Hilary Hahn Interview 2001

Having just recently enjoyed violinist Hilary Hahn's concert at The Stone, and her CD of Charles Ives's four sonatas, I was reminded of this interview from almost exactly a decade ago.

Ran: 11/20/01 on CDNOW.com
Head: The Provocative Pairings of Hilary Hahn

There have been such marketing abuses in recent years of the prodigy phenomenon that the prospect of hearing another young, female violinist might have connoisseurs blanching. Hilary Hahn, who released a CD of Bach at age 17, was the antidote to that. And it's not just that Sony hasn't plopped her into the ocean wearing a gauzy white shift for any album covers. Hahn is one of the finest violinists around, regardless of age; she's self-assured without the least hint of arrogance; she's constantly putting together intriguing discs pairing warhorses of the concerto repertoire with more modern works; and she's articulate and thoughtful.

The Baltimore native began playing violin at age three in the Suzuki program of the Peabody Conservatory, and from the age of five taught by Klara Berkovich. Upon entering the Curtis Institute, at age 10, Hahn was taken under the tutelage of the late Jascha Brodsky, an Ysaÿe pupil, and continued studying with him until his death; later teachers included Jamie Laredo and, for chamber music, the late Felix Galimir and Gary Graffman. Sony signed Hahn to an exclusive contract that has so far yielded four CDs: the aforementioned Bach disc; a pairing of the Beethoven Violin Concerto and Leonard Bernstein's Serenade; the Violin Concertos of Samuel Barber and -- commissioned for and premiered by Hahn -- Edgar Meyer; and now the Concertos of Brahms and Stravinsky. All have been not only much praised, but successful on the classical sales charts as well.

Now 21 years old, Hahn is perhaps past the prodigy stage, but her playing continues to thrill and please.

CDNOW: Once again, you've made a concerto disc with an unusual pairing. How do you decide what to record?

Hilary Hahn: Sometimes I propose an idea to Sony and sometimes they propose an idea to me, and we work out something that works for everyone. The Brahms/Stravinsky was actually my idea, because I've wanted to record [the] Brahms for a long time. It's such a great piece, and the chance to work closely on such a masterpiece like that in the recording experience is really something that brings the piece a lot closer to you and you clarify a lot of things about it in your mind, at least for me. So I wanted to record the Brahms, and I was trying to think what would go well with it. It's a little tricky with a piece like the Brahms, because it's such a full-scale work, it stands completely on its own. I was looking for something that could hold its own next to the Brahms but not take anything away from the Brahms, and vice versa. I wanted to have something in which both pieces would reflect the strengths of the other.

One thing I find that's fascinating about the Brahms and Stravinsky combination is, both composers worked very closely with violinists, Brahms with [Joseph] Joachim and Stravinsky with Samuel Dushkin, in the course of writing the pieces, and you can hear that the composers themselves were not violinists, because there are some ideas that seem to come from other instruments, or the familiarity with playing another instrument, certain sequences or patterns or whatever. But they still work for violin, because they worked with violinists on it and got the ideas to come across well for the players too.

So I liked that aspect of it. I love both pieces, and I had wanted to record the Stravinsky as well. I thought about putting them together and it seemed to work very well. The Brahms, as I said, is very full-scale. The Brahms has three substantial movements, plus the cadenza. The Stravinsky has four shorter movements that add together into a very memorable concerto, for me. I've never played any piece besides the Stravinsky that starts with the same chord in all movements and diverts from there into its own individual movement. So I thought the Stravinsky was a fascinating piece, and I like the unusual structure of it and the form. I had some ideas that I want to bring across in it, and same with the Brahms. I feel lucky we were able to work it out.

Was one of the ideas in the Stravinsky that it's very similar to chamber music?

That it is; it certainly is very much like chamber music. The Brahms in its own way is as well. Brahms wrote so much chamber music, I've played some of it. The Stravinsky has a lot of things going on at once and at different times. The Brahms is a more -- I don't want to say it's more unified, because the Stravinsky is unified too -- but the Brahms, it's more consistent throughout the piece. There's sort of a long line from the very first note to the end of the third movement, to the last chord in the whole concerto. Stravinsky is more segmented, yet when you put all the segments together, it makes for a very complete picture. So the pieces feel very different to me playing them. The Stravinsky is very much like chamber music in that there are a lot of instruments that have their own individual parts, and there are a lot of different things that happen. Stravinsky is a great orchestrator, and the Brahms is the Romantic masterwork.

I'm sure Stravinsky would play his own music very differently than I play it. But for me, I love the concerto 'cause it has so many different things within it. It has a huge range of emotion. There are parts that are very dry, parts that are very witty, other sections that are extremely lyrical, and some melismatic lines in the third movement especially, some things that are very driven rhythmically and others that are quite free. One thing I like about the Stravinsky is, I can hear where he bases certain sections on Bach. There's a part that reminds me of one of the Orchestral Suites, and then he used part of the Bach Double [Concerto] as inspiration for part of the fourth movement of the concerto, you can hear where that all comes into play. And Brahms, as well, admired Bach, so that's another connecting factor between the two.

