Let It Burn: A new book chronicles the life and hard times of Ann Arbor's Laughing Hyenas

Thu, 08/21/2025 - 9:00am by christopherporter

Laughing Hyenas formed in the mid-late 1980s underground rock scene that birthed more widely beloved acts like Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, and eventually Nirvana, as well as the mainstream grunge and alternative era of the '90s. Rooted in the hardcore punk flare up just a few years prior, combined with the blue-collar sleaze of Detroit's Alice Cooper and raw excitement of Ann Arbor's Stooges, the Hyenas melded stinging guitars with pounding rhythms and one of the biggest voices on record, giving equal nods to bluesman John Lee Hooker and Nick Cave's pre-crooner noisemakers The Birthday Party.

Founding members John Brannon, vocals, and the late Larissa Stolarchuck, guitar, had already made names for themselves in Detroit's Negative Approach and L-Seven, respectively, before bailing on the city to set up camp in Ann Arbor and immerse themselves in their singular vision of starting the "best band in the world." After recruiting Kevin Monroe—he and Stolarchuck both adopted the last name "Strickland" in the band—to make the move from guitar to bass, and adding Jim Kimball—son of University of Michigan and Olympic diving coach Dick Kimball—on drums, the band had a solid lineup of players all living together in an old house off of Platt Road, who set to making dark and dangerous sounding rock 'n' roll.

After a run of more abrasive records on seminal indie label Touch and Go, all recorded with producer Butch Vig (whose later credits include huge hits like Nirvana's Nevermind, Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, and drumming in Garbage), and tours of the United States and Europe, Kimball and Monroe split to start Mule. Laughing Hyenas continued on with a new lineup and one last album of more refined material recorded at Easley Recording Studios in Memphis before splitting for good.

In his new book, Laughing Hyenas, author and journalist Steve Miller documents the band's obsessive arc and uncompromising sound, with first-hand accounts of mind-melting shows and fresh insights from Brannon, Monroe, Kimball, Vig, and more on the band's formation, slow rise and undeniable influence in the scene, and eventual fizzle under the weight of drug use and time. Published by the recently launched J-Card Press, Miller blends matter-of-fact reporting with passionate scene-setting and amusing anecdotes for an efficient, entertaining look at an underrated band figuring out how to be truly great while always one step from self-sabotage.

Set in '80s and '90s Ann Arbor, the town plays prominently, from day jobs at Harry's Army Surplus and Middle Earth, to the band's friendship with the Stooges' Asheton Brothers and MC5's Mike Davis, to storied gigs staged upstairs at the Heidelberg.

We caught up with Miller, who also fronted Lansing hardcore punk pioneers The Fix in the early '80s and wrote the excellent 2017 oral history Detroit Rock City: The Uncensored History of Rock 'n' Roll in America's Loudest City.

Q: What made this the right time for you to write a book about Laughing Hyenas?
A: It was kind of this confluence of events. I was working on a different project, and I met up with John in Dallas. He was in town to play an Easy Action [Brannon's post-Laughing Hyenas band] show, and he was telling me about how he was getting this live Hyenas LP together, and I thought, "Wow, that's going to be great." And just about the same time, this new publisher came to my attention, J-Card. They were doing retrospective mini books on bands from the '90s—of course, we fudged a little on the Hyenas—that was kind of like the 33 1/3 series. I thought, "What a great idea." So we came to an arrangement that I'd do the Hyenas, because this Hyenas live thing is coming out in November of this year on Third Man, and that was pretty much that, because I'd known the Hyenas, known all the people, and just the story and the lay of the land. It came together very quickly.

Q: What set the Hyenas apart from the other bands of the day for you?
A: For me, it was their—I guess we could call it image, but what they projected, how they projected themselves, which was this raw, smoky, amalgam of noise with a great beat and great musicians, all of them. To me, that whole thing was very uncompromising, and the fact that, if you knew them, they really just didn't give a fuck. They just went ahead and went for it. And to me, that's one of the earmarks of good rock 'n' and roll is not giving a fuck. But the music was uncompromising and bent out of shape and terrific. So I think those things came together to make this a band that probably couldn't exist today, because of their raw nature. They played with volume, they played with heart, and I don't see a whole lot of that today. I see a lot of image-conscious stuff. But I think with the Hyenas, it was just natural. I don't believe they cultivated it, although they might have put a few things out there that weren't absolutely true. They were very sincere in what they did.

Q: It seems like extremes were a big part of the band, and having a vision and sticking to it was important to them.
A: I loved the stuff that John had told me during interviews we did over the years, both for the Touch and Go anthology book and the Detroit Rock City book. And in fact, when I did Detroit Rock City, I thought to myself, "God, it's a shame I can't put more stuff in here, because they really do epitomize that rather jagged Detroit sound." The stuff from Brannon in the book, mostly, almost all of it came from those interviews.

Q: Ann Arbor is all over this book, and it was fun to see the different landmarks and cultural touchstones. How much do you think that this legacy Ann Arbor has—with bands like the Stooges and the MC5, and the fact that some of them were still hanging out in town—influenced the band?
A: You know, I hate it when people do this, but I would have to defer to them to talk about the influence of Ann Arbor on their music.

Q: There is another influence you talk about on the band in the book, which is the Birthday Party, especially the guitar playing of Rowland S. Howard. Can you say a little more about why his playing was so important?
A: I think you could hear it in the way Larissa played guitar. It was clear that something in Roland Howard spoke to her sound. She managed to wrangle, to weave that stuff, especially on the first couple of albums and, more importantly, in that first demo and the Merry Go Round EP. To me, it was very clear, and I'm sure it seemed clear to a lot of people. The Birthday Party was a big factor for John in founding the band, and then with Kevin, who was also at that [Detroit] show in 1983. It was truly a movement. You know how they say the Ramones used to play towns, and after they'd leave, 10 bands would start? The Birthday Party did this, too, and in this case, the result was the Hyenas.

Q: There are quotes from John about how he had everything he needed to start the best band in the world and how he had this "Monkees vision" of the band all living together. Did you get the sense at all that a sort of "delusion of grandeur" thing kept them going? Like, even when things were tough and not going the way they wanted to, they still had this big idea about what was possible?
A: I don't know if I'm getting from that, that they wanted to "make it," and I think that's another thing that made them so cool and so above the fray is that they weren't running around trying to figure out how they could live on what they were doing, which was a huge problem with the sound of the bands of that era, especially as we got into the '90s, where the whole idea was to get some big corporate label to sign you so you didn't have to go to work in the morning and so you could stop living the life of a regular person and be this entertainer with a paycheck. I know that the Hyenas didn't have any delusions of grandeur in that way, shape, or form. You'd see the other bands kind of catering their sound to what might be acceptable in a corporate boardroom. The Hyenas wouldn't do that. But they also couldn't do that.

Q: Yeah, maybe that's the wrong phrase, "grandeur." There's a way to be the "best band in the world" and also not be the biggest-selling band in the world, so those are different ideas.
A: Yeah, absolutely. They're mutually exclusive, almost. I shouldn't say that, I mean, we get The Rolling Stones, we got Led Zeppelin.

Q: One of the big strengths in this book is the way you set the scenes with live shows and even practices, describing what's happening on stage. Can you talk a little bit about seeing the band live, and then also, were these based on experiences you had? Are these based on accounts or videos?
A: The scene-setters, especially like the opening, I was at that show. And there was another show at the Heidelberg, probably one of the better times that I ever saw them. It just exploded. It was an amazing hot summer night in, I want to say, '91, but, boy, it was like that. I'd seen them numerous times, and then I went to that show with a friend and just—they were really on top of their game. I believe that's when things started to deteriorate, but you sure couldn't tell it on stage. And, yes, I also used the video that I had. John had given me some videotapes, some DVDs at one point. So I had that to rely on. And there is a surprising amount of video online if you want to go see it, some really cool shows, and just, again, you realize how good they were live. The CBGBs show for sure. I think the Heidelberg might be out there, and then there's a show at Club Clearview in Dallas. They were opening for Sonic Youth, and that was a particularly good one, too.

Q: One thing I was surprised to learn in the book is when you talk about Brannon not liking confrontation. Can you talk a little about John on stage versus John in real life, because I think you can't imagine a more confrontational-looking frontman on stage.
A: That's probably true. I think it was [Laughing Hyenas roadie] Bruce Adams who told me about how the band would come on—and this is in the early days—the band would come on and the crowd would come up to the stage, and John would start singing, and he said you could see the crowd visibly take a couple steps back. Physically, it moved the crowd. I thought that was really a cool thing that he noticed about just an amazing effect you can have. But I never found John confrontational in any way, shape, or form.

Q: You mentioned this was pretty quick for you to write, because you were in it and you know a lot of these people. Were there challenges to that, though, in terms of people telling stories about each other?
A: Just a little bit of that, but that's every single project, every single article, every single thing you do. You're going to hear people in one ear saying this and another. It wasn't that bad at all. There wasn't anybody that said, "They really sucked." There was the episode [from the book] in Amsterdam, with the hotel. I thought that was told well with restraint. There was no, "They really sucked because they're terrible people." That would have been no fun. And it would have been kind of a buzzkill.

