first time I ever
came to New York I saw a guy commit suicide on the subway
on the train that we were on. We ran over him and they had to
back the train up off of him; his arm was separated and he was
still shaking on the track. I was just like, “Wow, this is where I
want to live,” you know what I’m saying? Go back and tell your
friends what you did for the summer and you saw a dude commit suicide. Which is not a beautiful thing, but just the whole
aspect of seeing that and getting off the train—this is freshly
done so the cops aren’t even there yet—just the whole action
and seeing the people. My grandfather was a big baseball and
football fan so he used to always take me to every Yankee game
when I was little; he took me to the World Trade Center, the
Empire State Building. I did all of that early, so that by the time
I was 13 I said, “I’m definitely going to move here.” It still
wasn’t because of hip-hop yet—I wanted to live here, period.
That’s how I started to make my plans of being here once I
was able to get some money up and move.
7
feature
BLACK
MAGIC
The flowering of the unholy union
between jazz and metal.
WORDS Hank Shteamer
ILLUSTRATION Hashashin
The Puck Building, New York City; New Year’s Eve 1989
John Zorn sits onstage, smiling fiendishly. Clad in a “Die Yuppie Scum” T-shirt and blue camo
pants, the saxophonist, composer, and leader of Naked City calmly taps out time on his knee and
mayhem ensues. Drummer Joey Baron executes jackhammer blast beats as guitarist Bill Frisell
plays gnarled, surf-gone-prog riffs; meanwhile, the Japanese vocalist (and Boredoms founder)
Eye shrieks and convulses, egged on by Zorn’s blaring alto sax. The concert lasts more than two
hours—weaving in classic soundtrack themes and bite-size references to country and classical—
but many of the pieces clock in under a minute. In case the message isn’t already clear, Zorn
announces a composition entitled “Jazz Snob Eat Shit.”
An apartment in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn; January 2011
I’m seated in the living room of Craig Taborn. Taborn is a jazz pianist, one of the most well-respected in New York, or on the planet. He’s worked with legends ranging from bassist Dave Holland to former Art Ensemble of Chicago member Roscoe Mitchell. Taborn is playing DJ for the
afternoon, and what he wants to hear at the moment is Cryptopsy, a Montreal band known for
its ultra-technical, uncommonly deranged approach to death metal. We stare at the speakers,
wrapped up in the sound. Taborn weighs the relative merits of the different vocalists the band
has employed; former member Lord Worm is the fan favorite, but he votes for bullish mid-period
barker Mike DiSalvo. I listen more and mull his point.
Death by Audio, Williamsburg, Brooklyn; February 2013
Two musicians are locked in a fully improvised duet. Their approaches are so sympathetic that
the sound pours forth in a unified stream. The guitarist is Mick Barr, a 30-something player
known for reconciling top-velocity metallic shred and insular experimentation in projects such as
Orthrelm and Krallice. On drums is Marc Edwards, a 63-year-old drummer who has worked with
Cecil Taylor, David S. Ware, and other free-jazz legends over the course of a 30-plus year career.
Together the two achieve a brutally beautiful sort of trance music.
8
9
feature
feature
The jazz/metal overlap has evolved to the point where the
crossing of this boundary doesn’t automatically connote some
stodgy idea of transgression, where players from both sides can
finally step back and assess just how much they have in common, locating the affinities that lie underneath the obvious surface differences (image, decibel level). As mainstream pop grows
ever more synthetic, as DJs and producers inherit the rock-star
mantle, as laptops and loops supplant guitars and drums as the
primary engines of DIY music-making, jazz and metal come to
seem more and more like sibling idioms. Both genres thrive on
highly specialized, unmistakably human-centric technique—think
of a death-metal drummer’s double-kick chops, or his jazz counterpart’s four-limbed independence. Both privilege the small,
tight-knit ensemble, in which musicians interact with the speed,
precision, and power of pro athletes. And both enjoy profoundly
devoted fan bases, support systems that encourage artists working
in their respective genres to stretch and explore. Thanks to Tony
Williams, John McLaughlin, Robert Fripp, Greg Ginn, John Zorn,
and many others, the ice has
shattered into bits. Today’s
counterparts are sifting
through the rubble, searching for what comes next.