Your Brahms is not slow, bucking the trend of the past couple of decades epitomized by Perlman and Mutter. To a degree, your recording recalls Heifetz and Milstein.

Those are the recordings I've heard the most, as well, and maybe just having that in my ear, and also, Jascha Brodsky, my teacher, was 83 and good friends with, or at least very well acquainted with, those musicians, so I feel a real connection to the past, and that's the group of players that I grew up on and grew up listening to and feeling a connection to through my teacher.

So you do listen to recordings of other players.

They're mostly dead, actually.

Do you take them into account when you're forming your interpretations?

I try not to copy anything, but often there's a lot to be learned from any recording, because the person who's recording it has played it a lot and is very familiar with the piece and has developed their own ideas over time. Everyone develops separate ideas. There are certain basic traditions in some pieces that some people follow, some people break. But in the end, everyone comes up with their own take on something. With something like the Brahms, there's so many recordings. I don't know what-all I've listened to; I've listened to a lot. But as far as using recordings, I tend to listen to a lot of recordings when I'm first learning a piece, to get the feel of the whole piece, hear how it all fits together and get different ideas of where to start from, and then once I've figured out what I want to do with it, I just go from there, and I don't tend to listen to tons of recordings after a certain point. And I always try to learn the orchestral part to every concerto that I play. I get the conductor's score and I get a recording that has a clear orchestra texture to it. So then I listen to the recording and play along with it, just playing the orchestral part, so I know what-all is going on.

Have you decided what you're going to record next?

I'm going to be recording Mendelssohn [E-minor Concerto] and Shostakovich 1 in Oslo with the Oslo Philharmonic and Marek Janowski. Another combination! We're going to be recording that this coming Spring and releasing it in the Fall.

How many concertos do you have in your repertoire at this point?

Forty-something, I think 42 or 43. I try to add on about three or four concerti every year, or two to four. It depends. This year it's four, some years it's two. I play Beethoven and Brahms every year, and try to cycle through the other stuff as much as possible.

Top 25 British Classic Rock Acts

The great Ian Alterman alerted me to this:
"The following is a list of the 25 Greatest British Artists, as voted by listeners of Classic Vinyl, one of the three Sirius/XM station that play classic rock."

25 - Peter Frampton
24 - Joe Cocker
23 - Bad Company
22 - Yes
21 - The Kinks
20 - George Harrison
19 - Rod Stewart
18 - Deep Purple
17 - Jethro Tull
16 - Traffic
15 - Moody Blues
14 - ELO
13 - Elton John
12 - David Bowie
11 - Queen
10 - Cream
9 - Fleetwood Mac
8 - John Lennon
7 - Pink Floyd
6 - Eric Clapton
5 - Paul McCartney
4 - Led Zeppelin
3 - The Who
2 - The Rolling Stones
1 - The Beatles

Since music didn't stop developing in 1980, I'm already annoyed by this list, though I suppose that "classic rock" listeners enjoy pretending to live in a world where punk never happened, much less post-punk and, aside from a couple members of Fleetwood Mac, no women are allowed.

Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison are on the list because of their famous bands, who are also on the list. As much as I like some McCartney/Wings albums, they aren't quite great. Clapton and Harrison don't even come close. If the Small Faces/Faces don't make the list, Rod sure doesn't on the strength of just one great LP.

So here's an attempt, off the top of my head, to construct a better list.
*Artists not on the Classic Vinyl list

honorable mention: The Hollies, Brian Eno

25 - Black Sabbath*
24 - Cream
23 - Fleetwood Mac
22 - Queen
21 - The Kinks
20 - The Who
19 - Elton John
18 - Nick Drake*
17 - Soft Machine*
16 - Traffic
15 - David Bowie
14 - ELO
13 - Kate Bush*
12 - The Zombies*
11 - Yardbirds*
10 - Richard Thompson*
9 - Procol Harum*
8 - John Lennon
7 - Yes
6 - King Crimson*
5 - Genesis*
4 - Led Zeppelin
3 - Pink Floyd
2 - The Rolling Stones
1 - The Beatles

If we continued this list into the present and expanded to 30, these guys would make the cut:

Wire
Peter Gabriel
Joy Division
Sex Pistols
Buzzcocks

Addendum:
For some reason, I can't comment on my own blog. Great. So here's my reply to Ian (whose band The Larch is pretty great).

John Lennon, unlike his bandmates, makes the cut because unlike them, his solo albums are so great that even if he'd never been a Beatle he'd make this list.

I tried to have it both ways with my little appendix of post-classic rock bands. Also, as my pal Chris Nickson pointed out on Facebook, I left out the Clash -- purely an oversight. I think I have to cut the Sex Pistols (who join the honorable mention list) to make room for them.
Were I to incorporate them into the list, it would go The Clash #7, Joy Division #9 (so, really, #10), Wire #11(13), Peter Gabriel #14(17), Buzzcocks #17(21).