Q: In general, you approach a lot of this very matter-of-factly, particularly when you talk about drug use. It doesn't feel sensational. Was that a conscious decision?
A: That's exactly right. It was just part of the story. I don't think anybody has ever denied it in the band. It wasn't as big a part as the music, clearly, but it did have an impact. It presented its challenges, but the fact that they accommodated their habits—the people [in the band] that did have those—and just prevailed and still delivered great music is a testament.

Q: There's been some interest in this time period lately. I just saw a Die Kreuzen book coming out, and there have been different documentaries. The Jesus Lizard got back together. John Brannon seems to be doing well on social media. Why do you think this era resonates right now?
A: Different areas have their moments. I mean, the '70s had a moment, the '80s—remember the '80s? Everybody goes, "Why are we thinking about this?" So the '90s, it's just human nature. You reflect on certain time periods. I only can look at it musically in this context. As I go back, I might play something from that era and go, "That's better than I thought." Or, conversely, "This is worse than I thought. What the fuck is this doing in my collection?"

Q: Speaking of collections, I have a personal question: I saw Discogs had their most valuable releases of 2025, and there, right at the top, that Fix seven-inch for "Vengeance" is still out there doing numbers. Any thoughts on that?
A: I hope it's because it sounds good. But yeah, I don't know. We had 200 of them; we ruined 15 of them. There's 185 that were left standing. I don't know where they are. I wonder how many exist at all, because, you know, little records like that get thrown out and so on. Again, my only thought is I sure hope it's because someone likes the song, but I certainly don't understand the collectibility factor. The funnier part is, I think that was the first song The Fix wrote. It came in from Craig, and I think Jeff just added the rhythm changes, and I reworked the phrasing, and it was a song. I'm thinking about that basement where we first started; we did it very quickly. We might have even done it at some of the first shows, maybe that summer of '80. We were probably doing that song already. But yeah, I don't know. That's kind of cool though, isn't it? I mean, you always want a number one single, right?

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer. 

Related:
➥ "Friday Five: Laughing Hyenas" [Pulp, December 11, 2020]

Northern Exposure: U-M professor Michelle Adams' "The Containment" shines a light on the 1974 Supreme Court decision on school segregation in Detroit

Tue, 05/27/2025 - 12:00pm by christopherporter

As a legal scholar and Detroit native, Michelle Adams had plenty of reasons to take more than a passing interest in the Milliken v. Bradley Supreme Court case. The 1974 ruling determined that, although Detroit's public schools had been illegally segregated, a plan to fix that by combining the predominantly Black district with surrounding white suburbs would not move forward, essentially halting Northern desegregation efforts across the country.

In her debut book, The Containment, the University of Michigan law professor digs deep into the history and legal precedents that led up to, and resulted from, this landmark case in a rigorously researched, moving, and accessible account of how civil rights leaders fought to expose Northern Jim Crow and promote multiracial K-12 education as a meaningful way to undo its harms and strengthen U.S. democracy for all.

Published earlier this year after 10 years of work—and three rewrites—the book has been praised by The New York Times, New Yorker, and Washington Post. But even more important to Adams, it has helped spark real conversations with readers—from those who lived through it to those who had never heard of the case before—and shine a light on those continuing to work toward school integration, such as the National Coalition on School Diversity, which recently invited her to speak.

We talked with Adams about the "extraordinary, life-changing experience" of writing her first book, connections between the past and present, and what gives her hope for today.

Q: One of the things I really enjoyed about the book is how, in addition to all the facts and dates and names, you interject your own thoughts in an understated way and even with some humor.
A: I tried to do that and I worked hard on my tone and making the reader trust me. I was obsessed with the reader in that book, and I think that the response I'm getting is consistent with that obsession.

Q: What has the response been like?
A: I couldn't really have asked for more positive publicity. But I think what's really important is just the people that I've been able to engage with who I never would have met. People talking about how it drives their memory of things that happened to them during the time, what their parents were thinking. Some people say things like, "I didn't know anything about this and it's just an amazing world." That's been the most important thing: being able to communicate with readers across the spectrum and invite folks who maybe don't necessarily think they would be open to this kind of argument to pivot and try to be open to everybody, no matter where they're coming from across the political spectrum.

Q: In the introduction, you talk about some personal events that sparked this idea for you. When did you know this was a book and how did it eventually come together from there?
A: I've been teaching law since '95. I've taught a wide variety of topics, and Milliken is a case I've always been interested in and wanted to know more about. I'm from Detroit, it happened when I was a kid and going to school in the suburbs. At one point, I just started reading and reading and reading, and I realized there was a story there, not just that it was an interesting case or a profoundly important case, but that there was a story that was interesting in itself. I knew that I wanted to write about it, but then that raised a question for me, which is, "How do I tell a story?" I've never written a book before. I've never written narrative, character-driven nonfiction, which I didn't know at the time is the hardest thing to do. So, I had to teach myself how to do a lot of things, like be a journalist and interview people and all that type of stuff.

Q: The amount of research that went into this book is kind of mind-blowing. How did you manage all of it?
A: I could never have done this without Cardozo Law School or the University of Michigan Law School. What I needed to have access to was basically a small army of very smart young lawyers. And that's what I have. If you look at the acknowledgement, you'll see a paragraph-length page of just names. And those are all the young lawyers who started working with me in the summer of 2013, all the way through just now. They all contributed something that was important to the book. For instance, there's 41 days of trial transcripts, and each of the days was over 100 pages. So you can do the math. I had my students read through those, and then they all wrote memos of exactly what was happening and synthesized it. Then I went back and read the memos and then I re-read the transcripts myself looking for particular things.

If I had to do it all myself, it would have taken five or six times as long. And then I had professors from different disciplines who read drafts along the way. So, it's my work, but I've been surrounded by a community of scholars and lawyers who've assisted me in ways that are great and small.

Q: One of the prevailing themes of the book is this idea that Northern Jim Crow and housing segregation were inseparable from school segregation, and it's still an issue today. With that in mind, what gives you hope for change today?
A: I'm by nature an optimist and I'm by nature a patriotic person who believes in the nation. And I think Martin Luther King believed in the nation. A variety of other civil rights leaders believed in the nation. We're coming out of and we are in, I think, a moment of great pessimism and great concern about the direction of our country. But this is not the first time that we've faced extraordinary challenges, and I believe we will get through them.

The reason I wrote the book, separate from telling the great story and other things that interest me, was that I really wanted to work on the demand side of school integration. I think public perception is that we tried integration. It failed. It didn't work very well. People didn't like it. And the story is much more complicated than that. So one of the things we have to do today is raise people's awareness and their consciousness about what the alternatives are and about creating demand in parents for well-resourced, equal, racially integrated education.

Q: As I read the book, it was hard not to think of current events, especially in the way issues are framed when it comes to undoing the harms of segregation, and also with all of the talk about activist judges. What are some specific connections you hope readers will make?
A: First, I didn't know I was going to end up writing a book about the nature and history and the makings of Northern Jim Crow. And once I got fully into the research, it's all there. So, part of it is just understanding that. But the next layer of what the book is about is understanding that the moves that the NAACP and Black activists were making, and the whole Brown [vs. Board of Education] movement, was really about democracy and making it possible for African Americans to be full citizens of the United States, but also enhancing democracy for all. And I think that's the connection to today's moment. We're in a moment where the question is, "Are we going to have a functioning democracy?" and Brown was always about that. If you go back and take a look at the case, there's a whole section about the importance of public schools, but the reason why the court is saying public schools are so important is because they educate our children to become citizens in our democracy.

Second, the book is in large part about housing, and another one of the things we're talking about today is how to stimulate the building of more housing and how to create more affordable housing. If we create more housing and more integrated neighborhoods, we will have integrated schools. There's a variety of things to think about there. But my contribution to the conversation is creating the demand.

Q: There are many really interesting characters in this book. One who becomes central to the story is U.S. District Judge Stephen Roth because he is able to be persuaded from one opinion to another after seeing the evidence. Do you believe someone in that kind of position can still have that kind of open mind in such a politicized environment today?
A: I have two thoughts. There's a lot of discussion in the book about judging. At some point I talk about why judging is hard, and in a lot of ways, this is a love letter to some of the Black judges of that era, as well as to Judge Roth. So part of it is just talking about the key elements we need in a judge, and understanding that a fidelity to law is foremost, but we also need to have the ability to be open-minded. If our mind is closed on every issue, you're not judging anything. You're just rubber-stamping what you already believe.

The second part is the difference in the information environment, and I think that's really where the problem is. I believe in our country, and I believe in our lawyers, and I believe in our judges, and I believe that there are many, many judges out there who bring the kind of qualities that Judge Roth brought to the job. The problem is that the information environment has changed so radically. People are getting information in a very narrow-casted way, both left and right. And that does raise problems and concerns about how people get information. It becomes about more than just the quality or the nature of the individual.

