hatARTICLE

1994 – 2004: Celebrating 10 Years of Music

In the film "Saxophone Colossus" Sonny Rollins says that at one time he thought his playing could affect change in the world but now he no longer suffers from those illusions. Now he's just happy to be able to move some people. I think about this, especially now that I have a band that's been playing together for over a decade. What effect, if any, does music have on the world? And what role does a band, specifically one working in a rarified musical language, have on the musical world let alone the world at large? Musicians like Sonny Rollins inspired me to devote my life to music in the first place. Had I not found a positive niche in the world I wonder what my life might have been like. For that I'm very thankful.

I'm a firm believer in the idea that each person has an effect upon the world in many small yet important ways that are easily taken for granted. There will always be conflict in the world and the least admirable traits of human beings will not suddenly go away. But change does happen. We rarely change our minds all at once but we do do change their minds every day in incremental and sometimes imperceptible ways. It's not always a jolt from the blue as in "hey, I know, let's start a band with saxophone, accordion and drums!" although those moments are beautiful when they happen. If we want to know what effect music has on the world, let's try to imagine a world without music. Pretty bleak, right? But is George Bush suddenly going to become enlightened by listening to a Sonny Rollins record? Doubtful. Though I'd say that Sonny Rollins has helped affect the world in more ways than he knows. That's an example I'd like to follow.

So what of the type of music I play, the so called "avant garde"? If jazz is a small subset of the music world at large and the avant is a smaller subset of that, just what effect can this "arcanum moderne" have beyond it's own insular borders? The fact is, these ideas do filter out into the world. Think about how the avant found his way into the work of the Beatles or how Jimi Hendrix expanded rock sonically in ways that rivaled the ways that Xenakis expanded the sonic thresholds of concert music. The avant is alive and well in the work of today's electronica scene and even pop stars like Bjork acknowledge the influence of people like Stockhausen and Meredith Monk. Shockingly radical 20th century visual art techniques are now so commonplace in advertising that we hardly take any notice whatsoever. But whether or not my music ever becomes influential (and personally I kind of like the fact that it hasn't) is actually unimportant. I would however, like to be acknowledged for my work and the work that this band has done in the past decade of touring and recording. And so I am very grateful to hatHUT records for supporting and documenting this music. It was never a given that a band made up of a saxophonist, accordionist and drummer would ever amount to more than a bad joke.

To commemorate our ten year anniversary we're releasing two projects in 2004.

TEN

The Eskelin w/Parkins & Black ten year anniversary disc that's not really an Eskelin w/Parkins & Black disc at all. But it satisfies some ideas and desires I've been working towards for some years. For one thing, it's the first time I've been able to document our work with Jessica Constable since she began working with us in 2001. Additionally, I thought it would be fun to invite a couple of other guests to the recording session. Even though neither had played with us in the past both guitarist Marc Ribot and electric bassist Melvin Gibbs easily tapped into our dynamic and helped us explore some new territory. It's also our first foray into completely improvised music. That's ironic since one of the stipulations I had in forming this band ten years ago was that we could perform completely improvised music yet we rarely did so because I was more interested in the myriad relationships between written and improvised elements in music. So finally I get to present the band's raison d'être in this enhanced presentation. TEN sounds like nothing we've done before. I imagine that some of our fans will be pleased while others will be perplexed. And that's always a good thing.

DVD – On the Road

While packing for our 2003 European tour I decided to take along my camcorder just to see what might happen. The result was 25 hours of video from concerts and behind the scenes action. I edited that down into a one hour video tour diary and pressed it up on DVDs. This document functions as a companion to "TEN", rounding out our commemoration of a decade of music. While neither "Ten" or "On the Road" is a full-on Eskelin/Parkins/Black experience (for that we've made seven CDs) I think these offerings provide extended insight into how the band functions. In the case of the DVD one can reassess the band as a whole after examining each player separately in excerpts from a special festival performance in which we each played an extended solo improvisation. In the case of "TEN" the listener can hear how the band functions in differing combinations with other musicians, from duos to sextets.

I'm very happy to offer these documents to our listeners in celebration of the years of music we've made so far. We're just getting ready for our eighth extended tour of Europe having just completed a stateside tour and an appearance at the FIMAV Victoriaville Festival in Canada. But right now I've got to finish writing some new music for the band. See you on the road...

Ellery Eskelin
September 2004

Introduction and Overview to "HISTORY OF A BAND"
by Ellery Eskelin

Sometime in 1997, after the release of "One Great Day...", Werner X. Uehlinger offered me a deal to record exclusively for hatOLOGY records for a total of six new projects to be released two per year over the next three years. The idea was do explore some different musical settings and ideas and to try and develop the audience for my music. Sometime in 2000, upon the completion of "The Secret Museum" Werner offered to renew this relationship on an ongoing basis. Swiss Bank funding for hatHUT had since ceased but Werner had been cultivating some private investors such the Vitra company in my case in order to fund certain projects. This arrangement has been beneficial to me for a number of reasons. For one thing hatHUT has a twenty-five year history of releasing great new music and the visibility and reputation that go along with that. Having a number of releases all on one label with one packaging "look" also helps create a sense of a body of work as opposed to a random assortment of projects. Given my uncertain musical classification (neither 100% free, new music, jazz, electronica, rock) if it wasn't for hatOLOGY I might not have any real visibility to speak of at all. Perhaps most importantly however is that the series has helped greatly with our European touring and festival appearances.