In Memory of Songwriters Nick Ashford and Jerry Leiber

I wrote a lengthy article on the Monday passing of Ashford and Leiber for Culturecatch.com. I totally geek out on the hit chart data. Please read it here!

Firesign Theatre interview 1999

This isn't about music, but when I was at CDNOW.com, I was editor of the Comedy/Spoken Word section and got to interview some pretty amazing people. George Carlin twice! I've already put both of those up here. Talking to two of the guys from Firesign Theatre (over the phone, in separate conversations) was on that same level. Here are the transcripts:

David Ossman

How did the group reunite?

We got back together for our 25th anniversary. A performance was booked for Seattle, so we put together a show for that. We hadn't worked together for quite a while, maybe as much as ten years. We did a big and very successful, a big sellout show at the Paramount in Seattle in '92, and then we went on the road that fall with that same show. It was a little bit rough. We were booked in halls that were too large for the crowds we could draw, and so forth. So we kinda did it, we felt, this is the Beach Boys on the road, and we did what we could do. But it was very difficult to let it go. We've been living with Firesign Theatre so long that it was very hard to abandon it once it was -- more than just revived, because we work very intensely together. So when the opportunity came to do a new album -- some time ago, we started two-and-a-half years ago on Immortality -- it was like, okay, we need to be able to do in a series of albums in the late '90s what we did in the late '60s and early '70s. The decision was to really not do anything that was like the past, or re-do stuff aside from a mention here and there, but to really do something that was new and contemporary, and I think we succeeded in doing that with Immortality, which kind of gave us a launch platform to go that next step.

I see these two albums as very much like Electrician, which was a very contemporary comedy album in its own way, and How Can You Be In Two Places at Once, which was really an album about radio. We re-examined our radio roots in Immortality and yet it was very contemporary -- it still is. But in approaching Boom Dot Bust, we wanted to do something much farther out there in terms of writing and a non-linear piece which is more like Dwarf. It took us a long time. We started in November of last year, then really started writing in January, but then we had to go on the road in April.

It's interesting to know how much time you put into these things. I had a friend who characterized Dwarf as "four guys getting high on acid and free-associating."

[Laughs] I don't think the four of us ever got high on acid, certainly not in the same room at the same time. Maybe everybody did individually, but we never did that, we've always been very meticulous writers and really have worked on our scripts, worked 'em out. What we've developed now is a sense of how we work, we're much wiser about how we work. We know we can go in the studio and move things around, that we don't have to have a completely perfect script, because what we do best together is sometimes first take, or within the first couple of takes of a scene, because we can bring improvisatory freshness to it that gives it that sound of four guys high on acid free-associating. There is that free-association, that improv, but it comes right in the studio when the mikes are on.

The question of, as you said, not wanting to do things that you've already done -- what is it like to concoct these incredibly complex scripts and then have to perform them over and over again live?

Well, we've done two major shows that involved our first five albums. We did Anytown USA in 1974 that sort of put Bozos and Dwarf together and elaborated on them, kind of extended the albums to the extent that you knew why Clem was returning to the Future Fair, what his motivation was for trying to get to Dr. Memory and turn the thing off. And then, in a much straighter fashion, on that 25th anniversary tour and still on the last time we were on the road, we were doing Nick Danger, but there's -- when you're on stage, and I know Austin's a vigorous spokesman for this -- the audience needs a certain touchstone, and if we just went out with nothing but completely unfamiliar material, it would be difficult for them. So we always try to have a grounding of things that is like those tunes everybody wants the Beach Boys to sing. We've decided really that Nick Danger, which for us is throw-away-the-script-and-have-fun-onstage, is the most satisfactory one for doing over and over. We can bring a certain amount of freshness to that. I think we could do Dwarf again. It's like a play, and we adapted it into a play form. When we went out and did the Immortality material, there was quite a long debate on how much of it we were going to do. We started out by doing much less than we finally did onstage. Some things were quite difficult. I know it was very difficult for me to do Danny live, and finally we just dropped Danny from the show. He was difficult for me to perform on the album. Very emotional, very unlike me -- really an acting job. In the new show, I mean as far as Boom Dot Bust goes, I'm kinda looking forward to putting this material up on its feet. It always gives us a chance to gloss over the writing one more time. We've always performed, so it's nothing new, we've been onstage together since 1968.

Do you ever test stuff in performance before you record it?