The collective known
as Sunn O))) is an important touchstone for this new
wave of jazz/metal crossover. The group’s basic M.O.
is to elongate the zombified
plod of doom metal into
sprawling drone epics, a
strategy that’s helped make
them a key nexus among
players from various experimental-minded scenes.
On 2009’s Monoliths & Dimensions, core Sunn O)))
members Stephen O’Malley
and Greg Anderson roped
in guests including vocalist
Attila Csihar, best known
for fronting notorious Norwegian black-metal band
Mayhem, as well as trombonist Julian Priester, who
has recorded with jazz greats
such as Herbie Hancock,
Max Roach, and Sun Ra over
a 60-year career. The results ranged from the band’s signature
abstracted doom to a more placid approach. The record’s final
piece, titled “Alice” and dedicated to Alice Coltrane, concludes
with Priester soloing over a shimmering ambient passage. The
cameo harked back to a 2008 LP by acknowledged Sunn O)))
forebears Earth, The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull, which
incorporated renowned jazz guitarist Bill Frisell into its desolate
slo-mo twangscapes. It would be tough to peg either of these records as jazz or metal, and yet DNA from both genres is traceable
in each. Works like these hint at the vast potential still remaining
in so-called fusion. Sunn O))) in particular seems to be seeking
an inter-genre soundspace—a purely textural experience, a sound
to go swimming in.
Various groups currently active in NYC are engaging in a
similar pursuit. The trio of Mick Barr, saxophonist Jon Irabagon, and drummer Mike Pride demonstrates how jazz and metal musicians are bonding over fresh aesthetic ideals, with raw
aggression being only one component of a broader sonic palette.
Irabagon and Barr come from different worlds. The saxophonist first attracted wide attention in 2008, when he won
the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition, a contest that celebrates a staunchly traditional sort of
jazz virtuosity. The victory netted Irabagon a recording contract—the album he released a year later, The Observer, toed
the party line. It featured pianist Kenny Barron, bassist Rufus
Reid, and drummer Victor Lewis—all esteemed veterans of
the jazz mainstream—and a sound that looked back to postbop’s mid-’60s heyday. Irabagon turned up in promotional
photos wearing a natty suit. To a casual spectator, it would’ve
seemed like he was aiming for a straightlaced jazz career. But
The Observer was actually the second of two major statements
Irabagon issued in 2009. The first was an extended duet with
Pride, I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues, a dauntingly extreme
statement that was nevertheless one of the most engaging re-
leases of the year. Reviewing the album in Time Out New York,
I wrote: “Sax-percussion duets often nod to the John Coltrane–
Rashied Ali free-jazz classic Interstellar Space. But to find an
analogue for this [record], you’d have to look to 2005’s OV, a
remarkable work of sustained minimalism by the post-metal
duo Orthrelm. I Don’t Hear Nothin’ but the Blues—like OV, a
continuous piece of nearly 50 minutes—seems driven by infernal monomania, as if Irabagon and Pride were simultaneously
afflicted by the same nervous tic.”
Like Irabagon, Mick Barr has been known to alter his aesthetic framework at will. The guitarist emerged from the D.C.
post-hardcore scene in the late ’90s as half of the esoteric mathrock duo Crom-Tech. Orthrelm was Barr’s next major project.
It focused on hyper-complex, non-repeating miniatures—like
the work of a thrash-metal band locked for years in a lightless
basement and driven insane. On OV, though, Barr and his bandmate, drummer Josh Blair, turned their attention to obsessive,
grand-scale minimalism.
ter’s best work tends to fall into one or the other camp: a series of aptly self-described brutal-prog releases by his former
band the Flying Luttenbachers (peaking with 2006’s excellent
Cataclysm); Horrorscenscion, a 2012 LP by the instrumental
tech-metal trio Behold… the Arctopus; free improv work with
players such as reedist Vinny Golia and guitarist Henry Kaiser.
