This interview ran in the December 1997 issue of Jazzthetik, a German publication.
Jazzthetik Interview/Ellery Eskelin
Interviewed by Eva Jakubowski
Ellery Eskelin's music seems to be all over the place these days. Based in New York
City and raised in Baltimore, Maryland which produced such American icons as John
Waters, Ann Tyler and Billie Holiday, Ellery at age 37 has burst out with four recordings in the last two years. Running the spectrum from a totally grunged-out collection
of covers of the songs made famous by Gene Ammons with Marc Ribot and Kenny Wollesen
entitled The Sun Died (Soulnote) to his recent release of Green Bermudas, a highly-original and very playful dialogue between the tenor saxophone and sampler with Andrea
Parkins, these recordings seem to illustrate Ellery's own pre-occupation with looking
backward and forward at the same time. Last year John Zorn's Tsadik label released
I Died Today, a collection of songs written by his late father, the cult figure Rodd
Keith which Ellery had only recently stumbled upon and then started researching the
tragic life of his father whom he never knew and eventually produced a CD of a group
of his father's recordings. Samples of some of these odd songs are also woven into the
material on Green Bermudas. In 1995 Songlines released Jazz Trash which Ellery recorded
with his trio of Andrea Parkins and Jim Black and this summer the label Hat Art will be releasing a second CD of his trio which was recorded in Europe in the fall of
1996. Plans are already afloat for still a third CD with his trio. Ellery is also
well-known for his contribution to Joey Baron's Baron Down and plays regularly with
Mark Helias' group. He had just returned from a European tour when we were able to have
a chat about music past and present, personal and not so personal.
EJ: Your trio with Andrea Parkins and Jim Black and your recent release of Green
Bermudas with Andrea Parkins draws heavily on the use of the sampler. What do you
think about people like DJ Spooky and the kind of stuff they're doing and how has
it affected the downtown jazz scene?
EE: I love it. I don't know that I would necessarily start trying to do that myself
because it's not really what I've come from. But I think I could add something to
it. The music has certainly had an effect on me. "Green Bermudas" which I just did
with Andrea, definitely. I can't speak for too many other people-- I'm wondering how
many of the people that I play with even know who DJ Spooky is. Some of them do
but I guess the more jazz-oriented people probably don't. I'm getting the impression
more and more that a lot of the more jazz-type musicians are really pretty unaware of what's
going on outside of what they do and it's kind of shocking to me. I'm shocked at
how little they know about what's going on outside of their sphere but really right
next to them. On the other hand there are a lot of musicians who are interested in it
and I'm trying to align myself with people who have more of an eclectic interest
in music, like Jim and Andrea. I think it makes a difference for me to be able to
bring music in for them to play. It's a lot different than playing with somebody who might not
even like a lot of the music that I like. Cause I'm less interested in playing "jazz"
anymore. I think that music is changing and I think a lot of the most exciting developments in music lately have come from people like DJ Spooky and the whole DJ culture
really.
EJ: What was your musical background and your experience growing up in Baltimore
and then coming to New York City?
EE: I came from a jazz background. I became interested in jazz almost immediately
even before I started playing the saxophone at age 10. I didn't even like rock and
roll. My mother plays the Hammond B3 organ and I grew up listening to her. Until
I was six she used to play in a band at
local night clubs. She doesn't play often anymore but when I go to visit we'll play
together. I learned a lot of music from her. I remember some of the first music
that I was ever exposed to was her playing songs like Cherokee and Satin Doll. While
I was in college at the University of
Maryland I freelanced-- I was doing gigs to make pocket money, big band gigs, dance
gigs, top 40 but I also was doing jazz whenever possible. If I couldn't get a gig
of my own I would sit in on someone else's. It was actually pretty open in Baltimore,
you could go and sit in almost anywhere. That was really great. I could go into black
clubs and sit in, it was cool.
I came to New York in 1983 trying to fit into the jazz scene which was a pretty fucked
up time for jazz anyway because it was right when the whole conservative thing started
to hit and so I quickly realized that that wasn't at all what I wanted to do and
trying to chase that around was not happening. Like the few gigs that I was interested
in doing there were like a thousand other saxophone players all waiting to get the
same gig with the same three people like Art Blakey who were still alive. The longer
it took for my number to come up in that scene the less interested I was in doing
it anyway. It wasn't until around '87 that I sort of had a musical epiphany and
found what I had wanted to do all along and felt that I had something to say. And
at that point I started making recordings and self-producing them, just starting it from scratch.
In '87, so that was 10 years ago and it's taken from then to get to this point.
So I've always taken the long view of things. I loved jazz but I didn't want to
be just saxophone player number 200 and whatever so I guess I spent such a long time trying
to figure out when is anybody ever going to pay attention to me and then when I finally
said "screw it, I don't care, I'm just going to do this music", that's when they
started paying a little attention and over time it's grown since then.