Not since the very beginning. I think the only show that we ever did onstage before we recorded it was How Can You Be. Nick Danger was originally written for a live performance, Giant Rat of Sumatra was much rewritten from things that we had done onstage. I think it would be very difficult, because really they are two very different things. In an album we care much less about a sequence of laughs, whereas onstage, well, you want to hear the audience laughing. So material is chosen or rearranged in such a way so that you keep the laughs coming. After all, that's what the audience is there to do. They're not there to see -- or they don't think they're coming to see -- a kind of modernist, surreal, experimental theater, which is kind of what I think we do when we're onstage. We certainly don't do stand-up comedy, and we never have done sketch humor. We've never done Saturday Night Live, we've never done any of those things people are used to seeing onstage or on television, that kind of format. It's always much, much more surreal or theatrical than it is sketchy or joke humor.

Which raises the issue of influences. Are there any in particular?

I guess everyone would confess various influences. For myself, I came to the Firesign out of a background of working in radio at the time. I had a very strong relationship with the golden-age-of-radio programs and with the kind of humor that one might have found in Jack Benny or Fibber McGee and Molly. I also came from a background as a poet, and I'd been in New York during the whole late Beat era and had been very much a part of that New York scene around '59, '60, '61. So I was very influenced by the contemporary American poetry scene. Peter too -- we met him after he had come from a literary colloquium in Berlin where he was working with Tom Stoppard. So we also have that European avant-garde, Waiting for Godot, Ionesco, in our immediate educational background. We were all college boys, so we come very influenced by that world. I translated a lot of Dada and Surrealist poetry, I translated French and Spanish poetry when I was in my twenties and thirties. So our influences were not ever a particular comic. I mean, I love Stan Freberg, and he certainly was influential on the medium. I listened to all those records of his, because they sort of freed up the medium, and that's one of the things I credit him for, bringing radio to records and really freeing up the medium for satire. But an influence, though? I'm not sure. I would say that mine come from the worlds of poetry, Surrealism, Dada, late 20th-century avant-garde literature. And finally, really, I think we've just evolved our own way of speaking. We are original. And it's the power of that originality that sold us all on the Firesign Theatre. We could all be wonderfully creative, but something would happen when the four of us were together -- are together -- that doesn't happen otherwise. That's really original.

Let's talk specifically about the new record.

One of the accomplishments, for me, of the new album is that we have at last learned really how to write for four people performing at once, which is quite difficult. "Two" scenes are kind of classic conversation, and "three" scenes are really comedy, ba-dum-bump. But it's difficult to write for four people working simultaneously. I think we've been very successful in the last two albums in putting us all onstage and giving us all an equal part. And also standing back and allowing the wonderful single pieces to work, like Ralph Spoilsport on the last album and Hal & Ray, which Proctor and I just fell in love with each other over. We could go on and do them forever. So you look for those kinds of relationships between us and among us that will spark these characters and bring them to life. B. Buck Bunnymumble, who does the money show, kind of a parody of one of those television shows, he just came together in that scene with Proctor out of the blue. I wanted to get it recorded, get it down, and my attitude was like that, you know? [forecfully emphasizing his words] So I just pushed him and pushed him and pushed him, and he had to respond to it, and it was great, because you come out of a take and everybody is saying it was fabulous because they'd never heard it before, so to give a really fresh performance to your pals, who are about as jaded in terms of our work as anyone, that's very exciting.

There's a lot of stuff that's not in print.

Almost everything, now.

Is there any plan to reissue that?

Columbia kind of folded up their tent, Sony, and has not allowed the license to be -- Mobile Fidelity licensed and put out the first five albums on CD in the late '80s and early '90s. Then the licenses were not extended, so everything is held in the Columbia vaults, and so far nobody's been able to shake any of it loose. We're hopeful that Rhino can acquire all of the early Columbia albums, but right now the only place you can hear the material on those early albums is through the live performances. This is a tragedy, of course, especially in the case of Dwarf and Bozos. They were in print for 30 years; for them to drop out of print is saddening. But I think they'll come back. I'm hopeful that Rhino can bring out a box set. I think they should all be out. It's not even a matter of money, I just think they should all be available.

You used to have a syndicated radio program. Are there any plans to do that again?

Yes, we've been talking quite seriously about going back on the radio. There are very likely plans to be afoot for something, maybe coming out of Los Angeles, maybe next year. I think it would really be great to go on the air. We're talking about a two-hour show in the Garrison Keillor fashion, it would have some variety aspects to it. We did a show up in San Francisco last year, and we had so much fun, as we always do when we're on the air. It's also very good for us to develop writing that way. You were talking about doing things onstage first -- on radio first is how you can really bring in individual material and hand it around or do it yourself, and that can be very effective in gathering early thoughts for the next album.

* * * * *

Peter Bergman

I hesitate to ask something so mundane, but what does it mean? What does Boom Dot Bust mean?

That's a very general question, but I suppose it's a snapshot of America as it heads into the next millennium. It officially takes place on the Fourth of July, or the Fourth of Julie, the year 2001, in the town of Billville, which is somewhere in Ohio, and it's a town that thinks big-big-big. It's got a corrupt administration run by the four lead characters of the story: Mayor P'nisnose, Doctor Infermo, Coach Swatt, and Bill Sprawl, and around them the world circulates. It's about the American bubble and the pricks who live inside it.