Sometimes you’ll hear techniques from one realm seep into the
other, as when Walter employs snippets of blast beats and double-kick drumming in his trio with guitarist Mary Halvorson
and trumpeter Peter Evans, but such crossover always stems
naturally from the context at hand. He knows jazz; he knows
metal. He reserves the right to blur these disciplines, or keep
them compartmentalized, as the situation demands.
Walter tends to broadcast his dual citizenship—proudly
sporting grindcore t-shirts at his avant-jazz gigs—but there
are other quieter corners of this overlapping territory, where
one genre seems to exert a strange kind of subterranean pull
on the other. Craig Taborn is an interesting case study. A few
years ago, I started spotting
Taborn at metal shows. In
2010, he scheduled a duo
gig with forward-thinking
Canadian death-metal guitarist Steeve Hurdle at the
Stone, John Zorn’s East
Village venue. (The concert
was canceled due to visa
issues and tragically, Hurdle passed away in 2012.)
I began a correspondence
with the pianist and eventually interviewed him.
Taborn is one of the most
knowledgeable metalheads
I’ve ever met—a listener
who’s equally well versed
in thrash staples like Slayer and Voivod and the furthest reaches of the metal
va n g u a r d : C a l i f o r n i a ’s
Spaceboy, Norway’s Virus.
But while he’s worked in
rock-oriented settings—
such as the Gang Font featuring Interloper, a loopy
fusion group with Bad Plus
drummer Dave King and
former Hüsker Dü bassist
Greg Norton—the pianist’s output doesn’t overtly reflect an
extreme metal influence. The title of Taborn’s enthralling 2011
solo-piano release, Avenging Angel, evokes a grandly sinister,
metal-related sensibility; sonically, though, the crystalline, eerie, almost alien-sounding pieces on the record more closely resemble contemporary classical music than either jazz or
metal. As I sat with Taborn discussing Cryptopsy and other esoteric bands, the notion of trying to pin a given musician into
one genre or another started to seem more and more absurd.
Is it really all that surprising that an open-minded artist would
be omnivorous in his or her tastes? Or that this diversity might
not be apparent on the surface?
What’s clear is that jazz and metal remain magnetized in
some fundamental way, and that this attraction has only
strengthened over time. All sorts of curious compounds have
emerged—psychedelic prog-jazz, free-form punk, improvised
grindcore with screaming saxophone—and more are arriving
constantly. Irabagon, Barr, and Walter are just three representatives of a larger community of players currently exploring
the jazz/metal overlap in NYC, including tuba player Dan Peck,
banjoist-guitarist Brandon Seabrook, and cellist Joe Merolla. In
recent years, John Zorn has turned away from the shock theater of Naked City, focusing on projects—such as the Moonchild
ensemble and the series of compositions heard on 2011’s Enigmata—that combine jazz and metal elements in still jarring yet
more holistic ways. Meanwhile, Taborn and other like-minded
players, like pianist Matt Mitchell and drummer Dan Weiss,
maintain a steady diet of extreme-metal listening while excelling in the progressive jazz sphere. The upshot is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to assess one of these styles
without seriously considering the other; they once seemed like
distant cousins and now look more like blood brothers. Jazz is
thriving. Metal is thriving. And the territory between them is
now, finally, starting to feel like a self-sustaining ecosystem.
Both [jazz and metal]
thrive on highly
specialized, unmistakably
human-centric technique—
think of a death-metal
drummer’s double
kick chops, or his jazz
counterpart’s fourlimbed independence.
