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MP3 Jazz Folk - Jazz in the Stone Age
8 MP3 Songs in this album (53:31) !
Related styles: Jazz: Piano Jazz, Easy Listening: Instrumental Pop, Mood: Upbeat
People who are interested in Beck Hansen Nick Drake Velvet Underground should consider this download.
Details:
Jazz Folk is: Peter Scherr, bass; Simon Barker, drums; Matt McMahon, piano
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For this record, the second studio outing of Jazz Folk, I wanted to do something that would take full advantage of the studio. Not necc. a documentary record, but rather one in which we would use overdubs, editing and full on signal twisting to accentuate the songs.
It was hot steamy July of 2008, and we spent several days in the studio, scheming, steaming and tracking. I had been obsessed with Beck''s criminally underrated Mutations album, and also the first Banana as Penis Velvet Underground with Nico. It seemed that Matt McMahon and Simon Barker were ready to adopt my obsessions as their own. We really got down. Dragged out the Wurli, stretched out the tempos in that beautifully hypnotic way that only Simon Barker can.
And then, I got busy, pre-occupied and post-occupied. I got my feet wet mixing Cold Brains in the fall of 2008, but I didn''t have a chance to get to the rest of the stuff until mid-summer 2009. I spent the better part of July 2009, shaping, twisting and editing. I kept coming back to Simon''s bass drum tone. I found this combination of compression and eq that really reminded me of how it felt playing with Simon in those sessions. In a lot of ways, I feel like this record is a bass drum concerto.
I really like these songs. I feel they show our love for the originals, and also Jazz Folk''s volcanic and spacey proclivities.
I hope you pick it up...
Here''s a piece that I wrote about the group last year:
Jazz Folk: Building a track record
I’ve known Simon Barker and Matt McMahon for a long time now. I first met and played with Simon in 1997, and it was love at first beat, so to speak. He had this incredible touch and sensitivity. And he was real jazz, swung like a dog, really unpredictable. But personally, he was soft spoken, and a very sweet and gentle guy. He’d been telling me about Matt for years, and as soon as I played with him, I was converted. Since that time, a lot of music has been made.
We recorded the Blue Album together in 2003, also with my best friend Bruce Huron on saxophones, and Guy LeClaire on guitar. That project brought a lot of firsts for me: My first project in the new studio, my first album of all-original material, and the first record on my new label 1hr music. There is something special about that recording to me. It’s not easy to explain, but it has something to do with the way the June sun shone through the windows. It has something do to with the way Simon leaned over his drum kit, coaxing out the grooves, and the way Matt would generate arcs of harmonic and melodic energy. When we did those incredible ambient tracks, it seemed like we were all in a collective trance. There was something in the air.
The next time that we got together, in 2004, March, I think, I was working out the kinks in my Dual Mono process, and they were the first ones to take that one on a spin in the recording studio. Bruce was also on the session, and a fine Australian singer, Emma Franz. We got some amazing results in those sessions. Sprawling, dense, confused and dreamy. I still haven’t made sense of it all. Someday I am going to go through that stuff and figure out a nice release. I am sure that there’s one in there somewhere.
We did a few gigs at that time, and even did some commercial recording together. But there was a bit of a loss in momentum, and we didn’t get together until October of 05. Honestly I can’t remember exactly how I spent my time that year. I suppose I could look it up in my diary. I know that I was busy.
I had a lot of other musical ideas that I wanted to try, but I could never forget how amazing it felt to play with Simon and Matt, and I really missed it. I called them during the summer of 05 and invited them to come to Hong Kong again in the fall, but I wasn’t totally clear about what I wanted to do.
When you get musicians together, you have to have some kind of agenda, even if it is as simple as just playing free improvisation. But you need a plan, to make good use of the time. It’s hard to get great musicians together, and expensive, and you don’t want to waste the chance. It’s a responsibility…
I had been writing music and working out some pretty difficult and involved concepts around that time, and I was ready to try something that was a bit simpler to put together. But I still wanted to do something that I could really believe in and enjoy. And I wanted to find music that would engage Matt and Simon. So putting all of those things together, I figured that it would be really great to play songs by contemporary singer songwriters. We all loved Joni Mitchell, and Nick Drake and Neil Young and stuff like that. I felt closer to that music than I felt towards standards, and the great American Songbook, great as it is.
The guys seemed to like the idea, and I transcribed some of my favorites. I also had a few tunes that I had written around that time. Maybe not as simple as could be, but definitely in the right area, mood-wise. I also asked Matt to bring some of his stuff. And it really worked. In the performances, we seemed to find this incredible energy, a different kind of freedom. And there was a really interesting tension too. I was (and still am) in awe of these guys. So I tried to make as much space as possible for them. I wasn’t walking on eggshells scared, but there was tenderness in my approach. Along with this rock and free noise energy.
We had one afternoon in the studio, just a few hours. And the occasion felt very special: again, that golden late afternoon sunlight, and a weird, unique setup. Simon was in the crook of the piano, because he wanted to be as close to Matt as possible. And I set up very close to them, with a mic on my amp. I remember that Simon only used a snare drum, bass drum, hi hat and cymbals. I guess the recording represents what went on in that room sonically, but it wasn’t easy to mix. There was tons of drum sound in the piano, and the bass sound was definitely not hi fi: a 57 on my bass amp. Simon insisted that we be in the room together, and no headphones, god dammit! The music went very fast. Again, it was a kind of trance-like experience. We mostly did just one or two takes of each tune and it was over. Those guys definitely want to keep it fresh. And then go downstairs and drink beer and do blindfold tests…
Initially I had a hard time finding a balance, with that electric-sounding bass track, and all the drums in the piano mics, but I kept coming back to those first rough mixes, because the vibe was so strong. A couple of months later, I had gotten some new pieces in the studio, an analog summing mixer and some other nice gear, and that seemed to help with some of the sound issues that I had been experiencing. In December of 05 I started to feel like the mixes were coming together and that I had something worth releasing.
Simon and Matt aren’t the greatest correspondents, and it took a long time for me to realize that they were ok with what I was doing, and I decided to release the record, which finally happened I think in the fall of 06.
Between 06 and 08, Jazz Folk got together I think three times for projects, including this past July. Each time we got together, we had some incredible performances, and also we did some recording in my studio. I always wanted to capture the live energy of the group, and not re-make the first record. I think there’s some great stuff in those intermediate sessions, probably one or two releasable records worth of material. But I wasn’t too serious about finishing and releasing records right at that time. I wanted to perform live, and write music and record it, and I did a lot of that. A great deal. I did so many different kinds of creative projects. I’m just starting to find time to sit down and mix them now. It’s proving to be a sonic education, and a real joy.
For the most recent get together of Jazz Folk in July 08, I really wanted to make a record in the studio, something that we could release that would show the next phase of the group, so we devoted several days to really capturing some different kinds of sounds. I brought out a few Beck tunes that I was interested in, and also some Velvet Underground stuff that I thought would be good for the group. To be honest, I can’t remember what else we recorded, ah, a Joni Mitchell tune, maybe a couple of Matt’s songs. And we really experimented with some different kinds of sounds: different mic techniques, and overdubbing drums and piano on top of our full group tracks. It was a very productive time.
Now I am almost finished with the mixing of Masako Hamamura’s record, and Joe Rosenberg’s new record. Once they are done, I will get into the mix of these most recent Jazz Folk sessions. Since I really feel like I have license from Simon and Matt, I am going to work very hard on finding a special sonic world for these recordings. And I need to get on it too. The “Stop the Madness” tour is coming up in April of 09. The new record has to be done by then. And I want and fully expect it to be an aggressive step forward.
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