Of the four main characters, only the mayor gets developed much.

Yeah, the mayor is the lead character in this album. Firesign Theatre has a tendency to have a lead character in each of its stories, you know? Just as Bebop Loco was the lead character in Immortality. And usually in most of the classic stuff Firesign does, there's a George Tirebiter or Babe or Clem, some character who carries us through. Although the mayor's the most developed, there are other characters who move through the story. And unlike Immortality, which took place entirely on a radio station in the period of 24 hours, I don't know how long this this takes, it could be almost the same instant and before you know it, everything's happened.

The last track is particularly confusing. I guess it's one way to wrap it all up.

It's a fairy tale, or a fable. You have to go back and listen to it a couple times. There is no bona fide answer. I can't give you a Firesign-guaranteed with a stamp that this is the way you should interpret the overall album, everyone has their own way of coming out of it.

It's definitely apocalyptic, which carries on from the last album.

Yeah, it does have that sense. In a way, it's apocalyptic, but guess what, the apocalypse is over and here we are. [laughs] I guess it's the both of those, for sure.

I guess the most apocalyptic part is the Devilmaster section.

You know, I love the Devilmaster. As he says, "we're doomed." One of the things we say in Immortality when we say hello to the next millennium, "Hello to increased demonic activity." I suppose it carries that theme along.

There was a reference in the beginning to the doctor poisoning the town.

Poisoning the water. "Give me shiny shiny water." It looks good, i.e. we do anything in our society to make things look good regardless of the environmental impact. Shiny shiny shiny, big big big, win win win. The coach is putting hormones in, he's hormoning the high school football team so they can be big big big and win win win.

Sports has been one of the ongoing themes, sports and its competitiveness.

Yeah, I think that the influence has been Phil Austin and myself, we both follow sports to a certain degree. Phil is a swimmer, I'm a biker, and David Ossman and Proctor are very aware of the concept of mega-personalities and mega-stars. When we deal with sports, sports is very personal, you know. It is one of the few industries that's completely personal, probably more personal than motion pictures. Sports is a live spectacle, and we feel that's a great energy to latch onto as a means of riding through the culture.

There's also a lot of wordplay, of course, with the invention of new terms like "cheese stamp" and catch phrases like "lick my zipper."

One of the things Proctor loves to do is bring in books that describe regional languages. I think "lick my zipper" is full Firesign, but it's inspired by two or three other regional languages that we included in here. We published the full script, annotated, on maybe the DVA of Boom Dot Bust and certainly the DVD. Those have both been mixed into a DVD video with full animation, a desktop version of Boom Dot Bust. Boom Dot Bust is the first audio piece being produced and mixed in DVD 5.1 Surround. It's turned out to be the perfect medium for Firesign Theatre, we're really enthused with the mix. It will be released by Rhino in February.

One of the things Firesign does is take the icons and buzzwords of our culture and turn them upside down. And when they mix together, they make perfect nonsense. You understand things through their nonsensical value sometimes, because that's what's hidden in them psychologically when we're pounded by all this material. You may get a single icon, but behind it is all kinds of other material, and we mine it. It's really our job.

That sort of information overload approach is something you pioneered over 25 years ago.

That's right, we do overload you with information, so it sets off the circuits -- it doesn't short-circuit you completely, it re-circuits you.

David Grubbs on Squirrel Bait: 10/29/08 Interview

Anthology Recordings was a pay download site last decade that had a wonderfully curated selection. And when Koen Holtkamp (co-leader of the uncategorizable and thoroughly excellent Mountains) worked there, he had me do some writing for the site. When he gave me this assignment, though, I developed a little mental block on it, partly because I was out of practice on interviews, partly because I felt too much self-applied pressure to prepare myself to talk to the great David Grubbs. Finally I emailed him the questions and he responded the same day. As usual, anxiety had made an innocuous situation seem more fraught than it was!

Anthology has been on hiatus for a while, and even before that had switched direction and ditched the editorial stuff, so I'm bringing this one back.

RAN: Anthology Recordings website, November 2008
TITLE: Squirrel Bait

The question of whether Louisville punk band Squirrel Bait was a little late on a trend or ahead of its time depends on what one focuses on while listening to them, but whichever side one comes down on, nobody can deny that they made great music that has stood the test of time, sounding great on vinyl, CD, and now online download.

Certainly when I bought their eponymous debut in 1985, it was because they were being compared to the Replacements and Hüsker Dü, big favorites of mine. They more than lived up to the hype on a disc full of propulsive, explosive songs, with singer Peter Searcy able to summon Paul Westerberg-ish tone at will but with something of Bob Mould’s phrasing and dark urgency. Guitarists David Grubbs and Brian McMahan whacked out chords that sounded like they might chew your leg off, sometimes expansive and fat enough to fill the room, sometimes bright and pointed enough to pierce walls.