Q: You grew up in Detroit and you describe returning to the city while doing your research. How has getting acquainted with Detroit in this new way changed or shaped the way that you think about it?
A: Most of all, it gives me an appreciation for my parents, because they were both born in Detroit, understanding how they grew up and what their environment was like. Detroit's history is so long and interesting, so I don't purport to be an expert in the city of Detroit; I'm an expert in that moment in time. But what it's given me is a greater appreciation for what Black folk of that generation thought about a little bit, what was going on in the city at the time. I read a tremendous amount of news media—the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News—and became intimately familiar with how those papers were covering the story. So, I just have an appreciation for the city and what was happening and the depopulation that was beginning to happen and that kind of thing. It's just given me an appreciation for my hometown.

Q: This was your first book and you mentioned that if you knew what it was going to take to write it, you might not have started, but here you are. Will there be another book?
A: I will definitely write another book or two. I developed a skill set that I'm certainly not going to put on the shelf now. I love the process, and people are responding to the product. I think people are hungry to learn, and it's almost like I'm giving an opportunity for folks who haven't gone to law school to get a little bit of a legal education. I don't want to talk about what the ideas are at this point, because they're not concrete, but there's no question in mind that I will write another book, or several.

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer.

Open-Source Oscillators: Gear Lords, Ann Arbor Bleep Bloop Collective build community with wires and knobs

Tue, 04/22/2025 - 1:00pm by christopherporter

After a couple of years helping to promote his friends' electronic dance music nights in Washtenaw County, Evan Oswald started thinking about ways to grow the local EDM scene. An avid dancer and sometimes DJ, Oswald saw an opening for a regular weeknight happening that didn't take away from what others were already doing well. After some trial and error, he settled on Gear Lords, a monthly Wednesday night series focused on live music production where genre is less important than the means of production; Gear Lords performers create electronic music using hardware—sequencers, synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, etc.

"I was talking about live sets. People that would plug a bunch of pieces of equipment into each other—a bunch of wires and knobs and stuff," Oswald says.

While he admittedly didn't know much about how the music was made at first, and many people told him why it wouldn't work, Oswald pushed ahead as promoter and recruited friend and musician Javan Cain (AKA "OMO") as Gear Lords' resident artist. A year and a half later, Gear Lords has hosted around 30 events at a handful of venues around Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, building a regular community of performers and patrons along the way. 

"I really just wanted more going on in my neighborhood, and I didn't want to copy other people or step on other people's toes," Oswald says.

Gear Lords offers a platform to explore experimental sounds, trade equipment tips, and develop new artists, several of whom have taken the stage after attending previous events. Oswald has seen the growing community make an impact on the music.

"[With hardware-based production] There's more free variables, right? There's more knobs. There's more flexibility. There's more creativity. There's a lot more going on. And those artists, in my opinion, need a little bit more time to season," Oswald said. "They need practice. They need platforms. They need friends to play with and a lot of practice. And when they do that, the upside of it is that the sky is really the limit."

Equipment varies heavily from musician to musician, and styles range from ambient to danceable to out there. Oswald says part of the fun is talking with the musicians about how they made a particular sound or seeing them connect over things like how to fix a half-broken piece of rare gear. He and Cain also promote other hardware-based shows in town, encourage others to host their own events, and have even been approached about hosting a night in Detroit.

"I'm an anarchist and one of the things about anarchists is we're consumed with mutual aid networks, communities," Oswald says. "I think of church, but without the God stuff. It's just a bunch of people that care about each other."

Another growing community plugged into the hardware-based electronic music scene is the Ann Arbor Bleep Bloop Collective (a2b2c for short). Eik Eikenberry, who creates music as The Chillennial, founded the monthly meetup as a way to learn more about a kind of music he'd discovered after stumbling upon a livestream on Twitch.

"Suddenly there was a person making these beautiful alien soundscapes from a colorful panel of what looked like switchboards," he says. "I asked in the chat what this was, and was told all about modular synthesis."

After checking out an event and demonstration by North Coast Modular Collective—another local synth group that hosts concerts and workshops—at the Ann Arbor District Library, Eikenberry saw huge potential in the standing room only crowd but was disappointed to learn the next event was six months out.

"So I posted around various local social media channels advertising a new group all about modular synthesis to meet monthly, with the hope that someone would show up that could actually teach me how this stuff worked," Eikenberry says. "Thankfully, quite a few did."

With a traditional synthesizer, a keyboard is typically involved, and the signal path and options for altering the sounds it can make are predetermined by the manufacturer. Even if there are lots of choices, there's a limit to what can be done. With modular synthesizers, players build their own setups from individual, interconnected modules that can interact with each other to create any number of sounds, depending on what modules are available and how they are used.

Eikenberry says one way to think of modular synthesizers is like playing "sound Lego," with different "bricks" — i.e., "modules"—that can be used to make, change, or control a sound.

"If you want to get poetic about it, you are having a conversation with a device you have built and assembled piece by piece, for a very specific musical purpose, and everyone's is different," Eikenberry says. "It's like building your own musical lightsaber."

Today, a2b2c has about 40 members and regularly draws a dozen or so people out to its meetups. The informal info swaps and jam sessions started out of the downtown Ann Arbor library before outgrowing its conference rooms. Some members have since started performing in the area, including sets at Gear Lords. Eikenberry hopes to host events outdoors once it warms up.

"Getting into this hobby I had no idea we even had a music scene, much less a hardware electronic music scene specifically," he says. "Learning about Gear Lords shows, and then meeting other artists who would show up to our meetups, a lot of natural networking happened."

Even as the group grows, the idea is to keep it "newbie friendly" and inclusive.

"We have had ham radio operators visit without knowing the first thing about synthesis," he says. "By the end of the meetup, they had radio frequencies running through effects chains to get some pretty fun effects."

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer.

The next Gear Lords is Wednesday, April 23, at Ziggy's, 206 W. Michigan Ave., Ypsilanti, from 7-11:30 p.m. $5 cover. More info on the Ann Arbor Bleep Bloop Collective is available here, through their Discord server, or by joining their mailing list.

Enlightening the self, nurturing the music, and letting the arrow fly with Kenji Lee

Wed, 10/16/2024 - 12:00pm by christopherporter

Since relocating from Southern California to Southeast Michigan for school, multi-instrumentalist Kenji Lee has quickly become a mainstay in the local jazz and improvisational music scene, while also making a name for himself nationally. 

Whether leading a trio on sax, holding down the rhythm on double bass, curating an open jam, or teaching private lessons, Lee is immersed in performing, curating, and educating, connecting with audiences on tour throughout the Midwest and locally at the Blue Llama, Ziggy's, and the Detroit International Jazz Festival.

We caught up with the busy Ypsilanti musician by email to talk about his musical roots, the challenge of organizing inclusive performances, and the personal importance of Edgefest, which returns to Kerrytown Concert House for its 28th year, October 16-19, and where he's performing Saturday with his Fortune Teller Trio.

Q: Your bio mentions you were born in Tokyo and raised "immersed in music" in Southern California. What brought you to the U.S., and how did those early experiences shape your musical interests? Were your parents, or someone else close to you, also musicians?

A: I was born in Japan, but we moved to the States when I was pretty young. My mother is from a small fishing village south of Mount Fuji and my father is from Los Angeles. Neither of my parents are professional musicians, but they both valued music and played instruments in their youth. My father played piano and clarinet and my mother played shamisen. My father is a pretty serious jazz fan and played me jazz records by Coleman Hawkins, Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson— mostly straight-ahead stuff. He was also a regular at a club called Body and Soul in Tokyo through the '90s and got to hear and hang with a lot of great musicians that came through Tokyo. My mom is more interested in pop music and British Invasion bands. That was all in the air when I was growing up.

Q: When did you first take an interest in playing music yourself? Was there a particular teacher or mentor or influence who helped put you on the path?

A: I don't remember a time where I didn't really love playing and listening to music. When I was a kid, I would learn songs by ear that I heard on the radio and play them on the piano for my friends at school. I played clarinet and saxophone in my middle school band and spent all of my time in the band room—tremendously cool, I know.

Around that time, I met the late, great Roger Shew, an amazing L.A.-area jazz bass player and educator who directed my middle school and high school jazz bands. He showed me what the music was all about. He was warm, hilarious, witty, and a brilliant improviser. He really took me under his wing once he noticed that I was getting serious about the music. He was very intentional about showing me a wide array of music, from Ornette Coleman to Hank Mobley to Warne Marsh to Vijay Iyer. We would play duo together a couple times a week and he would teach me a new jazz standard every week. I eventually started going to his gigs and would sit in; he was always incredibly patient and encouraging. He was able to show me what a life in music could look like and how deeply enriching it can be.

Q: What drew you to the University of Michigan, and what was that transition like for you? It seems like you're fully immersed in the Ann Arbor improvisational scene. How soon did you become aware of what was happening here and get connected to places like Kerrytown and Canterbury House and the community around them?