EJ: How did you come to produce the release of I Died Today, the Tsadik compilation
of your father, Rodd Keith's recordings?
EE: My mother and father split up when I was 1-1/2 years old and he moved to California
and my mother moved back to Baltimore. They had been traveling across the country
performing as a duo. Because of my father's eccentric tendencies my mother didn't
want me to visit until I was a little older. Unfortunately, he got really hung up
in drugs and died tragically in 1974, right before I was to be sent out to visit
him. The whole time he was in Los Angeles he was recording music for these strange
companies that advertised in magazines for people to send in their lyrics and they would compose
music for the lyrics and make a record for a fee. They called it "song sharking".
I think it's a specific thing, almost culturally American, the fact that these people sent in these really warped lyrics. But I feel that there's a certain amount of
honesty in that music that is lacking in a lot of so-called legitimate pop music.
My father just did this kind of work as a way to make money, he wasn't really able
to focus on much of anything else. They would send him a pile of 50 poems or something like
two weeks before the session and he would wait until the night before and write music
for all of them like right off the top of his head or he'd do them like the day of
at lunch while he was eating and talking. He was really a very naturally talented
person, people said he had a real genius for being able to play all instruments and
write music. He made hundreds and hundreds of these kind of records over about a
decade. And even though he considered it a kind of musical prostitution, he still put himself
into it in a certain way, more than most people in that industry did. In the last
couple of years I found out that people had been collecting these records. There's
a whole network of people across the country who are into collecting pop culture oddities
and my father became a central figure in their minds and he took on this sort of
cult status. I found about it by accident and I was astonished and I got in touch
with these people and they were pretty freaked out too. This led to an article that I
wrote and the compilation released on John Zorn's label. It's been an incredible
thing to have something that was so deeply private for my entire life become something
that I could not only share with everybody else but the fact that other people picked
up on it before I did. I've been able to use this whole thing as a catalyst for
finding out more about him and connecting with him as best I can. I feel I have
a profound connection to this guy yet I didn't ever know him.
EJ: In Green Bermudas what were your ideas about integrating his recordings?
EE: I was thinking of it strictly in terms of the sound of it. I think that music
has such a strong gravitational pull that I just thought that would be an amazing
ingredient. Originally I was thinking that it was going to be a solo saxophone CD
and then I realized that I didn't want to
do that and when I asked Andrea to do almost like a sound design and I realized that
what she could do with the sampler was amazing and it became actually much more of
an equal thing. Andrea made samples of segments of various cuts and we got together
and created pieces, shapes, structures out of the samples. The curious thing was after
I had assembled the three or four pieces that I picked, I realized that the lyrics
could be construed as being less than salutary towards women-- like "Yummy, Yummy
Dumb Dumb" where he's singing about that she's not too bright and there's another called
"Green Bermudas" which is not about onions but bermuda shorts on a woman and it's
got this lascivious vibe to it. I didn't pick these tunes because of the lyrics
at all but after I realized that I thought "this is going to be cute" because here I am asking
Andrea to be complicit in this endeavor but I think she realized right away that
it would be a cool thing for her to do as a woman to actually be controlling this
stuff. I was a little worried about it and I was almost afraid that I would get hate mail
but at least in our case there's some irony to it. We're using it for its artifact
value, it's not like we're endorsing the sentiment of these songs. It's a very complicated thing conceptually if you think about the nature of how that music came to exist
in the first place and then what we're doing with it like 30 years later with samplers
and improvising with it, the levels of irony get pretty deep pretty quick.
EJ: In the New York jazz scene yours is one of the few bands that includes a female
sideperson. What makes you unusual and how do you feel about the lack of women in
the jazz scene?
EE: Well, I'm not sure why that is. It's something that I'm really aware of but
I'm not sure why it is. I don't see that in our culture we're really trying to inspire
women when they're young to go for that type of thing. In the music scene I don't
see a lot of overt bias against women
but at the same time I guess maybe it just doesn't occur to a lot of musicians to
think of hiring women for their gigs. It's been kind of surprising because my mom
played music and so it was always the most natural thing in the world for me to see
women musicians. It never even occurred to me that it was an issue until much later. The
only thing I can say is that it's a nice thing to be able to have a group that's
not just like all guys. With Jim and Andrea it just feels somehow more like the
real world somehow. It's very easy for a group of guys to get insulated,
like you travel on the road especially and there's just a lot of things that just
start to happen that are not even thought about, just automatic-- the mentality can
definitely go a certain way. When I go out on the road with Jim and Andrea that
doesn't happen and it feels more normal to me. And I think this feels to me like I want it
to feel.
EJ: What kind of things were on your mind when you formed the trio with Andrea Parkins
and Jim Black?