Two years later they followed that up with Skag Heaven, which sounded even more dangerous. Drummer Ben Daughtrey’s rolled hardcore fills were tighter and more devastatingly deployed, but there was now more to this band than punk: there was often more metal in the guitars -- both the genre and the material’s timbre -- and the band more often sounded original enough to be hard to pigeonhole. Then a few years passed and it started to seem as if the band had been an influence on some of the less rote grunge bands

Band members went off to college, ending Squirrel Bait’s existence, and later went on to many other groups (Slint, Bastro, Gastr del Sol, Big Wheel, Lemonheads, Bitch Magnet, and more). David Grubbs recently had time to discuss the band.

The debut sounds like you’d been listening to what was happening in Minneapolis the previous few years, but there’s more to it than that, right?

The Replacements and Husker Du were major favorites, certainly. But also...let's see...the Meat Puppets, Big Black, Sun Ra, the Birthday Party, Leonard Cohen, Pere Ubu, Phil Ochs, Blowfly, the Red Krayola, the Babylon Dance Band, the Endtables, Malignant Growth, Maurice -- stuff like that.

$400 to record the debut, really? Where/how did you get the money?

Well, there were five of us. Waiting tables, cutting grass, playing shows. Then we got an advance from Homestead.

Based on the band picture on the debut, the Louisville punk scene didn’t enforce a very rigid dress code. What was it like being a punk in Louisville in 1984-5? What were your ages when that record came out?

Yes, the Louisville punk scene was pretty contrarian. I guess I'd say that I wasn't a punk but that I was in a punk band. You know? Punk rock was my life, more or less, but I don't think that I or most of my friends jibed with folks' ideas of who or what punks were supposed to be.

When the first album came out (fall 1985), we ranged from 16 (Brian McMahan) to 20 (Ben Daughtrey). I had just turned 18.

The first album and Skag Heaven could easily fit on one CD but were reissued separately. Do you feel strongly that they must remain separate entities? How had the band changed between the two albums?

Oh, I think that they're completely different. Very different sounding records. The first sounds like us blasting through our songs in Clark's parents' basement. The sound sounds like us trying to make something more like a coherent, conventional album. There's much that I like about the second one (particularly "Kid Dynamite" and "Tape from California"), but it's the first one that I love.

The intro to “Choose Your Poison” shows you trying out a style you’d make more use of in future bands. How did you come up with that at the time?

I think that that was our idea of free jazz. Ha!

Wikipedia’s Squirrel Bait entry says the band’s sound “clearly foreshadowed the grunge sound as well as math rock.”

Not so mathy, if you ask me. More like social studies rock. Or humanities rock.

That is where the published interview ended. I'd asked one more question, off topic:

A couple of Bastro reissues came out a few years ago for a week or two and were then recalled. (I work in a record store; I bought one each for myself and kept them after the recall -- I hope I'm not going to be arrested.) What happened there?

The Live 1991 CD wasn't recalled -- thankfully -- and it's still in print on Blue Chopsticks. The one that compiled the two studio albums was sadly recalled the week that it was released -- a dispute with the former owner of Homestead Records. Please don't get me started on it.

[When I was looking for a picture to use for this post, I found an excellent blog post on the band on the wonderfully named Lexicon Devil.]

Asobi Seksu 2011 Interview in The Big Takeover

Print is not dead...yet.

This is from the current issue of The Big Takeover (#68). Subscribe here! Since the above isn't legible, I figured I'd put the text here. And then I figured I might as well put in the longer version I had to cut down to squeeze into the available space (the section of the magazine this interview ran in IS called Short Takes). So here's my first draft:

Asobi Seksu’s self-titled album was reissued by Friendly Fire in 2004, the year the record store I work at opened. One day I bought a used copy from a customer because I thought it might be interesting J-Pop. It wasn’t, but I liked it anyway. Two years later came Citrus, very different but immediately captivating and my favorite album of the decade. And I’ve had that “different but captivating” reaction with each of their albums, including the new Fluorescence. I welcomed the chance to talk with co-leaders Yuki Chikudate and James Hanna about their musical evolution.

Hanna and Chikudate both went to Manhattan School of Music, respectively studying classical guitar and piano. She remembers, “With this band was the first time I started singing. I’d never been without a piano, and I’d never used my physical body as an instrument before, so I was absolutely terrified. I was a bit shocked that I was pushed to be a singer, because I had no idea what I was doing.”

I mention that on the sole (and very rare) EP of their previous incarnation, Sport Fuck, James was the primary vocalist. “I know, I know,” he says. “I had no choice. Nobody else would sing. It was me or the drummer, and his voice was much worse than mine. The thing I wanna say about Sport Fuck is, I still think of that as another band. It’s just such a different time. ‘Umi de no Jisatsu’ was probably the first song that I consider like this band.” “We were moving in this direction,” Chikudate continues. “At that point, I wasn’t singing really, and ‘Umi de no Jisatsu’ was the last thing we wrote before we recorded that EP.” (Hanna also says, “I used to be ashamed that people would find out we used to be called Sport Fuck. Now it’s kind of funny.” Their current name is just a more polite translation of the old name.)