A: I gravitated toward the University of Michigan because of the great faculty, welcoming community, and resources. U of M is home to what I think is one of the most open-minded improvised music programs in the U.S. I am grateful that I was encouraged to explore some facets of my artistry that I don't think I would have been exposed to in a lot of other collegiate music schools. 

Outside of U of M, I pretty immediately immersed myself in the scene in both Ann Arbor and Detroit. The improvised music scene in Ann Arbor and Detroit is really vibrant and, as a student, I was just excited to hear more great players and eventually make music with them.

Q: Your 2022 album with Fortune Teller Trio, Kyūdō, shows a lot of range—and sounds amazing—from the hard-driving to more atmospheric and "free," and then just some beautiful ballads. Can you talk about those sessions and what your goal was for the record?

A: Thanks for those words! The session was one full day. It was intended to be a trio date with myself on tenor saxophone, Andy Peck on bass and Jonathan Barahal Taylor on drums, engineered by our friend Morgan Brown. It wasn't until later in the day of the recording that Estar Cohen joined the group. We had been recording all morning and in a moment of telepathy, we all kind of said, "Well, you know who would sound great on this? Estar." I called her, and she happened to be down the street. She said she would come sing on the record if I helped her put some air in her car tires. Needless to say, I obliged!

Andy, Jon, Morgan, and Estar are wide open. They help me hear sound for what it is. My goal was to try and reflect that in a record. I wondered what comes out if we just play—some written material, some improvisation—and don't try to have a complete vision of what the end result looks like. What came out that day was free-jazz dirge, poignant ballads, noisy textural improvisations, bebop, and whatever else. If it was a different day, it could've been something very different. But, on that day, I think it captures our feelings, our interests, and our insecurities very well.

That's where the kyūdō idea comes into play: In Japanese archery, they say that you can practice something over and over, but if you are focusing on a target, you will not hit it. You have to free your mind of the target and trust that your practice will guide the arrow to where it needs to go.  

Q: Do you have any new recordings in the works, and if so, anything you'd like to share about them?

A: We have plans to record again this fall. Stay tuned. In the meantime, check out my website for more details on performances, etc.

Q: In addition to composing, recording, and performing, you're active in curating and promoting performances around Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, and Detroit. Why is this work important to you? Your website mentions diversity, equity, and inclusion, and building community as being a big part of it, and I'm curious to hear about how you feel about DEI, and that sense of community, in the local jazz/improv/out music scene today.

A: Someone's gotta do it!

No, really. I don't think it gets talked about enough how much of a challenge and risk it is to put on shows that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive. To clarify, that means not only are the bands diverse, but the audience, too. That means the gig is not only affordable to attend, but the musicians are getting paid respectable fees. That means that every member of the audience, staff, and artist feel welcome regardless of their identity. Easier said than done if you ask me.  

I'm just trying to do my part the best that I can—it's a work in progress. I'm playing Edgefest this year, but I'm also working it, as I've done for the past couple of years. I'm picking up musicians from the airport, I'm backlining instruments, I'm helping with sound, I'm doing whatever needs to be done to make the music happen. Muhal Richard Abrams said "Creative musicians should not consider themselves entertainers. Their purpose is to enlighten—themselves first and then the audience." Words to live by for me.

Q: Edgefest is coming up this weekend, and you're officially listed with your group. Anything special planned for it? Any outside collaborations happening? Any favorite memories of fests over the years?

A: Edgefest is a dream gig for me. I wouldn't be playing the music that I play without this festival.  I've heard so much great music at the fest over the years: The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, the list goes on and on. This is my second time playing the festival with my band, and it's an honor. The audience and the other musicians are always so encouraging of our music. I just can't wait to hear all the amazing musicians and spend some time around some of my heroes. I really can't say enough how much I love this festival and the musicians performing.

Q: It seems worth noting that you also play more "conventional" gigs. How does staying versed in more traditionally accessible music inform your own compositions and more "challenging" performances? And vice versa?

A: I love music. That's it. It's all the same to me. I try to find my voice in all of the music I'm playing. I think that comes back to what my mentor Roger Shew instilled in me. He would encourage me to nurture the music. That's what I try to do. I try not to see it as anything different. If anything, I love that I get to play with many different people and personalities.

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer.

Edgefest 28 runs October 16-19 in Ann Arbor. Kenji Lee's Fortune Teller Trio plays Kerrytown Concert House as part of Edgefest on Saturday, Oct. 19. More info and tickets are available here.

Instinct to Play: Thollem McDonas at Kerrytown Concert House

Mon, 11/04/2019 - 1:45pm by christopherporter

Thollem McDonas might be a compulsive collaborator. The American pianist, composer, keyboardist, songwriter, activist, teacher, and author's many projects have included several renowned, and lesser known, players over the years, and he doesn't seem to be slowing.

From improvisations with perennial experimental music headliners -- guitarist Nels Cline; double bassist William Parker; the late composer, accordionist, and electronic music pioneer Pauline Oliveros -- to his Italian agit-punk unit Tsigoti and the art-damaged spiel of the Hand to Man Band (also featuring American punk icon Mike Watt on bass and Deerhoof's John Dietrich on guitar), there's little ground McDonas hasn't covered or isn't covering. He might just be the ideal "six-degrees-of" candidate for people into that particular Venn diagram of weird improv, challenging chamber music, and thinking-people's punk rock.

McDonas plays Kerrytown Concert House on Friday, June 30, with a trio completed by two accomplished locals: reedman Piotr Michalowski and cellist Abby Alwin. We talked with the restless, and very thoughtful, pianist by email about his many collaborations, balancing political action with music, and sitting down at Claude Debussy's piano.

Q: You began playing piano at a very young age. What first drew you to the instrument, what are your earliest memories of playing, and when did you realize this is what you wanted to do in life?
A: My mom was a piano teacher and my dad played in piano bars. Some of my earliest memories were with the piano. I remember climbing inside my mom’s baby grand before I was old enough to start lessons. I was 13 when I kind of woke up one day and realized I had all these musical ideas. That composers were all people and that I was a people and I could be a composer. This is when I really made music mine for the first time. This is when I became obsessed.

Q: When did your interests begin expanding beyond your initial classical training?
A: I’ve always been curious about different approaches to music and what music means to people from different countries, cultures, and generations. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area and turned 13 in 1980 when West Coast punk rock was in its heyday. When I was 12 my mom remarried and my step-sister worked at Kuumbwa Jazz Club in Santa Cruz. I started heading over there regularly and hearing some of the greatest innovators. I’ve always experimented; there really wasn’t a beginning to that. It’s more like there wasn’t an end, then a new beginning. Life is all about experimenting and playing with the world. We’re born with the instinct to play, the trick is not losing this in the first place.

Q: I read that you "decided to become homeless" for several years after college and "wander and live out of a backpack, rather than pursue a career as a concert pianist." Where all did you wander and what did you do? How did your parents take the news?
A: I didn’t know my dad so well, but my mom was pretty devastated. I quit everything during the build up to the Persian Gulf War. I didn’t want to circulate money or participate in society, and the idea of making a "career" in music, or anything else, seemed absurd. I lived with a backpack and sleeping bag, sleeping in all kinds of situations, from action centers to federal buildings to on the street. I traveled up and down and around the West. I burned a lot of bridges. In some ways, I wish I could’ve realized then that music was my best way to contribute (not that I have necessarily changed the world with my music either). It’s taken me a long time to figure some things out! But all those experiences are important parts of who I am and the work I’m doing now, both of which I feel good about, ultimately.

Q: Political action seems to be as important to you as musical exploration. When did you start to develop your political inclinations and what events and policies have shaped them over the years? How do music and politics intersect for you?
A: Learning to balance the two has been a constant struggle for me my whole life. I started with animal rights when I was in junior high school and that moved into environmental issues, then anti-war, then police brutality, institutional racism and the injustice system, and so on. Like I said earlier, the Gulf War was a big moment for me. I think we are really fucking things up (or allowing a few to), and it’s unfortunate because it’s so unnecessary. I don’t want to get preachy here, though. Estamos Ensemble and Tsigoti have both been specific outlets for me, at least in terms of expressing something larger than the music itself. And right now my partner, ACVilla, and I are in the middle of a three-year endeavor making audio/video experiences with the United States as a subject. We started it last year during the presidential campaigns, and it’ll culminate with the mid-term elections next year.

Q: Estamos Ensemble's mission is to encourage dialogue and collaboration around the U.S.-Mexico border. What made you take this up, and what has the response been since it started? Do you think most Americans really want a border wall, and what could change their minds?
A: I don’t know what most Americans really want. The border wall is cruel, and the security and private prisons and laws associated with it are Draconian. It’s the ultra-rich elite who are responsible for convincing people that poor people are their enemies. I think as artists we are in a special situation to bring people together and to share our common humanity. I started Estamos Ensemble in 2009, and we just released our third album (Suube Tube).

