The legend of the upstart jazz master takes many forms and carries with it a tempting mystique. Whether born out of Kansas City farmhouse or a tenement in New York City, jazz fans often like to imagine future jazz greats emerging fully formed, armed with nothing but their own scrappy intuition. Think of the dissonant harmonies of Thelonious Monk, the energy of Charles Mingus, and the nonchalance of Stan Getz.

But none of these pioneers did it all on their own. Every master comes from a rich tradition of mentors and educators, and horn legend Clark Terry embodies that perhaps more than anyone today. A superstar performer by every measure from the end of the Swing Era to today, Terry’s story is one of both a devoted pupil and a proud teacher. It’s the story of an immensely talented kid who grew up looking for all the help he could get, and the story of a seasoned pro who’s offered all the help he could give. In many ways, he’s changed the institution of jazz education, creating new standards for a performer’s generous relationship with students of all types, and a healthy respect for the place of a thorough education in the evolution of jazz.

Terry was a trumpet and flugelhorn veteran of Duke Ellington and Count Basie’s bands by the time he became the first African-American staff musician at NBC, joining Doc Severinsen’s Tonight Show band in 1960. There, he scored the hit “Mumbles” and grew to be a beloved member of the band. His discography is enormous, spanning over 900 known recording sessions, and he’s garnered pages of awards from around the world including the Grammy Lifetime Achievement and the NEA Jazz Master awards.

Throughout, Terry fostered a strong relationship with an endless string of students, high school programs and university programs, ushering in more than a few notable careers in jazz. He’s set up lasting relationships with college music programs, holding adjunct professorships at schools like the University of New Hampshire and William Patterson University (home to the Clark Terry Archive). He’s otherwise taught classes at schools throughout the world and he’s had several jazz camps named in his honor. A jazz writer in 1971 declared him “The World’s Busiest Jazz Clinician.”

“Emulate, assimilate and innovate” has served as his mantra, and it couldn’t be simpler. Success so often depends on a student finding the right teacher – we’re lucky that Terry has made himself so easy to find.

Terry, who turned 91 this year, has a new autobiography -– Clark (University of California Press) – due for release this fall. He recently spoke with JAZZed about his vast experiences in the world of jazz and education.

You’ve always maintained a strong position as a leader throughout your career in music – what’s made you enjoy helping others organize and educate themselves about music?

I was born in jazz in St. Louis, and have loved jazz all my life. My older sister was married to a tuba player. At Sauter’s Park in St. Louis, I would have to sneak into the park to hear the music because of segregation.

When I wanted to learn about the trumpet at a young age, some of the older musicians told me the wrong answers to my questions intentionally. So, that made me want to help young kids get the right message of the ways and means of playing jazz. In the old times, they thought it was hip to tell you the wrong things. As a little boy I asked an old dude one time about how to getter a better sound in the lower register on my horn. He told me to sit in front of a mirror, up straight, then wiggle my left ear and grit my teeth at the same time while playing.

You were a big hero of East St. Louis native Miles Davis – what do you hear of yourself in his playing and writing?

Miles was a kid when I was a professional. When he became professional, he played his own music, and I played my own music. We had a lot of respect for each other, and we loved each other.

[Elwood] Buchanan was Miles’s high school teacher. He wanted me to come and hear Miles play in East St. Louis, and so I went to hear him. That was our first interaction. Another time I was hired to play in Jerry Lynch’s band for a celebration in Carbondale, Ill. A lot of pretty girls were there, you know, dancing around a maypole. So, I’m watching these foxy ladies, and Miles comes up to me and asks me a question about the trumpet. Now, all of my attention is on playing and watching the pretty girls, so I fluffed him off. I don’t remember what I told him – it might have been something nasty.

The third time we interacted was at the Elks Club. It was a walk-up-club – stairs, you know – and they were featuring “Eddie Randall and the Blue Devils.” Before I could get up the stairs, I was digging the trumpet. Later on when they finished the set, I went up to the trumpet player to congratulate him. I didn’t know that it was Miles. Didn’t remember him. Well, he reminded me of that time in Carbondale when I had been too busy checking out the ladies to answer his question.

That’s when I promised myself to always take time for students. No matter what’s going on. We became great friends, Miles and I, and we mutually admired each other. I liked the way that he had his own ideas about things, practiced a lot, and pursued his ideas. He was innovative, and I liked his beautiful sound. Miles had the whole idea about how a trumpet should sound and he made it go that way.