The jazz press and the larger "jazz machine" (particularly in the U.S.) does not necessarily pay much attention to these type of endeavors, preferring to concentrate on what the majors release, but hatOLOGY has shown that with dedication and persistence music not of the mainstream is viable and relevant to a new and growing audience, particularly of younger fans.

And I'm proud to say that I have quite a bit of artistic freedom at hatOLOGY. Werner X. Uehlinger, as label owner and executive producer often makes insightful suggestions but he understands that any project we do must come from artistic ideals and not commercial ones. So far the output has alternated with a new project by the band (Eskelin with Parkins & Black) followed by a special project of differing configuration.

First, with respect to the Eskelin with Parkins & Black recordings I'd like to clear up a misconception currently held by some listeners and journalists. None of the recordings we've made in this series are live. I believe the confusion to be a result of a misreading of the liner notes that I write for each release in which I discuss the pros and cons of studio recording and recording live performances. Our recording process does indeed revolve around a live performance in that the recording "studio" is the performance hall and a live concert does get recorded. But we also record in the hall in the afternoons without and audience and it is this material that almost always winds up becoming the CD. In all of the hatOLOGY recordings done by the band there are only two cuts that came from live concerts. And they are on two different CDs. And I won't divulge which tracks they are either. In fact it might make a nice blindfold test for those folks who believe that live is always best. I pretty much defy anyone to pick out which of the two (out of thirty) tracks are the live ones. Send me an email with your guesses!

Most of the projects we've done were recorded in the performance hall of a high school located in the tiny Swiss town of Berikon, about an hour outside of Zürich. There are a group of dedicated music fans who present concerts under the name of "Kulak" in the school where the head of this organization, "Big" Ernst Hofstetter, teaches biology. Engineer Peter Pfister lives a few blocks from the school and so he brings his remote equipment and sets up shop. It's a big room and very reverberant, taking a little getting used to in performance but the recorded sound is always very clear. Recording on the road means capturing the band while all cylinders are firing but there's also the risk of being fatigued from the travel. So recently we've been recording in New York which I like better since I'm on my own turf and there are many excellent studios within walking distance of my apartment. In the end we always get what we came for and Peter Pfister manages to put his patented stamp on the sound in the mixing sessions.

In the article "History of a Band" I described in detail the evolution of the group and our various recordings. Here I'd like to mention the other "special" projects that have come out of the series as well as the most recent (and yet untitled) Eskelin with Parkins and Black recording due early in 2002.

"Dissonant Characters"

After meeting Han Bennink for the first time in New York in January 1997, shaking hands backstage at the Knitting Factory and proceeding to play together for the very first time with absolutely no preparation or conversation about what would happen we soon decided to record. "Dissonant Characters" was our second meeting, a hybrid recording including mostly studio cuts and a few live pieces done in Berikon, Switzerland in December, 1998. Since then Han and I have toured Europe and performed at Festivals in Finland and Portugal. At no time have we ever discussed how we would play, what we would play or when we would play it. We both like it that way.

"Ramifications"

Ramifications is a quintet session of mixed instrumentation (meaning no rhythm section) including Erik Friedlander on cello and Joe Daley on tuba along with Andrea Parkins, Jim Black and myself. This was the first of the hatOLOGY series that we recorded in New York. Noted journalist Art Lange flew in from Chicago to produce this session and it was recorded by one of New York's finest engineers Jon Rosenberg.

Sometimes people ask me about my favorite recordings and I always tell them that I have none. It's my objective to simply document the band as accurately as possible at various times in our development. In this way all of them are my favorites since they are each unique and impossible to recreate. We couldn't for example go back and improve upon any of the early albums we can only go forward and make new and different ones. Given that I should say that "Ramifications" does hold a special place for me somehow. It sometimes gets compared to the band with Andrea and Jim since on paper it seems like I'm simply adding cello and tuba to the mix. What results however is a completely different entity. My intentions in writing for this ensemble were different than my writing for Andrea and Jim and the overall sound is really quite different.

Of particular interest for me has always been the stasis/movement issue. In this recording we explore that with an enhanced perspective given the additional instruments and their role in the overall rhythmic polyphony. A couple of reviewers found the stasis/movement issue to be a stumbling block in their reception of this project and their reviews made it seem as if we failed at keeping things moving all the time, which is I suppose some kind of cardinal rule in jazz. So just for the record I'd like to point out that the results on this recording are precisely what I intended with respect to this issue. And in fact, "Ramifications" is surely one of my favorites if I were forced to chose only two or three.

"Vanishing Point"

"Vanishing Point" is a totally improvised recording featuring strings (Mat Maneri on viola, Erik Friedlander on cello and Mark Dresser on bass), vibraphone (Matt Moran) and myself. This project came from a suggestion by Werner and Art Lange (the producer of this project) that we do something with strings. We had originally planned to do this prior to recording "Ramifications" but I deferred since writing for the sound of that project began to compel me more strongly at the time. Upon revisiting the string idea it occurred to me that I would get results much closer to what I was hearing if I simply let everyone improvise. In fact there was very little input from me on concept. I purposely avoided getting together prior to the session to rehearse or play live. We simply showed up in the studio on the appointed day, turned on the machines and improvised. Things went well from the very first piece on and I was compelled to simply let it flow. At one point I began setting up little scenarios to guide us which seemed OK but then I asked the musicians "would you like more direction or less?" "LESS!" was the resounding reply. And so it was. I simply gave the most basic prompts at what seemed to be the most crucial junctures. "Let's do a sparse one now", or "OK, how about we play a piece about harmony" were all that was needed to catalyze the energy and resulted in some of the best pieces of the session.