Q: What was it like to be invited to perform Debussy's works on his own piano and then to actually do it?
A: It was pretty amazing all around. The city of Brive-la-Gaillarde sent me a very official document, signed by all the city council members. It was only the second concert they had had with his piano since it had been found and semi-restored. It wouldn’t have been possible to pack more people into the room where the piano is normally on display. I could really feel the audience. And to play Debussy’s music, as well as my own, on his piano, to hear his music from that same vantage point as when he wrote this music originally -- pretty crazy! The first half of the concert I played pieces he had written on that piano. For the second half, I had invited the great contrabassist Stefano Scodanibbio to join me in structured improvisations I created specifically for us for this occasion. The recordings were released on Die Schachtel, out of Italy, and were the first recordings ever published of Debussy’s piano.

Q: Molecular Affinity, your album with Pauline Oliveros and Nels Cline, came out the month after she died late last year. What led to those sessions and what were they like to take part in? Was there any thought given to this possibly being some of the last music she recorded and released?
A: No, I think most everyone thought she was going to be around for a while. She still had so much energy right up until the end, working on an opera and so many other projects. This was the third trio album Nels and I recorded together, each time with a different third member (William Parker on the first, Michael Wimberly on the second), and we asked Pauline if she’d be into it, and she was. We had a great time before, during, and after the session. Pauline was always a real joy to be around, and Nels and I are good friends. So it was a pretty relaxed time making music together in an old renovated barn in upstate New York. Pauline suggested this studio because Daniel Weintraub, the main engineer, is making a documentary about her. She was working on it with him. Fortunately she was, and now Daniel just has to follow through with what their general plan was.

Q: You've done three albums now with Cline. How did you two come together and what makes him a good recording partner for you?
A: I heard Nels and Thurston Moore play and had an idea for a duo with Nels where he’d play melodies through feedback in response to the harmonics I’d bring out of the piano with these hyper speed clusters. He was into it. Then I thought to invite William Parker to play as a conduit between us. When we recorded, we used these relationships as leaping off and landing points. For the second album, we were both involved with Analog Outfitters out of Urbana, who repurpose parts from old Hammond organs, and I thought it would be interesting to see what might happen with all this equipment. Nels is a really interesting person to me and an incredible musician who has always been exceptionally curious, diving into many different approaches over the years.

Q: How did the Hand to Man Band come to be and how was jamming with Mike Watt? Were The Minutemen a group you followed as a Bay-area teenager?
A: The Minutemen were playing when I was just coming of age, so they definitely had a big influence on me. Punk is what we make it and “start your own band” are about two of the most influential statements I’ve ever heard. Watt is an incredibly intense person. Definitely one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. A crazy memory for all kinds of subjects throughout time, including who played in what band and seemingly every single gig he’s ever played. He’s a fan of Tsigoti. John Dieterich (of Deerhoof) and I were invited to record at Nicholas Taplin’s studio, which was in Austin at the time. So, I thought to invite Watt and John invited Tim Barnes. We made a second album as well but decided not to release it.

Q: Tsigoti is something very different from your solo and improvised work, and also different for punk rock -- even at its more adventurous -- since you don't often hear acoustic piano in the genre. It makes me think of The Minutemen and maybe The Ex a little. How did the group start and what does this project let you do that your many others don’t?
A: Tsigoti was started on a whim in a musician's house in the hills of Tuscany. I had been at this house for a while and with three days left, me and Andrea Caprara and Matteo Benicci and Jacopo Andreini decided to make a punk album. I had pages of words I had spent a week writing while I was in Prague about the war between Israel and Lebanon, and we turned these into songs. The whole idea was to write songs in the studio, recording them in less than three takes, mix and master before I left. We’re now working on our fifth album. We did a U.S. tour a while back and a bunch of Italian/European tours, including an anti-mafia tour throughout the country in association with anti-mafia groups there. We’ll probably play some shows in Italy next summer.

Q: For this Ann Arbor show, you're playing with a local mainstay in free improv in Piotr Michalowski and also Abby Alwin, the orchestra director for Ann Arbor Public Schools. Have the three of you ever played together before? What can people expect?
A: We’ve all played together in one way or another, though never as a trio. We’ll be playing structured and freely improvised music. It will go in many different directions, exploring all the many different possibilities our instruments are capable of. Solos, duos, trios, extended techniques. I’m sure there will be many very abstract sonic moments as well as modal/melodic playing. Abby and Piotr are both amazing musicians, so it’s going to be amazing. What else is there to say?

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Concentrate Ann Arbor.

Thollem McDonas Trio plays Kerrytown Concert House, 415 N. 4th Ave., Ann Arbor, on Friday, June 30, at 8 pm. Tickets are $5-$30. Visit kerrytownconcerthouse.com for more info.

Korde Arrington Tuttle and The National's Bryce Dessner examine photographer Robert Mapplethorpe's work through song in "Triptych (Eyes of One on Another)"

Tue, 03/12/2019 - 1:45pm by christopherporter

By the time the singers, musicians, and iconoclastic images of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe take the stage at Ann Arbor's Power Center on Friday, March 15, everything should be in place for the premiere of a new UMS-commissioned work examining the late photographer's work and legacy through song.

Edgefest & Piotr Michalowski have helped make A2 a haven for avant jazz

Wed, 10/18/2017 - 2:30pm by christopherporter

As free-jazz hero Joe McPhee got started on the third movement of Tuesday night's Fringe at the Edge concert at Encore Records, he settled into a minimalist, two-beat groove that was sometimes barely audible.

While McPhee patted his palm against the mouthpiece of his pocket trumpet, drummer Andrew Drury fell in, lightly tapping skins, rims, and cymbals for a nervous, anti-beat.

Piotr Michalowski held his sopranino saxophone and listened a moment, then completed the percussive theme by popping and puffing through his horn, before the trio opened up into long-toned exuberance. When it was over, Drury made Michalowski jump and then grin, as he frantically bowed away at some metal for a screeching effect.

Announcing the band members between numbers, Edgefest organizer Deanna Relyea shared that the visiting McPhee and Drury would be up early Wednesday morning to teach music students at Scarlett Middle School. Ann Arborite Michalowski, Relyea's husband, would be up early too, she joked: "To clean the house."

If you've followed jazz or improvisational music in Ann Arbor at all for the last 20 or 30 years, you've probably run into, read something by, or seen and heard some mind-expanding reed work by Michalowski.

The improv-music-scene staple is a regular face at Kerrytown Concert House's avant-garde Edge events, including its annual Edgefest, which returns this week for the 21st edition (Oct. 18-21), where he also often plays as a scheduled performer or sits in with visiting musicians. He also writes a monthly music column for the Ann Arbor Observer.

While he can hang with players like Drury and McPhee ("Joe McPhee, you know, is God," he says), Michalowski, makes it clear he's a hobbyist when talking about his own music -- "a palette cleanser" from the academic rigor of his previous 9 to 5 as a professor of Near Eastern Studies at the University of Michigan.

Other than a few masterclasses on extended techniques, Michalowski is self-taught. He's played several reed instruments over the years, eventually focusing on bass clarinet, but baritone and soprano saxophone and sopranino are often in the mix.

"I guess I have the Vinny Golia disease, so that I'm a multi-instrumentalist," he says. "I don't really have a main horn."

Michalowski grew up in Poland and moved to the United States in 1968 to earn his master's degree and Ph.D. at Yale University. After postgraduate research at Harvard and Penn, he took his first job at UCLA.

He'd been an avid jazz fan since he was a teenager -- he swore off rock 'n' roll after seeing the Jazz on a Summer's Day concert film -- but his tastes leaned more toward the old school, New Orleans-style than the new avant-garde.

In Los Angeles, Michalowski made friends with a record-store clerk who turned him onto some further-out sounds, including L.A. players the clerk also booked at the storied Century City Playhouse. There, Michalowski checked out gigs by adventurous improvisers, like John Carter, Nels Cline, and Golia, the last of whom inspired him to start playing clarinet.

"It was a fantastic scene," he says.

After a stint teaching in Philadelphia during which he didn't really play, Michalowski landed in Ann Arbor in the early '80s to work at the University of Michigan, where he continued to teach until just last year.

He took up music again at the urging of a friend and was soon playing traditional jazz, swing, and standards on alto and tenor sax, performing with David Swain's II-V-I Orchestra and jams with friends. He enjoyed the tunes, but it didn't feel right.

"I was playing 'Body and Soul' at some art place, and I just thought, 'It's totally ridiculous for me to play "Body and Soul."' I have in my head Coleman Hawkins and all these classic performers. It's almost sacrilegious for me to do it. While I love listening to that music, playing it was absurd. You could say playing as an amateur is absurd anyway, but I love doing it. That was just so crazy. I decided I was just making an ass of myself, and I just couldn't really justify it."

So, in the '90s, he turned back to his love of improvisation and found some like-minded, younger players at the University of Michigan and its Creative Arts Orchestra, who he started sitting in with. He collaborated regularly with James Ilgenfritz, Sarah Weaver, and "a whole generation" of musicians until they eventually left town to pursue their music.

