Ken Thomson is a guy with a lot of irons in a lot of different fires. What he doesn’t seem to have a lot of is time. Juggling rehearsals, performances, recording dates, and writing time for a number of New York-based outfits and one-off projects, Ken pulls it off through a focus on the one thing that ties all these activities together—improvisation. On the eve of his new record with Slow/Fast, It Would Be Easier If, Ken gives us the lowdown on his various activities.
Base: You’ve described Asphalt Orchestra performances as more “flash mob” than marching band. Performances are choreographed but chaotic. How do you decide when and where you play, and do you “tour”?
Ken Thomson: What we haven’t been doing is going to the middle of a football field and executing precise turns and giant military choreography. What we’re aiming for is to get more in people’s faces and play with their expectations a bit, while focusing on keeping our precision on the often tricky tunes. This isn’t to say we don’t spend a lot of time on the choreography—if anything, that takes more work because it’s something we’re not accustomed to.
In terms of touring, we’re just exploring that. So far, our farthest afield was the Barbican in the UK, where we played the lobby before a Caetano Veloso show, and then over to East London where we played a Barbican-sponsored street festival. We’ve also done festivals in Norfolk, Virginia and Philadelphia… but we’re still in our beginning stages. One of our challenges for the next year is to work on adapting our set for indoor performing arts venues.
B: The repertoire of Asphalt Orchestra seems to be an intentionally provocative mash-up, with material ranging from Frank Zappa [download Asphalt Orchestra's take on Zappa's "Zomby Woof"] to Tom Zé to Thomas Mapfumo to 19th Century brass band music. Is there something that unites all this disparate music or is it simply the idea that “it’s all music, man”? And is your day-to-day listening this broad?
KT: Yeah, I think it is all music, man. I think the first question is always: Would the band sound great doing this? And then everything else falls into place. But I think part of it is that we don’t want to be “the marching band that does X”; it would be limiting and also not really encompass the skills of everyone in the band. Also, we want to make sure there’s no chance that an audience would get bored. But what I’ve found in good bands that do eclectic material is that the band still has a sound, which informs all the material in a personal way.
B: Asphalt Orchestra seems largely to be a live proposition. How does that live excitement and performance element translate to record?
KT: Hopefully well. We released our debut CD this summer, and I produced it. The sessions were very rushed—we managed to carve out a few hours before one of our Lincoln Center Out of Doors performances in 2009, and took the gamble that we had been playing the music enough that we’d be able to go into the studio and nail it. (I think we did.) We couldn’t have even done too much Pro Tools magic even if we’d wanted to; with the exception of the percussion we were all in one room together with tons of live mics.
Transferring live energy to record is something I’ve thought about a lot over the years in many different projects, and the mixing was fairly essential to getting that excitement there. I’ve figured out a couple things over the years, and recently I’ve been doing a lot of work with Damon Whittemore of Valvetone Digital, who is great and also incredibly easy to work with. I actually used the same team on this record as we did with the new Gutbucket record coming out in the spring. Beside Damon, James Frazee engineered it, and Phillip Klum mastered it. All aces.
B: How did the recent commissions by Asphalt Orchestra of David Byrne and Yoko Ono come about, and what are they?
KT: Both were cold calls, and the budget, it should be said, came from Lincoln Center Out of Doors. “What are they?” is a great question, especially with Yoko Ono’s piece. We’re still trying to figure that out! We had an incredible improvisation session with Yoko Ono that resulted in a recording that we used as our template for a live piece. It turned out to be more performance art-based than purely musically based; she told us that she felt like every live performance was a work in-progress, and we took this to heart. In our performance, our trumpeter Steph Richards waded through a fountain in boots, playing a beautiful improvised solo against pre-determined impro/composed backgrounds from the rest of the band.
The Byrne–St. Vincent piece we actually just recorded a couple weeks ago and hope it will come out on a CD they’re doing together. Basically we wrote to David Byrne to ask him if he’d like to do a piece for us, and he wrote back pitching us on the idea that he and St. Vincent would write a piece together that we would play, and then they would create a version with vocals, which we would perform behind them on their upcoming record. The process of creating the piece was interesting—many emails passed back and forth between the two of them and me, Logic files that I was rapidly entering into Sibelius and tweaking and sending back… We finally recorded last week; Byrne and St. Vincent were both there, and we changed the arrangement around somewhat on the fly, and recorded two versions, one with their vocals and one without.
B: Compared to Asphalt Orchestra, your Slow/Fast project , while still leaving room for improvisation, is more about the compositions, control. Do you know what you want and what you’re getting with these pieces, or is there still surprise?
KT: There are definitely still always surprises; that’s the great part of improvisation. However, the idea of Slow/Fast is to fully express this composed/improvised dichotomy for me, and it lands pretty hard on the composed side. Though I wanted to work with musicians who spend most of their time in jazz and improvised-music situations, I needed folks who could also read the hell out of some sheet music. But basically, in each of these five tunes—except for one, which is fully notated—there is some element of improvisation, which I feel is essential. If that improvisation weren’t there, the piece would suffer. This is as opposed to a lot of jazz sessions, where it feels like the musicians are getting through the tunes quickly so they can do a lot of blowing.
B: What is your relationship with Bang on a Can?
KT: I applied there for a job in 2000. I still get made fun of because I wore a tie to the interview; they joke that they haven’t seen me in one since. I was hired for web operations manager or something like that, but within a week they said, “Hey, you know, we wanted to start this label…” and tapped me to help them get Cantaloupe Records started. I worked on that for six years, after which I finally realized that if I didn’t quit to do music full-time, I never would.