Eskelin w/Parkins & Black

This band just keeps changing and developing and I am very pleased that hatOLOGY has seen fit to continue documenting this process. In fact, without this support and encouragement who knows if we would have continued as far given the difficulties of maintaining a steady band over the years.

Probably the most fundamental difference in this new recording is the change in overall organization and presentation of the music. The project has yet to be titled but is slated for an early 2002 release to be available for our next European tour in March. Werner had asked me to write a preview of the session for his distributors and here's what I wrote just after the recording session:

This, our fifth session for the hatOLOGY label, took place in April of 2001 at Sound on Sound studios in midtown manhattan. This is the same studio that was used for "Ramifications" (hatOLOGY 551) and I am excited about the prospect of achieving what will likely be the best recorded sound yet on this project with Andrea Parkins (accordion and sampler) and Jim Black (drums). Also new for this session, Andrea has augmented her arsenal of keyboards and electronics with the studio's acoustic grand piano giving the band yet another added sonic dimension. Piano was Andrea's first instrument and she integrates it into her current set up with great ease allowing her to display an important side of her improvisational psyche in somewhat greater depth. Jim Black continues to surprise with his mixture of groove, improv and controlled chaos in the most wide open setting that we've yet documented. The music for this session contains a higher percentage of pure improvisation than our previous releases yet it is still structured along preconceived lines. I've written twelve short pieces which were developed on our 2001 spring tour of Europe and given a high degree of focus and energy in these studio versions. In some ways I feel as if we've integrated our entire seven year experience as a band into this suite and opened a new musical chapter in the process. To close the program we chose Thelonious Monk's rarely played composition "Oska T", which seemed as natural to us as anything we've ever played.

So that's the update as of September 2001. We're also organizing future sessions for 2002 so please stayed tuned. I also took this opportunity to re-read the history of the band article that I wrote for the hatOLOGY website in earlier this year and make a few fixes and edits. Hope you enjoy reading it.

Ellery Eskelin
September 2001

HISTORY OF A BAND
by Ellery Eskelin

From ad hoc jazz combo gigs in sleazy Baltimore bars to eighteen months of big-band one nighters across the U.S. to bad top 40 wedding jobs in New Jersey to slick commercial funk gigs at the old Playboy club in Manhattan to jazz gigs with Jack McDuff in Harlem and even the occasional classical gig thrown in I've played a lot of music over the years, much that I've enjoyed and much that I have not. Since arriving in New York in 1983 I've done pretty much every kind of gig available to a tenor saxophonist. But being one of about 7,000 other tenor saxophonists aspiring for the gig with Art Blakey or Elvin Jones and realizing early on that these aspirations were pretty far flung at best forced me into taking myself a little more seriously and to develop a rapport with other similarly disposed musicians on the scene to begin developing our own music.

After a few years and several short lived groups later, with very few performances or tours on our resume the cooperative band "Joint Venture" was formed in 1988. Musical issues, business issues and personal issues all collided messily but I learned a lot from that band. Cooperatives can be notoriously difficult but when they work the results often transcend the sum of the parts. By the end Joint Venture had recorded three albums and I had managed to release four of my own as a leader during that same time. Somewhere along the way drummer Joey Baron had heard me and asked me to join his new band "Baron Down" in '91. I learned a lot from Joey about musical role playing and simply how to run a band, ideas that would come in very handy in the formation of my own new band. In 1993 Andrea Parkins (on accordion) and Jim Black (on drums) both consented to embark on what amounted to a rather odd musical undertaking. The little bit of visibility I had managed to generate thus far with Joey and my own recordings was now in jeopardy, subject to being wiped out in one fell swoop with a band that included an accordion. But playing by the rules had never gotten me anywhere in the first place and so I had little to lose. And a lot to learn.

So what are some of the difficulties in maintaining a band? Well, there's juggling schedules, personalities, the whims and desires of agents and promoters, money and the general lack thereof, keeping the music fresh and honest, getting it rehearsed, developing consistency, getting it recorded, getting it distributed, getting radio play, getting press attention, booking gigs and tours, surviving on the road day in and out, maintaining family and sanity, keeping up with other music and probably most difficult, getting all these elements into play at the same time. And what are the benefits of maintaining a band? For one thing, there's that intangible quality that only emerges after many years of dedication. For lack of a better word, magic.

New jazz and improvisation occupies an odd but interesting niche in the world these days. It's been a long time since jazz was our nation's popular music. New developments in the music now happen underground, often eluding even the jazz press, who are supposed to know about these things. Fragmentation and diversity rule the day. That's a good for the music but hard on those trying to make sense of it all and sort it out for the rest of us. Often times when traveling someone invariably asks about my case and says "Oh, I LOVE the saxophone, do you like Kenny G? What's the name of your band?" I reply that we don't really have a name. I can't tell them what to call it, or what it sounds like, or what to compare it to and so that usually stops the conversation cold. "Our music isn't really...commercially...viable..." I stammer. But a lot of younger fans understand completely. They're the ones that also understand indie rockers, punk rockers and the whole "DIY" (do it yourself) crowd that has found the way out of the mainstream and into realm of independent survival. And that is the path that we too have taken up.