Another longstanding collaborator for years was Detroit violinist Mike Khoury, with whom Michalowski has released a half-dozen or so short-run CDs. He's also continued to play with Ilgenfritz when the two are in the same city. In March, the two played as an impromptu trio with U-M music professor Stephen Rush during an Ilgenfritz show at Kerrytown Concert House, and earlier this month, Michalowski and Relyea, a mezzo-soprano vocalist, joined the bassist in Steve Swell's band for a New York performance.

Through Kerrytown and Detroit's free improvisation scene, Michalowski has made connections around the country that have developed into mini-tours with professional musicians and one-off shows in other cities when traveling for work.

He recalls one notable house show in Berkley, Calif., wiith Golia and Jon Raskin of the Rova Saxophone Quartet all playing sopraninos. "It was advertised as a very squeaky evening," he says.

When pianist Thollem McDonas was recruiting musicians to perform with at Kerrytown last summer, he asked Michalowski and Ann Arbor cellist Abigail Alwin to join him. McDonas recorded the session, which is now posted to Bandcamp as part of a 15-album series produced while touring.

"Piotr is such a joyful person, and it overflows into his playing," McDonas says. "He moves seamlessly from one instrument to another. (He has) profound respect for his fellow musicians (and) giant ears. He allows much space for others, (and) he can jump head first into any texture and dynamic."

Using those "giant ears" is a big part of the music's appeal for Michalowski.

"One of the great things about this music is it's truly in the moment and it's always collaborative in the sense you really have to listen," he says. "You're always sort of balancing. You're on top of a ball on one foot. You can always fall off and do something that's egregiously wrong."

While other forms of jazz and new music have made an art of working through complex harmonies, free improvisation, puts the focus on sound and timbre.

"When you're playing a reed instrument, it's an extension of your body, and you immerse yourself in these overtones and this sound and discover new ways of doing that," he says. "It's very intuitive."

He tells a story about avant-garde saxophonist Evan Parker leading a workshop where he told musicians to "make your entrance" count. It's something that's stuck with him over the years, and he's seen great players, like McPhee, do countless times by hanging back, listening, and then taking the music into a totally new direction.

"Good musicians will pick it up and move it," he says. "You have to pick up the cue immediately. When you get on the stand, you can't coast."

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Concentrate Ann Arbor.

The 21st annual Edgefest is based out of Kerrytown Concert House, 415 N. 4th Ave., Oct. 18-21. For tickets, more info, and visit kerrytownconcerthouse.com.

All the shows listed below are at the Concert House unless otherwise noted:

Wed. 10/18, 6:00 pm - Mike Gould, Malcolm Tulip, Deanna Relyea, Katri Ervamaa
Wed. 10/18, 7 pm - Trombone Insurgency
Wed. 10/18, 9 pm - Pheeroan akLaff: aRT Trio
Thu. 10/19, 6 pm - Jonathan Taylor Quintet: Mover
Thu. 10/19, 7 pm - William Hooker Duo featuring Michael Malis
Thu. 10/19, 8 pm - Joseph Daley Tuba Trio
Thu. 10/19, 9 pm - Allison Miller’s Boom Tic Boom
Fri. 10/20, 6 pm - Ben Goldberg’s Invisible Guy
Fri. 10/20, 7 pm - Tom Rainey Trio
Fri. 10/20, 8 pm - Andrew Drury’s Content Provider
Fri. 10/20, 9 pm - Larry Ochs Fictive Five
Fri. 10/20, 9 pm - Tristan Cappel Quartet (free, Sweetwater's in Kerrytown)
Sat. 10/21, 12 pm - Edgefest Parade (free, Ann Arbor Farmers' Market)
Sat. 10/21, 2 pm - Gayelynn McKinney & Ken Kozora "> Oluyemi Thomas Trio
Sat. 10/21, 4 pm - Steve Swell’s Soul Travelers
Sat. 10/21, 5:30 pm - Matt Daher Duo (free, Amadeus Restaurant)
Sat. 10/21, 7:30 pm - Andrew Drury/Edgefest Ensembles (Bethlehem United Church of Christ)
Sat. 10/21, 9 pm - Adam Rudolph’s Moving Picture with Hamid Drake
Sat. 10/21, 10 pm - Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple Double

Flexible & Free: Dave Rempis' Ballister at Kerrytown Concert House

Thu, 09/28/2017 - 9:00am by christopherporter

Saxophonist Dave Rempis has fond memories of playing Ann Arbor over the years. The Chicago-based improviser and long-time member of renowned free jazz group The Vandermark 5 fondly recalls late-'90s gigs with locally grown and trained players, such as Colin Stetson, Stuart Bogie, and Matt Bauder.

But none were likely more memorable than a workshop for students at the University of Michigan School of Music, where Rempis had applied and been rejected a few years earlier.

"I totally flubbed my audition with a classical saxophone teacher, so he said, 'Why don't you go play for the jazz guy next door?'" Rempis says. "So, I went over there, and I'm not sure how well that went. I didn't get into the University of Michigan, and my first gig on tour with The Vandermark 5 was doing a workshop in the same professor's classroom. So that was my first paying gig out of college. I thought that was kind of funny."

After ditching classical sax for ethnomusicology at Northwestern University, Rempis dove into the Chicago music scene after graduation, where he became a vital part of not only its storied free jazz and improvisational music circles as a musician and presenter, but also indie rock community as an events coordinator and, eventually, business manager of the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Today Rempis plays with several improvisational music groups as well as solo, and he also serves as board president of the Elastic Arts Foundation and operations manager for the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. On Saturday, he returns to Kerrytown Concert House with Ballister, his hard-charging trio with cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and drummer Paal Nilssen-Love.

We spoke with the affable reedman by phone from Chicago, where, in addition to his music, he took the time to talk with us about "nerding out over spreadsheets," perpetual pre-show jitters, and the enduring work ethic of the late, great Fred Anderson].

Q: How did you get started in music?
A: I started playing when I was 8. My father’s Greek, and we had a family friend that played in Greek bands around town. I would see him play at weddings and stuff, and I was totally fascinated. My brother started playing clarinet pretty young, and as soon as he started that, I was like, “I want to play the saxophone.” In high school, I was lucky to play with a small jazz group at a local music school. A lot of kids were focusing on playing big-band charts and not a lot of improvising, but I really got the opportunity to play jazz tunes and improvise on them, which was an incredible puzzle. It was just a really interesting set of musical and other challenges, and I just totally got hooked on it.

Q: I read that you went to Northwestern to study music before switching to ethnomusicology.
A: I was young and I didn't know what I was getting into, so I applied for a classical saxophone program to get my technical chops together. As soon as I got there I realized this was the most soul-sucking thing I could possibly do to myself. Just hearing saxophone players in practice rooms for eight hours a day playing exercises without any musical conclusion. It was like gymnastics.

I was lucky my first semester to take a class with a musicologist who did a lot of work in Zimbabwe. He also wrote a big book on jazz improvisation. That class just kind of blew my mind. I was playing and maintaining my jazz interest, but by junior year of college, I decided to study in Ghana for a year in West Africa, which was totally incredible and very much connected to the interest I had in jazz.

Q: Out of college you were asked to join The Vandermark 5. How did that happen?
A: I'd met [bandleader] Ken [Vandermark] a few times, and when I got out of school I decided I wanted to play. My plan was to work a day job and practice as much as I could and see what kind of opportunities I could find around town. I went to a show at The Velvet Lounge one night, and I asked Ken if I could take some lessons with him on extended techniques he and others were doing. So I took a couple of lessons with him, and that fall, in 1997, Mars Williams decided to leave the band. Ken called me in November or December and said, "Mars is leaving the Five, and I'd like you to come audition for the band."

Q: Did you get a sense at that time that things were picking up there? It sounds like there was a lot of energy and excitement around that scene of music.
A: It was incredible. There had been so much happening in Chicago for a long time, and I think in the '80s a lot of the energy dissipated. But in the early '90s, there was sort of this convergence of forces. Ken is one of the people who really did a lot of work to build an infrastructure for the scene. He started this series at The Lunar Cabaret, and then he started The Empty Bottle series in 1995, and those things started to have a lot of resonance.

Around the same time, Fred Anderson had been running The Velvet Lounge for a while, but I think he was just running it as a bar and then eventually started doing music there in the early-mid '90s.

So this momentum started to happen, and it was a combination of local musicians doing more and people coming in from out of town. Fred [would] play at the Velvet all the time. I remember seeing Steve Lacy play down there with his trio, Milford Graves at The Empty Bottle, a lot of European improvisers at The Empty Bottle through its festival, Joe McPhee.

All these people started coming back to Chicago, and it was a regular occurrence in the late '90s that you can go see incredible people twice a week visiting from out of town. That helped really create this exchange with what was happening in Chicago and what was happening all over the world that is still sustained. Now it feels like it's been here a long time. We almost take it for granted. But at that point, it was something that was just emerging again, so there was a lot of excitement around it.