ABOVE: Jazz musician John Zorn, London 1989. Photo by Peter Williams/Corbis
In a broad sense, jazz and metal couldn’t have less in common: one is an African-American art form hinging on virtuosic,
moment-to-moment interplay; the other is a predominantly
white music built around paradigms of volume and density. But
as the examples above suggest, the two genres share a rich overlapping history. The early crossover between jazz and aggressive
rock, spearheaded in the late ’60s by musicians such as drummer Tony Williams and guitarist John McLaughlin, was a literal
hybrid: the souping up of small-group acoustic post-bop with a
rumbling electric engine. The pioneers of the movement encountered flak from jazz purists, but in retrospect, their so-called fusion made perfect sense. It reconciled two idioms descended from
black American music—recall that the de facto first metal band,
Black Sabbath, began life as the Polka Tulk Blues Band—each one
a staunchly organic style based on real-time musician-to-musician interaction, the art of the harmonious jam.
In the ensuing decades, the jazz/metal crossover branched
off in countless surprising directions, from the forbidding, improv-driven art metal of early- to mid -’70s King Crimson to
the Grateful Dead–inspired free punk that guitarist Greg Ginn
10
undertook a decade later on Black Flag releases such as The
Process of Weeding Out. During the early period of Naked City,
founded in ’88, John Zorn focused on brain-scrambling juxtaposition, gleefully colliding grindcore, free jazz, and atmospheric
exotica. Later, Zorn would join forces with Bill Laswell—architect of Last Exit, his own fearsomely raw noise-fusion outfit featuring free-jazz guitarist Sonny Sharrock—and Napalm Death
drummer Mick Harris in the alternately hellacious and dubbedout trio Painkiller.
In current-day New York, a new kind of jazz/metal interplay
is brewing. Musicians such as Mick Barr, drummer Weasel Walter, saxophonist Jon Irabagon, and various others are helping to
usher this disparate movement into a lush, weird spring, spawning fresh hybrids—not jazz, not metal, not fusion exactly, but the
beginnings of an autonomous aesthetic.
It’s worth asking what’s special about the current moment.
Why are conditions right for a new kind of jazz/metal intersection? First, metal has grown steadily more respectable over the
past decade. In retrospect, Naked City’s middle-finger iconoclasm
seems almost quaint. Today, you’d have to go a lot further than a
grindcore-jazz hybrid to scandalize any well-informed NYC music fan. We live in an era where critics regularly review doom
and hardcore records on Pitchfork and in the New York Times;
where documentaries and art shows fixate on the iconography
and principal players of Norwegian black metal. Perhaps even
more so than jazz, metal is now viewed as a cutting-edge genre,
a canonized art music, a style you need to know if you want to
be in the know. During the ’80s, the era of bullet belts and back
patches, this notion would’ve been unthinkable. (In 1990, metal was literally on trial: that was the year two Nevada families
sued Judas Priest for supposedly inspiring their sons to shoot
themselves via alleged subliminal messages.) At the same time,
jazz continues to grow ever hipper and more eclectic. In NYC,
young, pop-savvy listeners flood gigs by Jason Moran, the Bad
Plus, Vijay Iyer, and Robert Glasper—all historically minded jazz
artists who also engage meaningfully with the present—and flock
to the annual Winter Jazzfest, a festival that regularly embraces
Nels Cline, Vernon Reid, and other players equally well-known in
the jazz and rock spheres. While the proverbial jazz snob might
still exist in some ivory tower, he or she certainly isn’t the norm.
Irabagon invited Barr to join him and Pride for some
shows, and eventually the project became a trio. Like the 2009
Irabagon/Pride duo, the 2012 debut of this new lineup, I Don’t
Hear Nothin’ but the Blues Volume 2: Appalachian Haze, consists of a single album-length improvisation. The players zero
in on densities and qualities of sound. Irabagon’s ululating sax
entwines with Barr’s continuously unspooling guitar squiggles
while Pride runs interference, juggling frenzied free-time rolls
and what sound like rhythmic allusions to Gary Glitter’s “Rock
and Roll Part 2.” The record hinges on the same principles
that drive most good improv: attuned listening, sensitive response, varied dynamics. These players come from different
backgrounds, but here they leave idiom behind. It’s a humble
endeavor, one that doesn’t foreground the idea of splicing or
juxtaposing genres. Irabagon, Barr, and Pride are simply playing together, exchanging sonic ideas and constructing a group
sound from scratch.
