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Interviews
Led Bib: It's Not Lady Gaga
Bruce Lindsay
Bruce is the author of the blog Delicious Hot Disgusting Cold, and the photoseries "It's Not How It Sounds".Holub is willing and happy to embrace rock and jazz, as a fan as well as a player—just prior to this interview he had discovered John Cale's Paris, 1919 (Reprise, 1973)—but an oft-cited early influence on him was John Zorn. "I listen to a lot of stuff and feel that everything is an influence in some way. When I started this band, Zorn loomed large for me, but over time that's changed. I was impressed with his output and his spirit ... his ability to make something of the downtown New York scene."
Led Bib: Toby McLaren, Pete Grogan, Mark Holub, Chris Williams, Liran Donin
Ornette Coleman is often seen as another influence on Holub and on Led Bib. Holub is a huge fan of Coleman, but is somewhat surprised by references to him with respect to the band: "I love Ornette. In a lot of ways, he was my route into jazz. I'd been listening to a lot of Grateful Dead and Frank Zappa, and to me Ornette was a natural extension from that. But again, it's also his spirit. ... I think people can focus too much on how fast he could play something, but who cares, who cares? The great thing about him—about lots of major jazz musicians—is that he just sounds like himself. He sounds like Ornette."
Holub was responsible for founding Led Bib, and he remains its leader and main writer, but he also acknowledges that as the band has become more established, the others have taken on more responsibility for the sound. "Over time, I've learned to step back as a band leader and let the others do their thing, to be less prescriptive. In the beginning I would be, 'Oh, can you make this weird sound like on this Anthony Braxton record?' Then I realized that wasn't maybe the best way to do it. All the guys are into lots of different musics: it all comes into the band."
One of the most recognizable aspects of the Led Bib sound is its twin alto front line— the responsibility of Williams and Grogan. But this wasn't always the intention, as Holub explains: "It started life with guitar, trumpet and alto, but that was brief." This lineup never recorded: "No. Thankfully," says Holub, laughing. The twin alto setup came at a time when Holub was listening to Zorn and Tim Berne on their album of Coleman tunes, Spy v. Spy (Electra, 1989). As Holub describes it, "It's super full-on thrash metal-y versions of Ornette tunes, with Zorn and Berne squealing away. It's a very harsh sound, but in that harshness there's a lot of beauty."
Holub is keen to stress that Grogan and Williams are not simply mirroring each other, but bringing different sounds to the mix: "They both play very differently, and over time they've both developed so much. Even though they sound really different, they kind of speak with one voice."
Led Bib's members have been together for some years—the same line-up appears on each of the band's recordings. Every member of the band is now so integral to its sound that Holub is never happy at the prospect of having to arrange deputies if any of the quintet has to miss a gig: "Occasionally one of the guys will be ill, so we have done gigs with deps, but it's really tough. It's not that we can't play, but the band really is these five guys."
One aspect of the band members' development that comes over strongly on Bring Your Own is the playing of bassist Liran Donin (pictured right), who seems much more at the fore than he has been previously. "Yeah, someone else said that recently as well—you're not the only one. ... It isn't intentional, but it has developed naturally. Liran has always been great, but he's always tried to reconcile his interest in heavy metal or soul with more open jazz playing. He's now come to the point where he knows what he wants to do, how he wants to sound, and you can really hear that on the record."
Keyboard player Toby McLaren seems to have broadened his tonal palette on the album, adding a mix of new sounds that integrate well with the other instruments. On the album sleeve, he's credited just with the Fender Rhodes, but it's hard to believe that he isn't using more keyboards. "Toby's also been finding out what it is that he wants to sound like. It is just Fender Rhodes, but he's running it through all sorts of weird gizmos like ring modulators. That's really changed what we sound like. Toby is much more subtle than Liran, but he's the glue that holds it all together: if his sound wasn't there, then we wouldn't make so much sense."
Holub is clearly pleased with the outcome of the Bring Your Own sessions, even if he's a little more circumspect about his response as time passes: "All the stuff we've been working on—it kind of feels like it's all come together. That's it; we're done. I feel we've really achieved what we all wanted to sound like. Maybe five months down the road, I'll want to burn it, but for now it feels pretty good."