EE: I started the trio in '94 and I had been thinking for quite a while about having
a new group with some kind of a keyboard in it. I had done a lot of music that didn't
have a chordal type instrument, it was usually like horns and drums. I had been
trying to get away from the sort of way a jazz band usually operates and when you have
a piano in a jazz band it's got a certain role that's very strong. And as a saxophone
player especially I feel that my role was almost being determined by the piano--
it's like the horn players are sort of soloing over top of the
accompaniment. And I felt that that language had been pretty much exhausted. I was
really attracted to the idea of a band that didn't have that-- a starker, darker
kind of sound. But after a while I started missing the sound of chords but I didn't
want to have this paradigm of the chord providing an accompaniment so I wanted to figure
out a way that I could subvert that. It took me a long time to figure it out but
eventually I started hearing accordion players, like in Europe there are some improvising
accordionists that are doing some interesting things and it made me start taking the
instrument seriously. Like it hadn't occurred to me before to take the accordion
seriously because the accordion's got a lot of stereotypes to it. So I started checking
out accordion players around town and Andrea Parkins' name had come up several times
and then after I went to go hear her play we set up a rehearsal. And we got there and played like
a ten minute improv and I was like immediately "man, I'm in love with this, this
is totally great". That was 3 years ago and I've been writing music steadily since
then for this band.
EJ: Jazz Trash seems to be a mixture of both composed and improvised music?
EE: It runs the gamut, we don't do many free improvs. Some pieces have very little
notations and others are fairly notated, actual pitches on staff paper. I've kind
of mixed it up, I like each piece to have it's own thing. It's not like I have one
format to use for every piece, I really try to make every one as different as possible.
So sometimes I might write a piece where my part is completely written out and Andrea's
part is completely improvised or the reverse or anywhere in between that. I definitely leave a good amount of space for musicians to bring what they do, their personal
sound, to the band.
EJ: How did you come to record The Sun Died, to cover the material of Gene Ammons?
EE: Gene Ammons was one of the first saxophone players who really inspired me and
still does and he's somebody who I think has been under-rated in the jazz world and
in fact I think there's a certain amount of jazz snobbery where he's concerned because
his music sort of straddled the r&b, bebop kind of thing. In the 60's he was really
popular. He's a very blues oriented player although I've always considered him to
be a jazz musician and I think in the jazz world there's an almost condescending
attitude to something that might have too much r&b in it and I am bugged by that attitude as
I feel that he's a person that inspired me just as much as any other jazz musician
and all the songs that we did on that record are songs that I have been listening
to ever since I was ten years old, that I always wanted to play. But since I've gotten so
far away from jazz in a lot of respects I never really had an outlet to play them
and I certainly didn't want to play them in a strict jazz context, that would be
kind of boring. One day I realized it might be a nice sound to have a really grunged-out guitar
and drums and saxophone play that leaving out the organ or leaving out the bass in
music that was really heavily dependent upon the organ. I think the thing about
that record that's unique beyond just the sound of it is the interaction, the way that
we can exchange roles very fluidly and still play these songs kind of in a groove
and in a real fun way.
EJ: It has always been difficult for musicians in the avant-jazz scene to get gigs
outside of New York in the states. Lately you seem to have been more successful
and you will be doing a tour in the South this fall. Do you think things are changing?
EE: I think that there's a lot more interest in this stuff in the states recently
than there ever has been which is really encouraging. I think a lot of it comes
from a whole different crowd, it's not even like a jazz audience-- it's more like
a punk audience-- people who came to improv
through punk. It seems to be a younger audience, on college radio our stuff is getting
played a lot. Whatever it is, it's a good sign. It's still harder to make money
in the states than it is in Europe but I'm just happy to be getting some calls.
EJ: Where do you think that music, including jazz, is going these days?
EE: I don't think it's going in any single direction which I think is actually a
great thing, I think that's the best thing about music these days is that it's not
going in one major direction. I feel kind of liberated by that. It always seemed
like jazz wasn't going anywhere or it didn't have the same kind of impetus that it did in
the 60's or early 70's and what the hell happening, it's kind of dead, it's kind
of depressing. And then I realized that there's so much going on now and that I was
looking at through this old paradigm, things are a lot different now. I see in a way it's
like coming together, whatever you might call jazz or some offshoot of jazz might
be intersecting with all this other cool music. I'm really interested in that but
as far as where that's going, it's
anybody guess. And I'm not sure I think of it in that sort of linear way anymore
like you can say Coltrane came from so and so and then after Coltrane... Musicians
these days are inspired by everything, influenced by everything that's going on,
it's not like there's one dominant trend like when Coltrane was playing. This is a completely
different time now and I think it's a great time because ten musicians can have ten
different concepts about music and they can all exist together.
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