That unpretentious spirit also drives several other Barr projects, including his superbly matched duo with Marc Edwards.
The team-up came about thanks to Weasel Walter, a drummer
and composer who settled in Brooklyn a few years back, after
long stints in Chicago and Oakland. If the current wave of jazz/
metal crossover in NYC has a ringleader, it might be Walter.
The 40-year-old is a connoisseur of all varieties of extreme music—black metal, experimental improv, modern classical—and
an evangelical fan of those whose work he respects (like Barr).
At the same time he’s an enormously prolific musician, documenting his work on his own ugEXPLODE label.
More so than Irabagon or Barr, Weasel Walter has performed
extensively on both sides of the jazz/metal divide, gigging with
veteran improvisers like Evan Parker and Marshall Allen, as
well as with Chicago thrash-doom band Lair of the Minotaur
and maniacally intense San Francisco noise-rock group Burmese. At the same time, he isn’t a committed fusionist. Wal-
11
COLUMNS
COLUMNS
The
Marcy Hotel
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
LO G OS
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
the wu-tang clan’s bat-winged w
made its first appearance on the group's
1993 debut single “Protect Ya Neck,” as
part of a more detailed hand-drawn
illustration laden with the group’s spiritual
and martial arts-inspired symbolism.
Mathematics, who designed the original
logo, says, “The thing was to try and make
something to stand out, kinda like the
Batman insignia.” Although most of his
work with Wu-Tang has been developing
the group’s sound through a vast
repository of samples, the former graffiti
artist turned producer from Jamaica,
Queens, studied graphic and commercial
art at Thomas A. Edison Career and
Technical Education High School.
Math had already been messing around
with a few logo variations when it came
down to an all-nighter as “Protect Ya
Neck” was going to print. “At the time, I
was doing carpentry work with my pops,”
12
he recalls, “and RZA, Ghost, Power [Oliver
Grant, Wu-Tang executive producer],
and U-God, they came to the job at like
ten o’clock in the morning and picked it
up.” An early version showed a warrior’s
severed head, held by his dreadlocks by
a hand extending from the W, and had
“Wu-Tang Clan” written through it in faux
Asian-style handwriting. As RZA notes in
the Wu-Tang Manual, “That one was too
gory, but I liked how he wrote the letters,
so I had him come up with the sword—
because my tongue is my sword. But
that didn’t reflect everything I was about
either. So I told him it needs to represent
the sword, the book, and the wisdom.”
By the time their first album, Enter the
Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), came out later
that year, gone were the sword and book,
but the mark of the W—in yellow, and
still with Wu-Tang Clan written through
- Sue apfelbaum
it—remained.
The sub-class of audio snake-oil salesmen has it easy. Not because we’re all easy
marks, but because they’re not exactly
selling snake oil. Every piece of gear—every resistor, every last milliounce of gold
plating—affects the signal path. What they
say is true.
What they don’t say though... that might
be more important. In this space, I’m interested in the way our gear works invisibly—not so much how a piece of technology affects the signal path, but more how
it rewires our brains and determines our
creative processes.
Analog versus digital—that old chestnut.
Analog equals warm! Digital equals cold!
What does this mean?! To find out, I spoke
with Red Bull Music Academy 2013 participant TJ Hertz, a Berlin-based producer who
records as Objekt. He’s turned in excellent
remixes for Radiohead and SBTRKT, as well
as pristine salvos for Hessle Audio and his
own label. He also writes digital signal processing algorithms for Native Instruments.
If anyone can “hear” digital, it would be the
guy whose business is, to some extent, the
digital modeling of analog effects like tape
delay and tape saturation.
