"Kulak 29 & 30"
Eskelin with Andrea Parkins (accordion and sampler) & Jim Black (drums)
(hatOLOGY 521)
Here are the liner notes...
March 20th, 1994. That date marked our concert debut in New York City. We've been
a band for four years now. Even so, we are only just beginning to get to the point
where I feel like we have a real past on which we can build. I wrote most of the
music on this recording shortly before we began a tour of the States in September of 1997. Roaming
the countryside in a van while performing has been rare for improvising musicians
on the is side of the Atlantic. I've said it before and it's true, touring in the
United States is more exotic that touring in foreign countries. The microcosm of truckstop
culture alone is a sociological study in itself. One afternoon I brought Andrea and
Jim (vegetarians no less) to a rib joint in South Carolina called "Piggy Park". It
was right next to a church replete with a huge black cross in the parking lot and enough
neon to rival a sex emporium. We got a lot of looks. On the more serious side, we
did manage to bring the music to quite a few people along the way. Highlights included playing my hometown of Baltimore for the first time in nine years, a set of country
music improvisation with guitarist Eugene Chadbourne in South Carolina, and a workshop
for music students in Knoxville Tennessee.
It's also telling to note what the band listened to in the van during our many hours
of driving time. Squarepusher, Iggy & The Stooges, B3 organ jazz, The White Album,
Velvet Underground, StereoLab, The Silver Apples. When we weren't listening to CDs
there was the almost surreal world of religious and talk radio throughout the southern
US to tune into. Some of the music was amazing, church hymns sung ragged and raw
as hell by just regular folks. Abusive talk show hosts giving advice to the lost
and indecisive. It gave us a chance to reexamine what we grew up with, the elements that make
up our music; jazz, rock, country, folk music, commercial music, and even trash culture.
Immediately following the US experience we headed to Europe for a three and a half
week tour that culminated in this recording. We performed in Holland, Germany, Switzerland
and France as well as five dates in England where we played several towns in which
jazz and improvised music is not often heard.
It's now been a year since our last recording, "One Great Day..." was released. The
ideas that were the impetus for the formation of this band are still in place. Most
of the material here was written especially for this recording with the exception
of two pieces that I wrote at the band's inception. As different as this music is from what
I was doing six to eight years ago I'm still dealing with many of the same concepts
that sparked my interest at that time. I'm constantly looking for structural methods
to change existing and assumed paradigms in improvised music, sometimes blurring the
line between written and improvised material but more often creating a highly defined
distinction.
And then there's the issue of realizing and documenting these ideas. In the liner
notes to our last recording I touched on the topic of studio recording versus live
performance and I'm still of the opinion that a studio recording is the best medium
to capture what I do. Live performance is certainly the most important mode for growth and
understanding in this music for musicians and audience and there are certainly scores
of great live jazz recordings. Studio recordings are their own entities however and
as such I like to take advantage of that fact. A live performance needs to be interesting
one time. A recording of that event must be interesting on repeated listening. Many
issues that are engaging to me as an improviser are not always the same issues that
make sense the first time a listener hears them in concert. By the same token, music
that speaks well in live performance may not always have the same impact on recording
since the proportions between overall shape and content are perceived much differently over the course of repeated listening, often exposing and exaggerating technical
and structural weaknesses that were irrelevant in the live performance. Once we
record a piece of music I feel much freer about letting it change during the course
of a tour. I trust that the audience is with us but I realize that each person hears something
different and different audiences react differently even to similar performances.
It's not possible to simply play a piece of music as a fixed entity for every situation. Adjustments must be made simply in order to communicate past the distractions and
expectations inherent in live performance.
Personally I don't care for many of my live tapes. I think they were great sounding
gigs but not always great sounding recordings. I generally prefer studio recordings
where I am able to completely focus myself with no distractions. With that said I
can now tell you that this "studio" recording contains one live selection. It just goes
to show that no matter what I think I know about myself or what I'm trying to do
there are always surprises. In any event I view these recordings as being as close
as possible to what the band sounds like live while rendering the compositions as closely as
possible to what I hear in my mind when I wrote them. I take great pains to insure
that our concert performances are as natural as possible. We deliberately avoid unnecessary amplification of the band. It tends to make the experience sound less live. Going
to a club today is not altogether unlike listening to a record except that the sound
is usually far too loud and not well balanced. You're not hearing the sound of the
musician anymore, their actual sound is being drowned out by the amplified version. For
me, it's much more exciting to hear the sound coming directly from the instrument
(and yes, that instrument in some cases can include an amplifier as in the case of
Andrea's accordion and sampler). In the process we learn what it means to play music, communicate
with an audience and make documents along the way. You, the listener, are an integral
and essential part of it all. Thanks for joining us in that process.
Ellery Eskelin
February 1998
New York City
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