Lamentations on the lack of bands these days in jazz abound but there really are plenty of bands out there. With independent recordings, grass roots promotions and the internet, many of the best bands operate on the fringe and off the radar, something that was hard to do twenty or thirty years ago. In the mid seventies many excellent European labels emerged to document the music that was being neglected by major labels. Now in their 26th year, hatHUT has consistently been one of the best. In our case hatHUT had the foresight to realize that it takes dedication and time to develop an audience but that the payoff could be worth the effort. Without that support we may never have come this far.

Survival musically as well as financially means being adaptable to the changing realities of the music business. Since there are so few bands working full time, musicians today must work with as many as a half dozen bands any one of which may only work two or three months out of the year. It's not like the "good old days" but personally I find this preferable to working with the same group all the time. I also have other side projects as a leader and Andrea and Jim both lead their own bands as well. And we've played with each other in various other contexts all of which helps keep the band fresh and motivated. None of us are completely dependent on this group for their entire musical well being.

The idea...

Organ trio? It's been done but maybe there's a spin on it waiting to be explored. But who plays organ? While pondering these and other questions I ran into drummer Jim Black at a rehearsal with saxophonist Tim Berne. I was immediately taken with his phrasing, a natural fit with mine if ever there was one. While continuing with that organ dilemma I was stopped in my tracks one day at a festival in Europe during a set by French accordionist Jean Louis Martinier. not long after I heard the a recording of Swiss accordionist Hans Hassler. I forget all about the organ, I now wanted an improvising accordionist.

Back in New York I immediately called Guy Klucevsek who I had met through Joey Baron and while Guy seemed amenable to the idea of playing with Jim and I he said he said he didn't feel comfortable improvising. He could have fooled me but I wasn't going to try and talk him into something he wasn't comfortable with. The only other option I had was someone named "Miss Mergatroid" who I'd heard singing and playing an electronically distorted accordion on the radio. I thought she might have ears for what I wanted to do so I tracked her down and called her out of the blue in San Francisco. She seemed amenable as well but the distance factor was going to be a challenge. I was kind of losing hope.

After putting the search in high gear I drew up a surprisingly long list of names based upon recordings and recommendations. Andrea Parkins' name came up a couple of times and in turned out that she was doing some concerts in the city. I hadn't heard of her but it had been quite a number of months now and I really wanted to get started. I first heard Andrea at a concert by bassist Kato Hidecki at Roulette along with electro-persussionist Ikue Mori. I enjoyed the music but left without a clear picture of Andrea's playing. She was playing again the next night and after that performance I simply went up, introduced myself and asked if she'd like to get together with Jim and I and see what happened. She said yes, I went home and wrote some music and in December of 1993 we had our first get together at Context studios in the east village. I loved the sound immediately, from the first piece we played.

The band...

Guitarist Eugene Chadbourne recently paid us a nice complement. He said, "I also liked the way the three of you have such different personalities in your playing, but it holds together. You are the Beatles of avant jazz!"

Andrea studied classical piano and played accordion in punk bands but she is not without some jazz influences. She went to Berkeley, studied with a pupil of Lennie Tristano's and claims James Brown and Miles Davis as two of her favorite keyboard players. Jim grew up listening to a lot of the musicians he now plays with and is remarkably eclectic in the most natural way thus freeing him from many of the musical attitude problems that earlier generations grappled with. I'm a jazz head from way back but have been playing catchup with all the music I missed back in the day. And in spite of the current rancor surrounding what is or is not jazz I stand by the notion that this is in fact a jazz band. But I will not limit myself to the label, I only acknowledge a debt.

So I wrote some more music, scheduled more rehearsals and subsequently booked our first concert at the Knitting Factory for March 20th 1994. The Knitting Factory had become a haven for bands such as this, debuting projects that would probably have a hard time finding a space anywhere else in the city. Here I didn't have to worry about the club owner telling me that the music was too weird, too loud or whatever. On the other hand, after having booked the date it was quite by accident that I found out that the club had given our slot away to another group without telling us. After a series of intense phone calls I was finally able to save the date. Welcome to band leading 101.

I did all I could to promote the concert, doing a radio interview, sending out flyers, calling magazines and reviewers and as a result the house was pretty full. By the end of the set I was so into playing that I overshot the time running into the next band's setup. Afterwards I was confronted with a bunch of bugged looking musicians backstage. It was John Zorn and friends. John said "it's cool, don't worry" but I was embarrassed for not having my shit together on that score.

But the band sounded even better than it had at rehearsals although I could tell that at least parts of the music had people scratching their heads. I was very happy with our debut as well as with the turnout and assumed that this momentum would continue. As it turned out it would be years before I got as large a house in New York as we had for this first concert. Even though our playing has changed since over the years there was something very appealing to me about those early performances. It's something that can't be recaptured.