Any time there's an effect with a feedback loop, our ears expect the effect of the
processing to enter the feedback loop as
well. “Delay is an interesting example,” he
tells me over Skype. “The filter—or, in the
case of a tape echo, some saturation—goes
through the loop.” You could speak of “digital coldness” when that grit doesn’t make
its way into the feedback loop, when the
echoed signal is clean and precise. “You
expect it to get dirty,” Hertz says, “but it
never does.”
That’s our straw man “crude plug-in”
type scenario. But for Hertz, “digitalness” is
less obvious in any one sound or effect than
it is in the arrangements and productions
themselves, “where the tools steer the producer into working in a certain way.” DAWs
like Ableton are loop-based environments
that can lead to predictable transitions
and structures if you’re not diligent. “That,”
Hertz says, “sounds a lot more digital than
bit aliasing.”
-Nick sylvester
in 2005, after gentrification made significant inroads into Williamsburg, Marcy Avenue was still, in the
words of Wolf + Lamb’s Zev Eisenberg, “a dump.” But
the fledging party crew saw the potential for a future
headquarters when they leased a squat brick building,
once a machine shop, at the intersection of the Williamsburg Bridge and the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. This
three-story structure, the color of benign neglect, would
become the Marcy Hotel.
But Zev (“Wolf ”) and his DJ/producer/label partner Gadi “Lamb” Mizrahi, both native Brooklynites,
saw what the rest of the world didn’t: a perfect spot for
late-night soirees, the noise of which—minimal techno, house, and a grab bag of eclectic sounds—would be
masked by the cars roaring overhead. They gut-renovated the space using found materials as décor, a 1920s noir
style emerging after they looted a crumbling old theater
a friend had purchased upstate. Old film strips made
for a partition by the entrance, and giant film-rewinding
spools were set with lights and pronounced chandeliers.
Initially Zev and Gadi had a wine-bar concept for the
space, but that idea was jettisoned after a trial run. “It
quickly became obvious that it wasn’t meant to be a wine
bar,” says Zev, “but [rather] some kind of underground
loft party.” And so the Marcy Hotel was born. “No rules.
Very DIY. It was a liberated way to party,” he says. And
the music hewed to a similar “variety show” format, featuring live acts, MCs, and genre-defying DJs and producers like Nicolas Jaar and Soul Clap at the helm.
The Marcy opened at a time in post-Giuliani Manhattan when dance music had largely been co-opted by luxury brands and bottle service. The underground scene
was pushed to the fringes of the outer boroughs, unspooling in dank warehouses; despite such limitations,
or maybe because of them, it was a heady time, and Wolf
+ Lamb tried to channel that spirit through the Marcy.
“No lines, no bullshit,” says Zev. “People would just get
lost in the music, everybody having a good time.”
It wasn’t long before the Marcy outgrew itself—after
colonizing the yard next door, the Marcy succumbed to
neighborhood complaints and it closed to the public in
2011 (it currently serves as Wolf + Lamb’s record-label
headquarters). But it inspired a new wave of Brooklyn-based producers and parties, and Wolf + Lamb continue to impact fans across the globe.
- Adrienne Day
Top
5…
Brooklyn Flea
Record Fair
moments
PRESENTED BY
Brooklyn Flea’s Record Fair features collectors, independent record labels, and shops
inside the Smorgasburg food market in Williamsburg. Vendors sell new and used vinyl, CDs,
ephemera, and gear, and there are DJs throughout
the day. The Flea’s first Record Fair happened
on a hot day in 2008 in Fort Greene, and every
year (now twice a year) it grows bigger but also
weirder and more fun. Here are Flea head honcho
Eric Demby's five favorite Record Fair moments.
L A N D M A RK S
THE BRONX
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
past featured landmarks
1 max neuhaus’ "times square"
2 The Thing Secondhand Store
3 The loft
1
QUEENS
2
3
MANHATTAN
What: The Marcy
hotel
Where: marcy
avenue,
williamsburg
Why: no-bullshit
techno party
When: 2005-2011
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
Flying Lotus
Loved watching Steven
Ellison sign some
dude’s stomach at
the fall 2012 Record
Fair.