After leaving, my relationship with them actually developed further. I subbed for their in-house band. They added me to their faculty roster for their summer program. And they asked me to start their new project, Asphalt Orchestra. I can’t say enough good things about the Bang on a Can artistic directors, Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, as well as their office team, who are all great musicians themselves. I feel very supported by them in all my endeavors, and do my best to bring my best work to them.
B: This summer you performed “Steve Reich’s New York Counterpoint for live clarinet + 10 taped clarinets” at the Bang on a Can Summer Festival at Mass MoCA. Can you talk a bit about that piece and performance?
KT: I feel like this piece has become part of the essential new-music clarinet repertoire. You can perform it with the tape that the publisher provides—which I believe is Evan Ziporyn’s backing tracks—or you can create your own. To me, a piece such as this, in which groove is so important, demands that you find your own groove. I think I could probably find Evan’s groove and play along with him, but then why would I play it?
The great thing about the Summer Festival besides the faculty, students, museum, is that it gives you a really good deadline to get some projects together. This year I completed a piece for bass clarinet and string quartet, and also decided to work this piece up for my recital. To get ready I arrived to the festival early, and spent three sweltering days in my bedroom in artist housing, recording, editing, and re-recording. I hadn’t quite appreciated the full challenge of getting the 10 clarinets together and making it feel good. For each of the three movements, I would finally get all of the parts down “on tape” (ProTools), and as soon as I heard all the parts clearly I would start picking them apart. I wound up recording and re-recording each individual part multiple times to get things to the level of tightness and groove that I wanted. In the end, I think it represented me; I’m hoping to perform it again live.
B: The fifth album by “punk/jazz” quartet Gutbucket is in the can, due out in January. What can listeners expect?
KT: I think we’ve changed our moniker to chamber-punk-jazz, to more closely represent what we’re doing now. Not only huge blasts of energy but moments of coiled springs as well. This is a hard band for me to talk about only because it’s really a summation the input of the four of us; I am one of four composers. What I can say is that the band has a certain sound and feel. When I’m writing I know if what I’m writing is a Gutbucket composition. We feel really good about this new one, called Flock. We spent months recording, overdubbing, mixing, though we do initial takes totally live. We definitely tend to treat our records as closer to rock records than jazz records.
B: Gutbucket toured last spring, playing a bunch of dates in Europe, and only two in the States, both in New York. Are Europeans more receptive to what this band is doing?
KT: Wow, caught us. Guilty as charged. I think Europeans are more receptive in general to going out and hearing music! Sure, the promoters there complain that it isn’t as it used to be, but it’s definitely easier to get over there and play. And there are more organizations over there, even if just a bunch of folks getting together as a loose club to bring musicians over and present concerts. It’s a kind of cultural importance of music that we don’t have. Here, people might chase some bands in college but then forget about discovering anything new or going out to hear music after they pass 25.
However, it can also be said that our band is more closely identified with “jazz” in Europe, whereas here, we still haven’t found our place after 11 years. That makes things a little easier there because there is *somewhat* of an established following for jazz and a bit of a financial structure.
Finding “a place” for what I’m doing in fact is a very frustrating element of just about all my projects.
B: Apart from adding “chamber,” how has gutbucket’s music evolved in its 11 years?
KT: We tend to talk about Gutbucket’s development in terms of our records, which all sum up different periods for us. We started as a kind of dirty jazz band when we were playing every week at the Knitting Factory Tap Bar back in ’99; this era is pretty well represented on our album InsomniacsDream. Since then we added to our influences, and our second record, Dry Humping the American Dream, is pretty all-over-the-place thematically and in terms of genre, and we didn’t mind very specific genre allusions. Sludge Test we conceived as our first rock record—generally short tunes and very aggressive. A Modest Proposal dialed that back a bit and expanded our palette. It cut down the specifics of any genre—almost as if after exploring a lot of them we stopped worrying about it—and went way more expansive in terms of arrangements. Also important was the introduction a new drummer, Adam, who’s been with us for three-plus years now. And on Flock—as I mentioned, still trying to figure out how to talk about it—I think we’ve found a new place. We’re more patient than we used to be and are allowing our tunes to get longer, but the pacing is more continuous, unlike, say, our second record, when we switched moods every 15 seconds.
B: The Gutbucket website mentions that the band’s done some music for films. Which ones?
KT: Our first project was adapting our music for Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit films. But when things got serious and Celebrate Brooklyn asked us to present them, we had to actually call up Aardman, and I didn’t get 20 seconds into a phone call before I got a big “No.” Since then we’ve been finding some great public domain films. We’ve toured a bunch with a French animation feature “Jeannot l’Intrepide” and I was commissioned by a documentary film festival to write a soundtrack to an obscure but important 1936 English documentary about their overnight mail train, of all things, called “Night Mail.” (Benjamin Britten wrote the original music, I wrote over it….)
B: Is it difficult to shift gears between the more tucked-in “classical” settings and the freewheeling, off-the-rails sounds of Gutbucket?
KT: It’s all just music, man, as you say. I don’t think I ever play anything “tucked in;” even the more written settings where I may be (mostly) sitting in a chair, it’s important to me to find the passion and connection to that music. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise. Sure, there are some elements of my playing that I might be focusing on in one situation versus another, make some adjustments to tone, change attitude depending on whether I’m leading the project or, say, following a conductor. But I try to bring myself purely to every situation. So I guess the answer is “no.”
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