An offer to Soul Note, the label I had last recorded for, was made and swiftly rejected. "Perhaps something more like your last band. Something without an accordion." I began to sense that this was not going to be as easy as I had first hoped. Fortunately Ken Pickering, the impresario of the Vancouver Jazz Festival, came to our rescue. He surprised me by hiring the band for the upcoming festival without even having heard us. But the only slot available was the late set at the Pitt Gallery, twelve midnight, 3 am New York time). Fly out, play, fly back.

After the flight I was ravenously hungry and wound up over-eating just before the concert. Gig time came and between the three hour time difference and the digestive overload my tongue would barely move. But I managed somehow. Critic Kevin Whitehead was in attendance and having heard our first concert in New York informed his critic friends Art Lange and John Corbett that they should come hear this concert because "no one can figure out what the hell they're doing." I think he liked the fact that he didn't know what we were doing but it still made me stop and wonder. I could sense that perhaps we were having a strange effect on the audience but I was too involved in playing the music to be able to tell what it was. I do know that purposely manipulating the flow of the music as we do can really mess with listener expectations. But John Corbett came up after the concert with a grin on his face and told me how much he enjoyed it so I figured we must be doing something right.

A few months later I got a call from Songlines recordings in Vancouver. Label owner Tony Reif was looking for demo material for a CD sampler. I was flattered but I really wanted to record the band for one entire project. Over time we strike a deal and I got my friend Karl Hereim to act as producer. Karl choose one of the better studios in New York and an engineer whom I had not worked with before. In my attempts to explain what I want from the engineer I wind up badly confusing the man. As a result the first night of recording was completely unusable. On the second evening we start all over and the engineer sets up for the session as if I had never said a word, probably the way he should have in the beginning. It still takes us some time to get the sound and levels right. We're recording live to two tracks meaning the engineer has to anticipate sound level changes and mix the music as we play. There is no chance to go back and make corrections. To further complicate things the sound in the studio is very strange and disconcerting. We soon realize that there's only a few hours of time left and we have to get this music down on tape no matter what. Somehow the desperation of the situation urges us on to play better than we've ever played but afterwards I can't listen to the tape for two weeks. I'm afraid that we've completely bombed out. Of course I haven't told Tony about this yet and I'm simply hoping against hope that there's something on the tape we can live with. Eventually I put on the tape in the privacy of my living room and am astounded by the sound and playing. We got it! What a relief. It's a pretty wild sound, kind of rough and ragged so I decide to name the recording after one of our tunes, "Jazz Trash".

The music on "Jazz Trash" was probably more about texture than our subsequent recordings which became somewhat more groove oriented. I had a lot of ideas that may have related more to "new music" than jazz at that time. Having players that could do both became a great asset though as it became fun to switch between "new music texture improv" to "rock band" in the blink of an eye. But I've purposely set things up so as to be a little uncertain. Even after this first recording and into our subsequent concerts I'm not always sure if Andrea and Jim are 100% positive about what I'm asking of them. By not giving the band all the answers, even making them do things that are not the most natural for them, it forces us to improvise in the moment rather than rely on all the stuff we know how to do well. In an interview years later Jim would say "Ellery Eskelin's music left me stranded on a number of conceptual islands, which I had to figure how to get off".

The reaction in the press was very good and reaction among fans was even better. I was afraid the title would get me in trouble but it didn't. I fact it still follows us around, with some promoters still referring to the band as such, much to my chagrin. On a hunch I sent the disc to Werner X. Uehlinger at hatHUT records and simply asked him what he thought about it. He wrote back offering to set up a recording in Germany with the cooperation of WDR (the German radio) which would be released on hatOLOGY, a new series on hatHUT. Werner also helped to hook me up with a booking agent in Germany, one that I had been trying to interest for some months with no success. With this consolidated effort on the part of several parties I would finally be able to get things moving in Europe.

The idea behind recording this next CD, "One Great Day...", was to record a live concert for the radio and record in the venue during the afternoons without an audience, selecting the best cuts for the CD. The room itself was rather difficult sonically and the lights would intermittently blink making a distinct popping sound that I was afraid would get on the tape. The situation was not helped by the engineer telling me that "all my good microphones are at home, it doesn't really pay for me to bring them." Not exactly inspiring words to get a band up and playing but we did very well none the less. After a mixing session with Peter Pfister in Switzerland the recording really came to life.

The biz...

Over the ensuing months I try to come to grips with an alarming downward economic spiral in the club scene here in NYC. It started with the double and triple bill door gig concept coming into the Knitting Factory and was spreading rapidly. The rock clubs have been doing this for years and now I see that we too are being expected to play for free. In spite of the fact that no one in NYC seems to be paying that much attention to us we are playing better all the time. Luckily we are finding some opportunities to play outside of the city.

One of our early out of town gigs was the result of a call from Michael Ehlers (founder of Eremite records) who had recently heard us perform at the Knitting Factory festival. He wondered if we were in a position to "punk rock" it on up to Amherst to do a double bill with saxophonist Jemeel Moondoc. He came to get us in his own car and drove us back to New York as well. The concert took place in a two hundred year old Unitarian meeting house with an electrical system maybe half that old. We had to route all the power for Andrea's accordion, sampler, half a dozen effects pedals and two amplifiers through one tiny outlet that had a note stuck to the wall saying not to overload it with anything more than an electric coffeepot. But somehow it worked. The concert was great and even writer Byron Coley attended. That meant he had to step inside a church, something we were informed he never did. Afterwards we were shown our accommodations at Byron's house, two bunk beds (displacing Byron's children for a night) and one really large King size bed in another room. Punk rocking it, indeed. But we'll place that in our "fond memories" file along with the comment made by Michael's sister that "Ellery and Andrea look like such young parents to have a child Jim's age".