El-P
Back in 2008, when
it was the Superstar
DJ Record Fair, El-P
sold his own records
and all this cool old
gear he was getting
rid of. Not sure most
people even knew it
was him.
Thurston Moore
The Sonic Youth
frontman comes to buy
records now and then
from one of our vendors, Phil Lanigan of
Addicted to Vintage,
which still gives me
a shiver. Thurston’s
always totally blasé,
just like you’d imagine.
The Brothers
Demby
When the market first
opened, my brother and I used to
play records in the
schoolyard backstop
at the Fort Greene
Flea every weekend,
and he’d wheel over
the sound system from
down the block on a
cart. Those were the
days.
Portishead
XL debuted the new
Portishead single at
the fall 2011 Record
Fair. When the band
played Late Night
with Jimmy Fallon the
week before, Fallon
promoted the Record
Fair on air.
13
New York story
New York story
Contort
yourself
The author of Love Goes to
Buildings on Fire offers a personal
postscript of no wave New York.
words will hermes
illustration Gustavo Dao
i wrote my recent book on New
York City’s mid-’70s music scenes using
a strict five-year chronology: ’73 to ’77.
This was partly conceptual—disco, hiphop, and punk rock were invented in
New York during those years, while the
salsa, loft jazz, and downtown composer
scenes hit their creative peaks. But the
framework was also practical: I wanted
to build a coherent narrative arc and
write a readable volume, not a doorstop
reference text. Also, after years of research and interviews, I wanted to finish
the damn thing already. But in some ways, the New York scene
got more exciting just after my book
ends, when musical borders got more
porous. The above scenes were rubbing
shoulders by late ’77, but they didn’t intersect much. There were flashes: minimalist composer Rhys Chatham deciding
to devote himself to electric guitars after
a night at CBGB witnessing the Ramones
(who bought their weed from the same
dude who supplied jazz composer David Murray); cellist Arthur Russell, an
art-music composer and art-pop singer-songwriter, seeing God on the dancefloor at Nicky Siano’s Gallery. There were
salsa lovers who dug Kool DJ Herc’s park
jams, hip-hoppers weaned on son montuno, disco fans who rocked, punks who
boogied, improvisers who grokked notated music, and composers who dug free
jazz. It took a while for these languages
to really start blending.
No wave was one locus. It took its aggression and noise from both punk (notably proto-punk electro provocateurs
Suicide) and the polyglot free jazz of the
lofts. No wave was short-lived, if it was
a scene at all (see Thurston Moore and
Byron Coley’s semi–oral history No Wave:
Post-Punk. Underground. New York.
1976–1980 and Marc Masters’ No Wave
for the breakdown). Its key document is
No New York, released in 1978 and produced by Brian Eno with the complete
opposite of the billowy ambience that became his trademark. It collected tracks by
four bands: DNA, James Chance and the
Contortions, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks,
and Mars. Its shrill attack was tough to
love, but its power was undeniable.
Like out jazz, which also has a performance-art element, no wave was best
experienced live. James Chance (née
Siegfried) was the man to see back then,
and I caught his act whenever I could. He
took Iggy Pop’s audience-baiting to new
14
extremes, yelling verses, howling on his
sax, then stepping offstage to slap someone who wasn’t paying attention. In what
may have been Robert Christgau’s only
bar brawl with a musician, the critic once
jumped on Chance after the singer hit a
woman he was with. Chance’s music was
funky in a twisted way, which made it fun
to dance to. At one point, he was offered
money by the fusion-minded ZE Records
to make a disco LP, and James Chance
and the Contortions mutated into James
White and the Blacks, a confrontational
no-wave soul revue.
The latter always seemed to book
hometown gigs between Christmas and
New Year’s in the early ’80s, and since
that’s also my birthday week, I often celebrated with them. Downtown was still
so seedy and druggy and scary, but you
just accepted it as the human condition.