Before Miles passed away, we were in different hospitals at the same time. That was back in ‘91. He couldn’t talk, you know, so they would put the phone up to his ear when I called. They told me that he smiled at what I said. We were very close. I tried to cheer him up, encourage him to hang on, and things like that. Man, when they told me that he was gone, it really broke my heart.

What do you remember about your earliest teaching experiences?

I was at the Palomar Theater with Count Basie in Seattle, Wash. Quincy used to come by the club every night. He’d come up to my room in the morning at five or six o’clock. He was persistent, eager and sincere. It made me feel real good because he wanted to learn from me.

And then years later, there’s a story about you nearly missing a gig at the Kennedy Center because you had gotten so wrapped up in a lesson.

About 10 or 15 years ago I was supposed to be performing at a Kennedy Center concert. When it came time to perform, they couldn’t find me anywhere. They only found me because they heard my horn in a stairwell that led to a basement. That’s where I was teaching a student who wanted to learn trumpet. I had gotten so involved with the lesson that I had forgotten about going on stage.

Was there any moment in particular you can think of when it became clear that you wanted to devote so much of your life to helping students of music?

Some of The Tonight Show staff asked us to go to schools and talk to the kids about jazz. I went to high school, elementary and junior high schools. I felt good talking to the kids – the way they would respond to me and try hard. Instead of teaching one, I could teach 20 or 30 at a time.

Has your approach toward students changed much since when you first started teaching and donation programs?

I always insist that if they really want to do it, then they really have to practice. And they really have to practice more than other people in order to play better. It’s like putting money in a bank. You can only get out what you put in, and if you put enough in there, you can even get more with increased dividends.

How do you think you would approach music today if you were growing up all over again? Would you be drawn straight to jazz? Anything else you think you might try out?

I’d more or less be in the same thing. If you’re a kid, you’ve got to be a good listener. Pay your respects and learn from the people first-hand. Look at the television and go to as many concerts as you can. Jazz should be taught in the schools in order for the students to learn it. I’d probably teach the students to learn their instruments and learn to apply it to jazz.

My neighborhood and school influenced me. Today you can learn about jazz through [mp3s], YouTube, and internet services like Spotify and Pandora. We’re looking into Skype now to see how we can teach jazz more effectively in the schools. And I love my iPod. I’m never without it.

Are there particular methods and techniques that you’ve always found enjoyable and essential to pass on to students?

When my brother-in-law, Sy, played the bass tuba horn, he showed me how I could semi-suppress the valves and not let them come all the way up or all the way down in order to get a different sound with the notes. This was right above or below the notes. He showed me how to flip the notes by letting the valves come quickly and how to bend the notes. This is fun and exciting to a young kid.

I would teach circular breathing where you breathe both out and in at the same time. I’d also teach doodle-tonguing versus tonguing the traditional way. You can play faster notes just by using your tongue in different ways. It’s much more effective.

Students need to learn to play a passage forward or backward, if it’s a difficult one. Start slowly at first, then gradually increase your speed until you can play it flawlessly. Students have to learn to use their ears to play in all 13 keys.

What kind of ties do you maintain with St. Louis?

I left St. Louis to join various bands – Charlie Barnet, Basie, and Duke. It’s my hometown, and I love going back to St. Louis to perform. I don’t play much anymore, but I can still sing. I sang “Mumbles” recently at the Greater St. Louis Jazz Festival, and I enjoyed working with the students in the band.

I enjoyed going to the Griot Museum to see the collection of my memorabilia. That life-sized wax figure of me is a gas! I also like to see my star on the Walk of Fame at Blueberry Hill. Last time, it was too chilly to go by and see it. No matter where your hometown is, the main thing to remember is that if you want to learn, you have to be willing to put in the time to practice, practice, practice.

Who were some of your most important mentors when you first started learning to play?

St. Louis was a jazz town. A whole lot of jazz came through there – riverboats came through there and celebrities and lots of folks played it on radios and graphophones (those were before gramophones, you know). So it was all around my neighborhood, and I heard it every day.