So the urge for change was already there in the beginning. “It makes me happy that we make different records every time,” says Hanna. “It’s never that intentional. From Citrus to Hush, we were touring those songs for three years and I definitely got to the point where I didn’t want to make guitar-based noise. Other than that, I think we’re just pretty restless.”

Of course, their breakthrough, the very guitar-heavy and shoegazy Citrus, led to inevitable comparisons to My Bloody Valentine. Did that influence the desire to change styles? “No, no, no,” they both exclaim. Chikudate explains, “We just try to make music that makes us happy, what makes us excited. I guess that’s probably why there have been some changes.” Hanna says, “I really need to be a fan first. A lot of this comes out while we’re listening to, like, stuff where Eno had his synths on everything and it came out kind of icy.”

While Fluorescence is more keyboard-oriented, they say the overall sound wasn’t exactly planned. They’d reunited with Citrus producer Chris Zane, and as Chikudate recalls, “Chris was into synths too, and so the three of us got really excited playing the really awesome synthesizers in his studio. The Emulator Two that Depeche Mode used, we did a lot of that on the album. He has a Juno, the Eno synth. I love that synth. I brought in a Farfisa, a Casio. He’s got a Moog. My Ovation we used a lot. Prior to going into the studio I was creating sounds for the record for a least a couple of months, really diving into it and showing that keyboard a bit of love instead of just using it like a pad. I started to really showcase it a bit more. There aren’t as many guitar tracks this time.”

“I didn’t go that crazy this time with pedals,” Hanna concurs. “Pretty minimal, just a Jazzmaster through a Marshall.”

That’s unlike the process through which Citrus was recorded, which Hanna describes as “Let’s get into a real studio for the first time and see what it sounds like when we fucking play on every possible thing that I’ve ever bought for each song. It sounds like mush.” “Pretty mush!” Chikudate insists. “When you combine those sounds, sometimes a lead melody pops out that nobody wrote, and you say, ‘where did that come from?’” “That’s a My Bloody Valentine trick,” Hanna adds. “It’s luck. Now I want to actually hear some of the stuff I record instead of just the overall effect. There’s still a little bit of that [mush], it’s an overall balance, how everything combines when you can’t tell what’s going on, and how they sound separately.”

While the sound has evolved, the results on Fluorescence still have an updated '80s vibe, the songs are still lushly beautiful, and Chikudate’s vocals still waft delicately above it all. A mood of ecstatic wistfulness still dominates, but in an increasingly individualistic style that no longer fits so easily into preset categories.

Yo-Yo Ma Interview 2000

Ran: 12/1/00 on CDNOW.com
Head: Yo-Yo Ma Bridges Musical Worlds

Yo-Yo Ma is a supremely talented cellist who has achieved crossover popularity without compromising his music principles or even standards of good taste. Fluent in the warhorses of the standard repertoire (concertos, chamber music, and solo), contemporary composers both challenging and ingratiating, and Baroque music, he's even successfully tackled such far-flung genres as tango, bluegrass, and various Asian styles. Ma's discography is approaching 50 albums, and he's won 13 Grammy awards. His popularity is such that even in this current profit-driven corporate period, Sony allows him considerable leeway.

Ma's ability to bring great music to the masses is epitomized by his upcoming appearance on the December 13 episode of the TV series The West Wing -- more than a cameo, as he'll be in several scenes -- that will find him playing Bach's Suite in G major for solo cello to probably its largest single audience ever.

The friendly, thoughtful, soft-spoken Ma spoke with CDNOW as part of the promotional effort for the latest release to feature him, Tan Dun's soundtrack to the acclaimed Ang Lee film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, discussing not only recent projects but more philosophical issues.

CDNOW: You are involved in such a wide variety of music, yet you always seem comfortable in any context.

Yo-Yo Ma: For me, the genesis of any sort of organic artistic experience is, you have to start from the inside. It doesn't matter what part of the inside, but just from the inside, because only from there can you then grow organically and perceive something. And we all know people who are always looking at something from the outside, who can't get in there. You can surround the thing that you're looking at with so many things on the outside, you never find your way in -- it's always a foreign experience. The only way to make it part of you is to actually jump in.

How about music that's more abstract? Say, 12-tone music.

Twelve-tone music is a methodology that people compose in. In one of Schoenberg's piano concertos, it's a waltz, a 12-tone waltz, so he went into it in that way. I mean, there's always a way to do it. And you always know that there're things that you don't understand, but also know that as time marches on, there's the possibility that one day you might understand. And only when I start to understand can I actually advocate for something.