When I turned 21, a bunch of us piled
into a Tribeca dive bar to catch a discount
buzz before a Mudd Club show. An old
Latino dude (old to us, anyway—he was
probably in his 30s) came over to our
table and, astonishingly, offered us free
cocaine. He’d bought it to share with his
girlfriend, who he told us had just broken
up with him, and he didn’t have the heart
to snort it himself. We were dubious,
but the powder was vetted, and he kept
it coming for an hour or two, abstaining
himself but saying it made him happy to
see young people enjoying themselves.
It was heartbreaking, and watching my
friends jockey for position like pigs at
a trough was instructive. We asked the
dude to join us for the show but he declined, no doubt for the best. Chance was
ferocious. We danced like crazy. No one
got hit. But it was a memorable night.
Chance’s music epitomizes ’80s downtown for me: art-damaged and madwired, dangerous, sputteringly rhythmic,
furiously alive. After Studio 54 and its offspring had defined dance clubs as corny,
classist, and starfucky, venues like the
Mudd Club, Tier 3, Danceteria, Hurrah,
and the World were revelations. Hip-hop
came downtown, the product of its own
dance-music class war. Blondie connected with Fab 5 Freddy. Afrika Bambaataa
cut a record with Johnny Rotten, played
the Ritz, and did a residency at the Roxy
roller disco (I recall Bam DJing a spectacular P-Funk show there in the ’80s). The
South Bronx sister group ESG brought
their rec-room funk to the Mudd Club,
where the DJs played punk, jump blues,
boogaloo, reggae, African drum jams,
and bubblegum pop by turns—no doubt
taking cues from Bambaataa, the melting-pot master.
Our crew would dance to anything.
We’d lose our shit freestyling to Ronald
Shannon Jackson and the Decoding Society, a harmolodic jazz-funk outfit led by
Ornette Coleman’s brilliant drummer and
featuring the guitar and banjo of a young
Vernon Reid, who went on to form Living
Colour. Defunkt, led by Joe Bowie, little
brother of jazz scientist Lester Bowie,
was another awesome avant-party band.
Why should hot improvisation, deep
dance grooves, and rock muscle be so
tough to resolve? These players pulled it
off handsomely, even if it proved a shortlived lingua franca. It worked best live,
although few labels documented it. In addition to ZE, the local 99 Records put out
Latin-inflected beats, dub reggae, and the
debut by composer Glenn Branca. Franco/Afro/Anglo/American label Celluloid
put out jams with DJs, jazzbos, rockers,
rappers, West African guitarists, and kora
players (see the illuminating new anthology Change the Beat on Strut Records).
This polyglot spirit waxes and wanes
in NYC. I was touched to see Liquid Liquid—the avant-funk outfit who recorded for 99 and was a touchstone for the
Brooklyn early-2000s dance-rock bubble—open LCD Soundsystem’s farewell
show at Madison Square Garden. (I was
also touched to see that famous group
photo of the Fania All-Stars—a couple
dozen salsa dudes surrounding Celia
Cruz like planets around a sun—turn up
on the big screens during a montage later that night.) It’s beautiful to see doomy
no-wave greybeards Swans in the midst
of an unlikely second act, splitting the
difference between post-punk noise and
minimalist drone, crushing a new generation of skulls. Bachata is the new salsa, evolving its own sphere of influence.
Indie rock, jazz, and notated composition are crossbreeding in some Bushwick loft as I type. And as far as I can
tell, the dance-music culture has never
been more alive. Which is, of course, why
we’re here.
Will Hermes is the author of Love
Goes to Buildings on Fire and is a
frequent contributor to Rolling Stone
and NPR. He tweets at twitter.com/
williamhermes and lives in upstate
New York.
15
Flying Lotus
Ultraísta
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En2ak/ Rafik
May 5 & 6
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out
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610 W 56th St 8pm $32.50
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April 28 – May 31
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