My brother-in-law was my oldest sister’s husband. He played jazz bass lines with a tuba. They didn’t have a bass fiddle in their band, just Sy’s tuba (Boom, boompady, boom, BOOM) and things like that. Sy was in Dewey’s band – Dewey Jackson and His Musical Ambassadors. It was a very popular jazz band in St. Louis. I liked going to their rehearsals, and listening to them play around town when I was young.

George Hudson was the leader of a great band. He had a real good band, a popular band. Everybody wanted George’s band to back them up at the Club Plantation because his musicians played the music so well. They took it to heart. Took the charts home with them to make sure they played it right. I was a member of his band, and I especially liked the fact that he listened to our ideas. I could say, “Let’s try it this way or that way,” and he would allow things like that. He allowed me to speak my opinions on how a passage should be played. You know, fifteen people would play it fifteen different ways, but if I had an idea and I said, “Make this note quicker, or make this note louder, or make this note shorter,” he’d try it. In other words, he would let me “stylize” the band. So I felt respected. George was a great cat.

Anyone else from early on?

Another experience was when I was in Len Bowden’s band. He was a little older than the rest of us and his music was a little different than what we had been playing, and I learned about different styles. Later on, he was head of the music scene at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. We used to play for the new guys at happy hour, played in some parades, and then occasionally we did some radio broadcasts. Then there were the Black Brothers, but I can’t remember their first names right now. Harold “Shorty” Baker was a well-known and respected trumpet player in Duke Ellington’s band. Not only was he a great soloist and leader, but he was also an excellent trumpet player with marvelous articulation.

When I was around sixteen, I was a member of the Tom Powell Post #77 Drum and Bugle Corps. Doug Cloud and Pop Owens were the leaders of the corps, and I learned a lot while I was a member. Of course, with a bugle, you know, there are no valve tips, so when I played bugle calls – things like: [Clark mimics playing “Reveille”]. I learned a lot about my embouchure. I learned a lot about articulation, single, double, and triple tonguing on that bugle. And I learned about buzzing, which is tucking your lips inside and then blowing through a small hole in the center, and making them vibrate while you’re blowing. It’s like when you’re blowing into your mouthpiece, but you just use your lips.

Count Basie and Duke Ellington were great bandleaders to begin with – two of the top band leaders in the world. Basie was more or less known for his swing. I learned a lot about “space and time” in music from Basie. Duke was more “siditty,” you know, more sophisticated. I consider the time while I was with Basie as “Prep School,” and the time when I was with Duke as going to “The School of Ellingtonia.” I learned so much from Duke. They were both dear friends, the greatest musicians, and they had the great musicians playing in their bands.

What do you tell kids to work toward nowadays as jazz musicians?

Perfection, mastering their craft, playing lessons without flaw both fast and slow. Just stand out above all the rest of them, and do it better than all the rest.

I’d love to hear more about one of your earliest gigs – working with the Navy Band during WWII outside of Chicago. How did you end up with so much responsibility early on? Did you perform music with the Navy, or just organize recruits for overseas bands?

Well, when we first worked boot camp with “For Further Transfer” (FFT) in the Navy, we used to have jam sessions all day long. Just about any kind of music you could think of. We would put bands together, then ship them off to other naval bases. We had a marching band, concert band, radio band, orchestra, happy hour band on Sundays, etc..,

We didn’t learn to shoot guns or sail ships. We were there as teachers for the new recruits. We worked at the ground level. We played charts for celebrities that came to the base and for concerts. I had to play charts for some visiting artists -– Duke Ellington, Dorothy Donegan, Cab Calloway, Lionel Hampton, and anyone else who needed a band to back themselves. It was a sensational band, the Navy band.

Growing up with and working with so many musicians, you must know tons of unsung heroes throughout the business – you’ve mentioned the great Charlie Creath before in interviews, for instance, who seemed to lead a generation of St. Louis trumpeters around by the nose. Is there anyone else like that who comes to mind, either from growing up, playing in live bands, or doing recording session work?

There are any number of those people scattered all over the world. Yeah, I guess my students are my unsung heroes: Josh Shpak, Ham Davis, Leon L., Justin Kauflin, Michel Petrucciiani, Stantawn Kendrick. My students have become grown, and I’m now teaching 2nd and 3rd generation students. Now you have teachers like Esperanza Spalding, the youngest staff musician at Berklee.

What’s the most recent musical trick you picked up?

“Shut up and lay out.” In other words, know when to keep quiet.