Q: I love that idea of Fred playing his own club a couple of times a week -- that you could just go and watch him play whenever you wanted.
A: Totally. You could go down the Velvet, and he'd be sitting there working the door. Somebody, it might have been Ken, wrote some liner notes about Fred sitting in on the second set with a band and then walking off stage to fill up the cigarette machine. That's still a work ethic and a mentality that informs the way a lot of venues here are run.

Q: How long were you working on Pitchfork Festival, and how did that come about?
A: I helped start it in 2005 and just left last fall. Mike Reed is a drummer in Chicago who founded the Pitchfork Music Festival. I started bartending right out of college, working at a small jazz club called the Bop Shop and then started working for a couple of different larger rock venues owned by the same company, so I’ve always kind of been involved in front of house type stuff in venues.

I had a lot of large concert concessions experience and had also worked a number of outdoor events for those folks. So when Mike started the festival, he asked me to come on as the concessions manager in the first year for what turned out to be a pretty large operation. The second year he split up with his partners on the event and asked me to come in and basically take over a lot of the logistical organizing type stuff on the event.

Q: Is logistics something you enjoy, or is it more about community enrichment?
Q: I guess kind of enjoy it. I’m a very detail-oriented person. I would love to just focus on music, but the stuff that goes into making sure music happens is a huge factor in making sure I and others have the opportunity to present our work. I do those things more out of necessity than desire, but at the same time, I can definitely nerd out over some spreadsheets.

That translates on a lot other levels. We’ve both been organizing jazz and improvised music events in Chicago for a long time. I’ve been booking a Thursday night series here at the Elastic Arts Foundation since 2002, where I'm now board president. We’re doing four-to-six concerts a week as a small not-for-profit venue without a bar.

Q: Being a working musician on the road, you probably get a lot of ideas about how to run a space like that.
A: Totally. I did a solo tour last spring and part of the idea was to work on solo material and approaches, but going on the road by myself, I was able to go to a lot of different places I wouldn’t take a band, much of it for financial reasons. I did 31 concerts in 27 cities in the States. There are so many things happening, and sharing that information and learning from other people about how they’re approaching this kind of stuff, about how they fund it, how they organize it, who’s doing it, all that kind of stuff is really valuable, and I think a big part of what we do as touring musicians is actually helping to create and sustain those networks.

Q: What sets Ballister apart from your other groups?
A: Part of what I like is the flexibility of it. In a way, it's the instrumentation and the skills of these particular musicians, and a lot of it comes down to Fred, who's a cellist who just has this incredibly wide palette. He can interact more like a bass player might, playing a vamp or something, or he can interact the way a guitar player might, playing more melodic things. He can interact the way an electronics musician might, with a lot of screeching noise-type stuff, and he's great at all those things.

Paal is somebody who's out playing 250 to 300 concerts a year on the road. I can't quite imagine living that life, but he's somebody who shows up to every single gig and is totally committed to it.

On a personal level, it's just a bunch of guys who really enjoy playing music and are really passionate about life and just put a lot of energy into the whole thing.

Q: What mindset does playing with those two put you in? What does it let you explore that you can't with other groups?
A: It can be a pretty loud group at times, and I'm really enjoying exploring those limits of how far can I push myself physically. That on its own can lead to new things musically. And in a lot of ways, it ties to the music I was interested in and studying. Ideas of spirit possession, in a way, for example. Or you listen to Coltrane in his later period, and he's so focused and energetic and pouring all this physicality into his instrument. That type of thing really stands out to me listening to it but also playing it, how that feels. It's almost like an athletic thing, to push yourself to these boundaries. I just think you get to new places by doing that.

Q: Is anything charted at all beforehand, even in a basic way? Some of the recordings have some very composed sounding parts.
A: It's all purely improvised. We've never written a chart or came up with a game plan of how we're gonna start or structure a piece or anything. It's all open.

To me, one of the "goals," so-to-speak, is to create music that sounds like music and doesn't just sound like three people playing together randomly. Improvised music that speaks to me does feel as composed as what you might say composed music sounds like. And that's what I think makes for a good performance is when that feeling is there, of, "We know where this is going." There's no question. If the musicians feel that question and aren't sure where it's going, then you hear that.

Q: Do you still have a feeling before you start, of, "OK, let's see what happens?"
A: Definitely. I get nervous right before I start, just in the sense of, "What are we gonna do? Is this gonna work?" You know, we don't have anything to fall back on. This could be a trainwreck (laughs). I think that fear never quite goes away, but then you get on stage and start playing and you realize, "Oh, no, it's gonna be OK."

Q: You started Aerophonic Records a few years ago with a vision to control your body of work and not use streaming services. How's that going and how are you feeling about it today?
A: It's a lot of work, but it's one of the best decisions I've ever made. It's allowed me in so many ways to connect with my audience. I have email conversations with the people who buy my records who live all around the world. There are so few labels at this point putting out this kind of music, it's really kind of a blessing to not have to wait for them to approve a project. As long as I'm able to plan out my schedule, I can release whatever I want, whenever I want. That's very liberating in terms of trying to coordinate schedules around when a band can tour, my own personal schedule, all that kind of stuff.

Q: How did the refugee benefit album you did come about and what was the response like?
A: [Pianist] Matt Piet called [drummer Tim Daisy and I] up to say, "Do you guys want to do a session?" in the fall of 2016, so we said, "Yeah, sure." It ended up being on the day after the election. All three of us were basically in a state of shellshock. We just got together to play, and afterward we said, "We should do something with this around inauguration time." We ended up doing a benefit for Planned Parenthood the Saturday after the inauguration. It was a really nice triple bill at Elastic Arts. The room was packed, and we raised a ton of money for Planned Parenthood, and the set just felt really great, and it tapped into the positive energy that day from the Women's March because the concert ended up being a kind of after party for that.

It just had a really special feeling to it. I think that's a great record, and I'm really proud of it, and we were able to raise about $500 for Refugee One, which is a local Chicago group that helps resettle people in the United States from various parts of the world.

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Concentrate Ann Arbor.

Dave Rempis' Ballister plays Kerrytown Concert House on Saturday, Sept. 30, 7:59 pm. For tickets and more info, visit kerrytownconcerthouse.com.

Slow Burner: Alabama Slim at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival

Thu, 08/17/2017 - 12:45pm by christopherporter

In addition to the impossible-to-replicate lineup, the real legacy of the original 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival is in how a group of college students helped introduce mainstream, white America to the incredible music being overlooked all around it for years in favor of repackaged versions from the U.K.

If there's such a secret hiding in plain sight at this year's revived Ann Arbor Blues Festival, it's probably Alabama Slim. Born Milton Frazier in Vance, Alabama, Slim didn't record an album until he was in his 60s, when he finally teamed up with his cousin, fellow New Orleans guitarist Little Freddie King (not to be confused with the late Chicago guitar great Freddie King) to record The Mighty Flood for the Music Maker Relief Foundation.

Slim's a first-rate storyteller, whose warm baritone voice and tasteful, hypnotic playing recall all-time greats, like Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker on a slow burner.

We talked to Slim briefly by phone on the eve of a family reunion in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was looking forward to some good food, drinking a couple of beers, and relaxing after a long drive.

Q: How did you get started playing the blues?
A: My mother had a Victrola. You know, one of those Victrolas with the little dog looking down the horn? We had this record of Big Bill Broonzy: "Mean Old Frisco," and I liked it, and I fell in love with it. And then I heard Lightnin' Hopkins and Muddy Waters and different ones, and I said, "Aww, man. I wanna play."

When I was about 11 or 12 years old, a guy across the district, you know, we lived in the country, he had a guitar and he would come over and play, and I would get his guitar and start strumming on it and strumming on it. And he said, "This boy's gonna play one day."

So somehow my uncle got a guitar. I think he paid $10 or $12 for it. I started blummin on it, you know, "blum, blum, blum," and my fingers and my thumb got swollen up. I had to soak them in salt water and all that stuff.

So one day, I played this record by Lightnin' Hopkins, "Rocky Mountain." And after that, I played this Bill Broonzy record, and I was like, "Aww, shucks. I got it goin' now."

Q: When did you start playing out?
A: We were going to school, and we had three or four cats that were wannabe musicians: piano, horn. So we'd get together and play. People would get us, you know, out in the country where we had that whiskey drinking and home cooking going on. They'd say, "You boys come over and play for us." We'd go over there and play, and good God almighty, they'd give us about $10 a piece, and that was a whole lot of money then.

Q: How old were you when you're playing these parties?
A: About 18 or 19. After that I started running a little wild. You know how it is with them girls, man, and taking a little taste of that liquor and going on, you know. So I put it down, and I come back at it again, and I put it down. So when I came back this time, I stayed with it.

Q: You didn't record an album until later on in life, is that right?
A: I recorded an album in 2006.