When I was 15 I had just given a recital, spent a year working on it, and just the next lesson Leonard Rose says, "Here's this late Beethoven sonata, and I'm not going to tell you anything about it. You just go and work on it and play it." So I did. I thought it was beautiful, but I couldn't find my way in. It wasn't until three or four years later in college that somehow I figured out one thing about that piece, which was that there was no sort of actual tonic cadence for the longest time. And just that one thing got me into sort of, this is, "Oh so that's what he's fooling around with, that's what he's dealing with." 'Cause it's sort of like swimming around tonic-dominant, but you don't know what to grab for. So that's an abstract concept, it's the denial of something.

You studied with Leonard Rose for quite a while, starting when you were around seven?

Age of nine.

Is there anything in particular, beyond just specific techniques of playing, that you took away from that experience?

Love and patience. He was a great cellist, of course, a master, a great musician, all of that. He was so kind, he was so gentle, he was so loving. And that's what stays with you. And specific things such as, after this recital, he would say -- and later on, when we did some mentor-and-protégé talks and stuff like that -- where he would articulate and say, one of the most important parts of being a teacher is to say to a student when you have to learn to teach yourself, you've got to fly on your own. And he stayed a friend and mentor all the rest of his life, for which I'm very grateful -- but I think [of] the patience and love, and saying, "I know you can do it." I tell you, that kind of positive --you know, with high standards -- nurturing was so important. Because if he had said to me, "I think you stink. You'll never make it," I know that it would be totally devastating to me, and I probably would not have had the courage to go do a lot of things that I went and did later on because I felt supported. Someone believed in me.

Emanuel Ax went to Columbia, you went to Harvard. Did the Ivy League connection have anything to do with you guys hooking up, or perhaps on a different level, the fact that you have relate so well?

That has something to do with it. I think there are a number of factors that made us friends and made us want to work together over such a long period of time. One of them is that we were born in another country other than the United States. He was born in Lwow, which was part of the Soviet Union, Poland, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire at various times, so he understands what it's like to be on the inside and on the outside of cultures. [He] then went to Winnipeg, then went to New York. I was born in Paris, my parents are Chinese, I lived in New York, now I live in Boston. So we have that kind of immigrant, newly arrived kind of background.

Manny's one of the most loyal people I've ever met, a loyal friend, and that's very important. And I think rather than the goal, the process is very important to us, how we get there is extremely important. And that probably is the most important thing to us. And the fact that we both have families, and that we've talked so much about the struggle of, you know, just touring while trying to keep some semblance of regular life, and what we do without children and all that, similar goals for family, emphasis on nurturing and education, but not kind of sitting down on our kids so much that it stifles their growth, but then a sense of humor. You know, all of those things I think help, and I think the schooling, yes. Manny actually writes very well. I don't, but I admire the fact that he was able to do that, study French at Columbia, and yeah, these things do keep us going strong.

Your involvement in the soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon presumably came about through Tan Dun. Was there any different approach because it's a soundtrack?

Well, I love Tan Dun. I love what he does and have great sympathy for it, for his music. We had worked together once before on a piece called Symphony 1997 and recorded somewhat the same ways. This was done in the studio, cello/voice alone and then afterwards he went and put it all together. Because I have sympathy for his music -- I think this only could have worked under those circumstances, I knew he's a great melodist, he's a very evocative, a very theatrical composer, and I said, "Look, you've gotta tell me, even though it's not quite written yet, what you're thinking of so that at least I can go there with you in an imaginative way."

And Ang Lee was also there, and so he was able to give his input after years of shooting, sometimes under incredibly difficult circumstances. I hadn't seen the film, saw little snippets of it, but he could give a sense of what he needed. And so in that studio on that evening, we were able to put together, hopefully, what was a form of expression that matched with what I knew of Tan Dun's work and what he was still to imagine, what was gonna be done later on, with what Ang Lee and James Schamus had been thinking of for years and what that was gonna be like. It was actually a fascinating meeting. I treasure that moment, those late hours in the night [laughs] when we were recording. And of course when I saw the film, I saw what a magnificent job they did.

Are there any particular qualities in John Corigliano's music that prompted you to commission Phantasmagoria?

I've known John forever, and the pieces he's written -- his Symphony, Violin Concerto -- and this is before Red Violin -- and also of his Dad and, you know, the New York Philharmonic. All of that stuff was always percolating. I was thinking it would be really neat to get him to write a piece. And the occasion came when there was a new auditorium that was opening at the Freer-Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian. And somehow the person who dedicated the auditorium was very much involved in music and wanted to commission a piece, and that's how it came about. I was very happy that he took that music from his opera, The Ghosts of Versailles, and kind of made an instrumental short version of that piece.

Do you think that one of the reasons that it works is that the cello is so close to the human voice and it's operatic music?

That could be one reason, but I think John is so knowledgeable on all kinds of instrumentation that it's, that, you know, he could've made anything work. I of course would like to think that it's because of the cello that it works! [laughs]