By Nils Jacobson
II. From the First Drumset Right Into the Beats
AAJ: What were the street beats around that time? I guess, the mid-'80s?
GEB: Yeah, 1985.
AAJ: Right before hip hop came out in a major way.
GEB: At that time I could play all the way through the Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet album. That was hittin', man! I was on it! But for me one of the first memories I have of hip hop was WBLS, and also KISS-FM. Those were the two major stations in New York, which pumped their way up to Connecticut. I remember Rappin' Duke, Da-ha Da-ha, and other kinds of hybridy stuff. Chaka Khan And those movies that turned break dancing into this weird thing... like Beat Street, Krush Groove, and all that stuff. But I think Run DMC was the first record that I bought. "I'm the king of rock, there ain't nothing higher, sucka MC's should call me sire." So that's the one, with "King of Rock" on it. I think that was all around the same time. Michael Jackson was a little bit before, and then Bon Jovi. And my grandfather's brushes, and Slippery When Wet and Run-DMC and the Tin Man.
AAJ: That's quite a mix.
GEB: Yeah, and then the church stuff as well.
AAJ: Did your mom bring music or music people home?
GEB: She's always had her differerent field recordings, from Haitian voodoo rituals, to whatever... and her old [Smithsonian] Folkways recordings, which she picked up from her own graduate study. So I just made my own radio shows and stuff, that kind of thing. I had this old Fisher Price tape recorder. I would play a record and pretend I was Red Alert or something. And then do that, and make all these tapes. And do interviews with my dad, do stories, that kind of stuff. We were in Portchester from fourth up until I was in college. And then I changed schools. I went to a private school called Hackley School. Around eighth grade I started writing my own songs with people from school. Ninth grade is when the jazz started becoming really more and more of a thing to look at. Just having a little bit more control over the instrument.
Jay Hoggard--he's a vibraphone player... he was a freshman when my mom was a graduate student at Wesleyan. She had him do a gig for one of her functions that she had. And we met, and that was just great. And he sent me some tapes of Max Roach. That was also around the time when Living Colour Vivid came out, and I was getting Rolling Stone at the same time. I think there was a review in there with Vivid alongside Fishbone's Truth and Soul. So I was just, "Oh!... that's it!" Because it was from seeing the video that I knew about Living Colour. And the funny thing was that Vernon Reid used to play in Jay Hoggard's band. So when I went to this function and talked to Jay Hoggard, he asked what I was listening to. I said, "I love Living Colour." He was like, "That guitar player used to play in my band!" And that just blew my mind. "My God! That guy in the video played in your band??" I was absolutely... it was unbelievable. I couldn't even fathom how that could be.
And that was around the same time that [De La Soul's] Three Feet High And Rising came out. When "Potholes in my Lawn" came out (just the single was out, maybe they weren't even finished with the record yet)... there was a record store right near church, and every Sunday... the first time I heard De La Soul, I asked, "Do you have this De La Soul record?" Every Sunday, every Sunday. And they finally had it. And that was just a whole 'nother thing as well. So there was all this Max Roach/Art Blakey/Living Color/Fishbone/De La/Tribe Called Quest. And that's what's reflected in my music now. And later on, deeper into the turntable thing, in college. Around '96, being at a place in drumming where I was looking for some other influences, or being in a place where... "I don't know if this is exactly it, but I like it... but this thing over here is amazingly cool and exciting!" Because I was doing an internship with this organization called Creative Time. And that was right around the time when [DJ] Spooky's album came out. Jungle in the States, especially in New York, was just coming into prominence. So I was like, "I need to get a credit card, and go crazy, and buy records every week. And buy turntables, and jump into this. Because I understand what's going on here."
AAJ: They're speaking your language.
GEB: Yeah! The drums are moving in an improvisational way, but it's totally new sounds. Huge-sounding, and the bass is reverberating your chest. You know that feeling? So that worked for me on a purely moving level. And on a musical level. Then I was at a point in college after getting to a place with turntabling, and I was like, "OK, I need to get back to the drums again. Play the drums and the turntable together." Working through that, and struggling to find a space where it was still improvisational but not, where I could access the electronic sounds as well as the acoustic sounds, and I could kind of highlight those mistakes that are apparent in the jazz world as well as in the electronic world.