Q: But before that you hadn't made any recordings?
A: No, I hadn't done any recordings. Just playing around with this band, that band. I'd get me a couple of guys and we'd play around and that. But after Katrina hit in 2005, then I made that CD, The Mighty Flood

My cousin Little Freddie King, me and him would jam around. He had a 335 Epiphone guitar, and he said, "I know you can handle it." So I got to playing with him and going around. His manager, he was crazy. He didn't want me being with Freddie. So, after Katrina hit, me and Freddie went to Baltimore. I was supposed to play a couple of numbers, but Freddie's manager made sure I didn't get a chance to play. So I told Tim Duffy (founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation), and that kind of made Tim a little mad. He said, "I tell you what: when you get ready to cut a CD, you call me," and he gave me his card and said, "My secretary will set it up." And so I did. I went and cut that CD The Mighty Flood with Freddie, and I've been rolling ever since. I've been all different places: Germany and Scotland. I go all over. Everything's going sweet and good now.

Q: Do you feel like you're making up for lost time?
A: Yeah, I am. Really, I am. I'm catching up, and this music keeps me going. I'm 78 years old now. This music is keeping me going. You know, I'd be sitting around or something, I'd probably be real down. When I play my guitar, I feel like I'm 16 years old.

Q: So when you were "putting it down and picking it up again," what were you doing for a living?
A: I always kept a job. Some of the jobs were really rough. Working at a sawmill, doing coal mining, digging ditches, and whatever. When I got to New Orleans in '65, that's where I stayed. I got a job at the World Trade Center of New Orleans. I worked there 24 years. I was a porter there. In other words, a maintenance man. When they had parties and things, that's when I really made my big money. That was a nice job. And I had my little band going, and we were doing pretty good.

Q: You have a distinct style we don't hear as much today. I saw someone describe it in a YouTube comment as "Blues with possibly the fewest notes." It was a compliment, and I agree. Where did that style come from, and is that something you're conscious of?
A: The blues tells a story, because the real blues is the problems that you have and things that you're going through. That's real blues: heartache, or something that you want, you can't get it; or you think you can get it, but you're like, "Why can't I get it?" So you've got the blues.

And then if you love someone and something's going wrong and your woman quits you or something, man, you've really got the blues!

Q: I'm thinking about the sound. There's a tendency in newer groups to focus on big solos. When I listen to you and watch you with the band, it's like everything just fits together.
A: Right. You know, a lot of guys come out here today and talk about playing the blues, but their set will be halfway blues and halfway rockin' stuff. But the real blues, you just can't get around it.

Q: That heartache, it really comes through in your songs, and you're telling these stories about "The Mighty Flood" and "Crack Alley." Are these real experiences you've lived through?
A: Yeah, man! I been through that stuff. I'm serious. It's funny, I hooked up with a girl, and I really didn't know at the time, and then I found out she was addicted to crack, and I had to cut her loose. And I was in the flood. I saw it.

Q: Are you living in New Orleans now?
A: Yeah, that's where I live right now. When the flood hit, I went to Dallas, because my wife has two sisters out there. So me and Little Freddie and my wife went there and stayed about 14 months, then I came back to New Orleans.

Q: When you were in Dallas, is that when you started thinking about making the first album?
A: That's when I put it together. Sure did. I was devastated with that Katrina. Water everywhere. Oh, my God. If you listen to the record real good, I tell the whole story of it.

It's kind of amazing how something so disruptive gave you an opportunity you might never have had.

That's right.

Related:
➥ Resurrected: James Partridge on the 2017 Ann Arbor Blues Festival
➥ Put a Spell on You: Michael Erlewine on the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Concentrate Ann Arbor.

Alabama Slim plays the Ann Arbor Blues Festival at 2 pm on Saturday, August 19, at the Washtenaw Farm Council Fairgrounds, 5055 Ann Arbor-Saline Road, in Ann Arbor. The whole event runs from 1-11 pm and advance tickets are $35 ($17.50 for kids age 13-18, free for kids 12 and younger). For tickets and more info, visit a2bluesfestival.com.

Resurrected: James Partridge on the 2017 Ann Arbor Blues Festival

Thu, 08/17/2017 - 6:00am by christopherporter

As an East Coast transplant and late-comer to the blues, you can forgive James Partridge for not knowing Ann Arbor's storied history with the world's greatest blues musicians until fairly recently (or exactly blame him -- there's no Beale Street or other marker to speak of).

But as founder of the recently formed Ann Arbor Blues Society and co-organizer behind the return of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which takes place Saturday, August 19, at Washtenaw Farm Council Fairgrounds, he's making up for lost time quickly.

Partridge was turned on to the blues by a guitar teacher while taking lessons as an adult and was soon thinking of ways to get more live blues into his life on a regular basis locally.

When he started doing his homework, he soon learned he was basically living in the birthplace of the electric blues festival.

"I started doing some research and was like, 'Whoa!" he says. "Not only did Ann Arbor have blues festivals here years ago, but we invented the blues festival for crying out loud. I couldn't believe that."

The original 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival is believed by many to be the first and greatest of its kind, with headliners including just about any name a casual blues fan could think of -- B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Son House, Big Mama Thornton, Otis Rush.

The follow-up event in 1970 was a close second, and after taking a year off, the festival returned in 1972 under new management as the Ann Arbor Blues and Jazz Festival. Under the direction of John Sinclair, the fest expanded to include jazz giants, like Miles Davis and Sun Ra, before dying out a few years later. Another run of Blues and Jazz Festivals ran from the early '90s to mid-'00s with a slightly different format, ending in 2006.

With the 50th anniversary of the original Ann Arbor Blues Festival approaching, Partridge contacted several local event promoters and others in the music industry with the idea of trying to revive the fest in time to commemorate that milestone. When he didn't get any takers, he eventually decided to do it himself, thanks in part to the encouragement of co-organizer and local blues musician Chris Canas.

"The fact Ann Arbor had such a tremendous impact on the genre and on the lives of the musicians who played here and the people who organized it and the people who attended but nearly 50 years later it was like nobody knew that had happened except for a really small group of people was just startling," Partridge says. "I could not fathom that."

With the help of about a dozen volunteers, Partridge and Canas set to booking the venue and artists, securing sponsors, advertisers, and vendors, and promoting the festival. Thanks to a successful GoFundMe campaign, Partridge says attendees can expect a first-rate stage and sound system for the all-day event.

"We've done a significant amount of work in a very short period of time," Partridge says. "Far more than most people ever thought possible. I thought we would need a year of planning, and we put it together in like four months."

Partridge hopes to get at least 1,000 people out for this first "dress-rehearsal" festival Saturday, with his on eye substantially growing the festival each year from there.

"We talked to people who performed in 1969 and '70 and '72 and their management, and they are very aware of what's happening here this year and very interested in participating in the future," he says. "To the extent that this event is successful and advertisers and sponsors are on board for the future, we're going to be able to draw some incredibly talented and big name artists in the future."

For this year's acts, Partridge says the organizers curated a selection of national, regional, and local acts covering a range of styles, from the heavy, blues-rock of the Nick Moss Band to the more traditionalist leanings of Alabama Slim and Benny Turner, who also played the 1972 Blues and Jazz Festival.

"It's so significant to me not just that [Benny] is coming, but that he's so excited about playing here," Partridge says. "That connection to the old festivals and old Ann Arbor and what we accomplished was really important. That's something we want to carry through as we move up into 2019."

It's important to Partridge to honor those earlier festivals and the city's ties to the music while also building what he hopes will be a future for it, to the extent that he sought counsel from previous producers, like Peter Andrews and Sinclair. The latter actually made contact with Partridge when he heard what he was up to.

"I'm in my 50s, and I knew of John Sinclair through the John Lennon song," Partridge says. "He was larger than life. He was a legend to me. The fact that this guy who has been immortalized in song by a member of The Beatles wanted to talk to me was just, I couldn't even fathom that."

In the future, Partridge also hopes to do something ceremonial to honor Ann Arbor and the role it has played in blues music.

"I think it's time the city get its due and the people who participated in that and had the vision to do that at the time also get some recognition," he says. "I'd like the city to become proud of what it did and recognize what it did in terms of blues music and how it shaped what we listen to today."

Festival Lineup
1:00 pm - Blair Miller
1:30 pm - Tino G's Dumpster Machine
2:00 pm - Alabama Slim
3:00 pm - Hank Mowery & The Hawktones featuring Kate Moss
4:15 pm - The Norman Jackson Band
5:30 pm - Chris Canas Band
6:45 pm - Eliza Neals & The Narcotics
8:00 pm - Nick Moss Band
9:30 pm - Benny Turner & Real Blues featuring Brandon "Taz" Niederaurer

Related:
➥ Slow Burner: Alabama Slim at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival
➥ Put a Spell on You: Michael Erlewine on the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival

Eric Gallippo is an Ypsilanti-based freelance writer and a regular contributor to Concentrate Ann Arbor.

The Ann Arbor Blues Festival is from 1-11 pm Saturday, August 19, at the Washtenaw Farm Council Fairgrounds, 5055 Ann Arbor-Saline Road, in Ann Arbor. Advance tickets are $35 ($17.50 for kids age 13-18, free for kids 12 and younger). For tickets and more info, visit a2bluesfestival.com.