Since seeing us perform in Vancouver John Corbett had called me a couple of times to play in Chicago at the Empty Bottle, the rock club where he and Ken Vandermark have been enjoying a healthy success in producing Wednesday night jazz and improvised music concerts. I began to sense that something was "up" with this music. There was new interest from a younger crowd, weaned on puck and indie rock, that I'd not seen before. Something was brewing. I also got a call from the Boston Creative Music Alliance. This gig had a little more "infra-structure" offering train travel, hotels and actual funding for a concert in an art gallery. The connection came via my good friend Phil Milstein who recommended us when asked by a member of the BCMA for suggestions. Phil is the curator of the "American Song Poem Archive", researcher of the "send us your lyrics" song poem (or "song sharking") industry and my connection to him came from the work of my father Rodd Keith who had become something of a cult figure. This was my first indication that I might be getting more attention from the underground crowd by virtue of Rodd and his song poem work than from the jazz cognoscenti. But I'll take it. The second such indication came in the form of a call from a fellow named Marc Minsker who wanted us to play at the University of South Carolina. I think Marc probably new more of my father's music than mine. He'd even help us build a tour if we wanted. Seems there was an underground touring circuit emerging for this music. There were small grassroots organizations popping up all over, usually run by a small group of frustrated fans who want to have some concerts take place in their town and realized that they had to do it themselves if they wanted it to happen. This was an interesting change from the conventional channels for jazz concerts in the states. I would even come to notice that whenever we play university gigs in the US it's often an art department, film department or language department that gets involved in producing these concerts. I find it a little disconcerting that we get little to no attention or support from music departments when we play.

But this was the first encouraging news I'd had in a long time, maybe ever, about the conditions for American musicians in our own land. Until now it had seemed that touring was all but impossible in the US. I still have some bad memories of playing gigs in Baltimore in which the club owners would sometimes make us stop after the first tune because they couldn't deal with the music. As a result I still have this fear of hostility from the so called "establishment". Fortunately my experiences in the last five years are allaying some of those fears but old habits die hard. It's still sometimes hard for me to believe that we're not going to get beat up or thrown in jail.

We did seven concerts on our first US tour on 1997, including Knoxville, TN, two concerts in Columbia, SC (including a road house gig with Eugene Chadbourne), Durham, NC, Washington, DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Aside from some money I am still owed by the Philadelphia gig the tour was a success. It seems that maybe time is finally catching up with the avant garde and just as bebop, once despised by general audiences, is enjoying a newfound respectability (albeit in it's reconstituted form at places like Lincoln Center), 60s free jazz is undergoing something of a similar revival among the underground scene. And so even as we are not true practitioners of free jazz we find ourselves benefiting from this new audience for whom dissonance, density and volume are not a problem.

Back in NYC...

Since our Knitting Factory debut the situation there had become quite untenable for me and an increasing number of my colleagues. It's always been my policy to pay the band a salary for every gig, never asking them to take a risk on my behalf, even if I would sometimes lose money. It was getting to the point at the Knit where about eight bands might be playing on any given night, each playing for the door and splitting the audience share. Then all hell broke loose in 1998 when the news got around that the Knit's Jazz Festival, with major visibility and a huge corporate sponsor, was paying some musicians $50 or less to perform. A petition was started protesting the club's policy and the local papers picked up on it. Even though an agreement was then made musicians were starting to look for alternatives. As such it will be years before I would bring a band back into the Knit.

Other places in NYC that we played in New York include "In House" (essentially a concert series that takes place in a living room loft space) and Roulette, a NYC mini-institution of sorts run by trombonist Jim Staley. Both concerts were subsidized but the state of funding these days being at an all time low makes it sometimes easier to make better money playing for the door. As a result I began booking the band into a tiny little East Village joint called the Internet Cafe. We get to play two nights in a row, two sets each night and can play what we want. A modest fee was guaranteed but subject to increase on a good house. It's here that we began to re-grow our audience in New York. By now our CDs were showing up on the College Music Journal charts and were making at least some writer's "Top Something-or-Other" list for the year in which it was released.

The Internet Cafe is not without it's charm but it also has some drawbacks, one of which was that for a time they were flirting with the JVC festival by honoring a free pass given to festival-goers. The musicians were still only being paid the standard guarantee and now the club could potentially be filled with pass holders taking up space normally occupied by paying customers, thus killing our percentage. Plus there was this hideous JVC festival sign that blighted the bandstand. I refused to stand in front of it since we were not playing the festival nor were we being paid to advertise for JVC. Management at the Internet was a little vague about the whole thing and didn't seem to want to understand my position so I simply pulled the sign down off the wall. After the first set a couple of guys from JVC's goon squad made an appearance. They wanted to see that their sign was up. To be fair "goon squad" is a silly thing to say since these guys were quite young and very respectful to me all the while making it clear that this sign had to go back up. So we compromised and put the sign up in another part of the club. The whole incident was a bust really since I don't think one person showed up with a free pass. Still, principle is important and I did not want to appear to be shilling for "the man" particularly when I wasn't being paid for it. But our audience was growing again, slowly, up from an all time low of about 10 people at the Knitting Factory to respectable figures for just about any New York club.