Like the glitch. This whole thing about fetishizing the glitch in techno... there's this glitch, you keep on highlighting it, and you keep on exposing it. And jazz is about that as well, like finding that mistake. It's like you know your instrument so well that you almost try to un-learn it, in a way. I'm working with musicians on doing a live version of this record [Soul at the Hands of the Machine]. And I'm trying to tell them, "Play like you don't know all that you know about your instrument." Because that's what you hear in hip hop, in a way. There's things that producers know, and you may know viscerally know what's going on, but you may or may not know in terms of traditional music theory. But you know viscerally what's happening, and you're accessing a glitch or a tempo or a feeling, like a feeling tone. You're just exposing it. It's this visceral quality that you can't really explain.
AAJ: That's something that Cecil Taylor told Sunny Murray: "Just play."
GEB: Right. There's a lot of different styles of drumming in this music. I don't know what people say, but it's like the styles of drumming can be as broken off as the styles of drum-n-bass. You get into tech-step, you get into dark-step. This is more ragga, this is more this, this is more that. The same way that "Oh, he's an avant garde drummer." Or: "he's not an avant garde drummer," or: "he's only a groove drummer," or: "he's a swing drummer, latin drummer, funk drummer, rock drummer, or whatever." But my whole point is that this is a new instrument! This is not some old-school, established part of the Western canon. This has been made in the last century. And, additionally, it's an amalgamation that reflects our own American situation. The bass and snare, from Europe. The toms from Africa. Cymbals from Turkey and Asia. It's this hodge-podge of things.
If you look at old drum sets, you're not playing that! You're kickin' it! Because there's no bass pedal made yet. That's why they call it a kick drum. You know what I mean? You're stepping on a cymbal to make whatever sound you need to make. It's like this continuing development of technology.
AAJ: Break down for me the electronic music that was happening early on for you.
GEB: In addition to Prince Paul? There's the Prince Paul, whole Native Tongues... Prince Paul, DJ Premier...
AAJ: How about the British stuff?
GEB: The more dancehall-oriented, some of the Arkon stuff, Metalheadz, reggae...
AAJ: Squarepusher?
GEB: Squarepusher is a little later on for me. I was more dancehall-oriented. It totally works for me, but that's a different shard of it. For me, it was the hard core singles. Some of them would only go by a name like brown, or yellow, or red. That's what they'd have on the label. There was this Hot Stepper series, a remix of this TLC record, I dunno, "Don't go too fast, don't go too slow." It was one of their slow songs. But the way that they flipped it! And there's this whole vocal thing in there that I totally appreciate, and I guess that comes from my musical theater background as well. And then looking at people like Squarepusher, and now like Cristian Vogel and 4Hero and Jamie Lidell and the group that Jamie Lidell and Cristian Vogel had together: Super_Collider. That's very much "now" for me.
AAJ: So you're getting into samples and remixes...
GEB: That whole Hot Stepper series, yeah. But then Roni Size, and some of his other aka's. Definitely his first record, as an album, worked for me. And then Stereolab came in for me as well. That started to come in, but all the while I'm dealing with Ron Kuivila, Alvin Lucier, and Braxton, Jay Hoggard, and a theater thing. A theater/performance plus all this music stuff. I've begun to see that... I'm still struggling and still working through the whole thing about the Tin Man/ performance/ drumming/ samples/ interethnic understanding. It's all mish-moshed in there.
And so, you also have this kind of free jazz hip hop R&B thing, Nicole Willis. I'm kind of working through that kind of theatricality/samples. Defining free jazz, definitely the way I've read about it, differs... obviously everyone's perception of it differs.
AAJ: And that's a good thing.
GEB: And so it's exciting to see that in operation.
On to Part 3-7...