On the road...

hatHUT eventually offered me an exclusive deal for two projects a year in order to develop the music and our audience. In 1996 we did our first European tour and have since managed to tour yearly as well as perform at some of the summer festivals. Each tour has been between three and four weeks long and each has culminated in a new recording. I have written extensively about these tours in the liner notes to some of our recordings and there is even a lengthy tour diary posted on my website from our 1999 tour.

What's really great about Europe is that beyond playing world capitals like London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Vienna small towns and villages all over the continent are hosting incredible jazz festivals the likes of which rarely even happen in major US cities. Try to imagine a three day festival with the likes of David Murray, Tony Williams and Don Pullen happening in Hooterville, USA. They were all on the first European festival I ever played, with Joint Venture, in 1988 in a tiny German village called Vilshofen, on the Danube river.

I refer to our first tour as the the "what's your music about?" tour as that seemed to be the most often asked question. It took some weeks to realize that for me there is no answer to that question, nor should there be. But we had a successful first tour and the ball was now rolling although there was still some rocky road ahead. During our second European tour (1997) and subsequent recording ("Kulak 29 & 30") I experienced first hand some of the changes on the touring scene that I had so far only heard about from others. Business was getting a little rough what with German taxes on foreigners, reunification straining the government's budget, and a general economic slump translating into lower fees and less gigs on the circuit. But it's still far better economically than in the US. We hold on, I'm able to pay the band and things get better over the next few years as new territory opens up in England, France and Spain to take the place of lost gigs in Germany. Our best press was now coming from France and by 2001 half of our gigs will come from there. Our 1998 European Tour goes better, pointing to a slight improvement on the prior year, adding Venice, Florence and Bologna to our usual German, Holland, Switzerland circuit. I feel that we're gaining some momentum now, people seem to know who we are. Up until now we'd been playing exclusively my own compositions but we've begun playing some cover tunes on this tour which we document on our next CD, "Five Other Pieces (+2)".

Another factor that has helped us out has been the accumulated road time and exposure I've gained with bands led by Mark Helias, Gerry Hemingway and Joey Baron. Aside from my big band road days with Buddy Morrow in 1981-83 (48 weeks a year of one nighters) 1998 is the most active year I've ever had with all three of these bands as well as my own doing tours of Europe. In addition Gerry Hemingway manages the unheard of by booking nearly forty dates for his quartet in the US and Canada. This manages to fly completely under the radar of the jazz press but again points to the vitality of the underground scene.

One of the stranger gigs in this underground U.S. scene was the "Penofin Jazz Festival" in northern California which Andrea, Jim and I played in 1998 . I figure it had to have been a company tax write-off by a fan since we and a bunch of other bands (pianist Graham Connah from San Francisco and a band from Chicago featuring Fred Anderson and Ken Vandermark) were flown in, given a rental van, put up at a hotel and paid a nice fee to play for fifteen or twenty people in the company owner's back yard. It's a beautiful location in the country though and we play a great set although we got rained out before our big finale, "Visionary of the Week". We also played at New Langton Arts in San Francisco since we were in the neighborhood. I've always loved the scene in the bay area and wish we could have stayed longer but schedules would not allow this time.

Despite the great year I'm a little taken aback in my own attempts to book the next stateside tour for the band. Seems a number of the places we played in 1997 have changed policy and are now door gigs. I can't take that kind of risk, so I turn down all but three gigs; Pittsburgh, Chicago and Detroit. We are preparing for our next European tour and I feel that it's important to keep the momentum going. But it does get me questioning the future viability of US touring. Which way will it go?

Changes...

I don't endorse making important life decisions while on the road. The emotional ups and downs can be very destabilizing. But sometimes you have no choice. the question was "should I become a father?" I was at an emotional low. After weeks of overcast skies all over northern Europe the Italian sun suddenly shone bright one day as the streets flooded with gleeful children on their way home from school. That seemed so much more positive than all the crap I was putting myself through so I made the decision right then and there. I'm proud to say that my son Rami Wade was born in January of 1999 (along with some help and encouragement from my wife of course). During Rami's early weeks at home I began writing music for a special project including Andrea and Jim with the addition of cellist Eric Friedlander and tubaist Joe Daley. We performed at Tonic (a club that rose up out of the ashes of the Knitting Factory debacle and quickly became very popular) as well as the New School (as part of the Jazz Composers Collective series) and the music was released in the spring of 2000 titled "Ramifications", named and dedicated to my son.

On the road...again

Our fourth European tour in 1999 was the best and longest yet including France, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Belgium, Spain and England. The travel was a real bitch but we were now getting noticed on the festival circuit and word was spreading. We had covered a lot of ground since 1994 and the band had now reached an ease and consistency that can only be attained with time. Many of the concepts that seemed odd or uncertain in the beginning were now becoming second nature. After having recorded about forty of my pieces exploring structure and compositional/improvisational strategies to the "nth" degree I now began writing music that is a bit more open, partially inspired by some new avenues we discovered in the process of recording a couple of pieces written by Eugene Chadbourne on our most recent disc, "The Secret Museum".

We got called to do some more French festivals for the summer of 2000, one of which I had played before, the Luz festival, with Joey Baron in 1998. It's nestled snug in the Pyrenees mountains, in southern France. There's been a good amount of pre show buzz and by the time we hit the stage the crowd is raving. Practically anything we do is met with cheers of approval. There's some great music on the festival too and one of my discoveries is a vocalist named Jessica Constable, a British musician living in Toulouse and her partner, pianist Philip Gelda. Their music rests somewhere between song and improvisation using prepared piano in a very clever and rhythmic way with Jessica's voice going everywhere at once. I introduced myself to her and spoke with her musician friends from Toulouse about setting up a two or three day musical meeting on our next tour, giving me a chance to perform with Jessica as well as address the growing issue of the "one nighter" syndrome on tours.

After Luz we play another French festival, this one in Parthenay on a bill with Daniel Humair, Henri Texier and Evan Parker. I've never heard Evan play in a situation quite like this before. It's much more "time" oriented and a little more swinging than his usual settings. Their encore was Coltrane's "Some Other Blues". I really got to hear Evan's roots speaking clearly for the first time. Fascinating. This was soon followed by three nights at the Gulbenkian Festival in Portugal. The line up was something of a who's who of what's happening in the new jazz scene including Anthony Braxton, Leroy Jenkins, Joseph Jarman, Myra Melford, Bruno Chevillon, Ray Anderson, Craig Harris, Misha Mengelberg, Han Bennink, Supersilent, Hugh Ragin, Amiri Baraka, Hamid Drake, Peter Brötzmann, William Parker, Joe Morris, Graham Haynes, Craig Taborn, Mats Gustaffson, Ken Vandermark, John Purcell, George Lewis and many others. The club we played was packed every night with reveling fans, energy practically pouring out of the cracks in the walls. Months later Jim ran into some folks who had been at this festival and told him that our rendition of "Song For Ché" had actually brought tears. Wow. So after nearly seven years, with the CDs accumulating and word of mouth spreading, the crowds at our concerts are now almost always full. We return to New York and play at Tonic to a packed and enthusiastic house. Finally, a sense of redemption in our home town!

My next attempt at booking a stateside tour was much more successful than the last. Even though the southern leg fell through in the end I was able to get a nice swath of concerts booked out west . This, our third US Tour, took us to Seattle, Portland, Berkeley, LA, San Diego, Albuquerque and Tucson. I sensed a fair amount of pre tour enthusiasm on the part of everyone concerned, promoters and audience alike. To finally be playing in the US, our own culture, and getting the kind of attention that was previously only forthcoming from Europe was quite a thrill. There is one sullen moment however after our final gig in Tucson, AZ. It's election night and George W. Bush is threatening to claim the presidency for real. A disappointing closer to an otherwise stellar tour.

After a few weeks at home for the holidays we are back out on the road again, this time for our fifth European tour in January 2001. Another three weeks, at least half of which is in France. I had vowed not to return to France without speaking something of the language so I took some French lessons before the tour and was able to announce the band and even do some rudimentary conversation with folks which was way overdue. Je suis musicien professionnel!

We were also able to perform with vocalist Jessica Constable in Toulouse and Perpignan which was perhaps the most fun I had on the tour. I love the effect that Jessica has on the band. She manages to bring out qualities in our improvising that I haven't fully exploited in the band yet. We also played with some other local musicians in Toulouse including a tabla player, a hurdy gurdy player and a guy who played an ancient traditional instrument from that region (Occitania) that resembled a sort of bagpipe. This was a real blast and a nice musical change of pace.

I hadn't planned on writing any new music for this tour since we weren't going to record. I felt it would be more relaxed to just play what felt good, have fun and not worry about breaking in new material. On the other hand I felt we had some unfinished business with regards to what we started on "The Secret Museum". With this in mind I wrote twelve new short pieces. These pieces are miniatures, magnifying smaller more detailed improvisational gestures that subsequently become larger parts of shorter pieces. It's about the closest thing to free improv I'll likely get with this band while still exerting an effect on each piece. The concept is related to some ideas I had back in 1994 but never really got around to exploring. In some ways it's like going back to the beginning of the band's history since I know the crowd has certain expectations concerning flow and I see that I am pushing it on a few of these gigs with these new pieces. Werner X. Uehlinger hears us play a particularly good rendition in Zurich and offers to record them in what will be our sixth release.

Looking back, I might have thought that this instrumentation was too limited to take us this far. One New York DJ, who seemed almost surprised that he liked our first record, was sure that there would be nowhere to go after that. But even to my own surprise there is still more to do. Jim was recently asked in an interview for College Music Journal to preview our new recording, "The Secret Museum" and he said, "I think it's our best CD to date. As I listened to the playbacks at the recording session, I alternated between serious puzzlement and laughter. I felt like Karen Carpenter at one point."

I'm pleased to know that I can still stump the band after all these years.

Ellery Eskelin
New York City
February 2001

Additional sponsorship by Rolf Fehlbaum/Vitra enables us to initiate a series of recordings with Ellery Eskelin from 1998 to the year 2001. These releases are part of a development program which allows the musician to present his musical concepts in a varitey of settings.

With special thanks to Gunnar Pfabe Touring
for making so much of this history possible.

Hat Hut Records Ltd.
P.O.Box 521, 4020 Basel, Switzerland