**

Originally published in JAZZed here.

by Matt Parish

For those looking for a savior of jazz education, mild-mannered and sparsely populated Utah probably isn’t high on the list of scouting locations. But that’s where ambitious private teacher-turned-bandleader Caleb Chapman calls home, and he’s gone a long way toward creating one of the most successful youth jazz programs in the country. What’s more he’s done it all with local kids.

Chapman runs the twelve-year-old Caleb Chapman Music and the fledgling Caleb Chapman Institute, programs that he’s slowly developed based on a meat-and-potatoes love for jazz and a strong music education background of his own. An avid saxophone player through high school, he first got the conducting bug when given the helm of his all-state high school band in New Hampshire. He moved to Utah from his hometown of Derry, N.H. to study music at Brigham Young University and nearly enrolled at business school before starting a private instruction business on a whim. In 1999, he opened The Music School, a sprawling program of individual lessons and ensembles including early versions of his stalwart groups the Crescent Super Band and Little Big Band.

He pared down to simple ensemble direction in 2008, taking the reins of each group of middle and high school students himself, and the results have been striking. His bands frequently travel the country and, in some cases, the world, performing in festival slots usually reserved for world-class professionals. Chapman now serves as an education expert with the Jazz Educators Network and has seen his approach sought after by Juilliard School of Music, Berklee School of Music, and high school administrators across the country, many of whom hope to sign on to Champan’s new satellite programs starting this year.

His flagship band, the Crescent Super Band, remains the only musical group to perform at the halftimes of NBA’s Utah Jazz games in Salt Lake City, and has been named the Best Band in the Country twice by DownBeat Magazine. The group has also won four “best in state” awards in Utah as well as the BOSS award for top organization in Arts and Entertainment in the state, beating out all other professional groups. They’ve performed with over 200 guest artists including Christian McBride, Joe Lovana, Peter Erskine, and Bob Mintzer.

All this by a band that comprised totally of Utah natives that meet once a week for two hours. And none of them are over 18 years old.

Chapman spoke to JAZZed about the unorthodox path he’s taken to get his students to work toward such a consistently high level, how he handled a few bumps along the way, and what’s in store as his program begins its expansion beyond the borders of the Beehive State.

JAZZed Magazine: You have a sprawling program of activities for your students, so let’s start by getting a lay of the land. What are the different ensembles your students can get involved in?

Caleb Champan: Currently the program consists of eight different bands. It’s a contemporary music program so some of the groups are pop-oriented as well, but the majority are jazz ensembles. Our flagship group is the Crescent Super Band, who’ve been in heavy rotation on the Real Jazz channel on Sirius/XM since last October. That’s pretty cool. I’ve got a lot of friends who are Grammy-winning jazz musicians that have a hard time getting their music played on the Real Jazz channel. So to have a bunch of high school kids from Utah be in rotation for that many months is pretty exciting! I’m not gonna lie. I think it’s a real tribute to the work that these kids put in. The other groups are The Voodoo Orchestra, which is big band stuff with jump swing; Caribeña, which does Afro-Cuban stuff like Tito Puente’s big band; the Soul Research Foundation, which has a Tower of Power kind of configuration; the Crescent Octet, an all-star combo; and the Little Big Band, which is the junior high big band.

JAZZed: Tell us how your adventures in jazz education began.

CC: I started my program back in 1999 originally as a community musical school with private teachers and things like that. Then in 2000, we started doing some ensembles. We started with a junior high all-star jazz big band and then it took off from there. I invited some other teachers that I felt shared the same values and quality of instruction that I had set. And so when we opened up, we had maybe even 200 teachers between the six to ten teachers. We grew that to the Music School, where we had 1,500 students and I had 100 instructors working for me.

But everything I loved about education and all this stuff – I looked in the mirror and I wasn’t doing any of it. I was an administrator. My job was a mix of being a public school administrator and a corporate CEO. I spent my time managing people and balancing budgets and doing spreadsheets and doing investor meetings and I realized, “This is not what I want to be doing!”

JAZZed: Was there a problem with the economy tanking at about that time in 2008?

CC: Right, the economy tanked and the investors of the school at that point were in control. They were calling the shots and their other companies, just like everybody else, just weren’t doing well and decided that they wanted to move on and not be part of that. I got some incredible friends in the industry and there were plenty of people who came to me afterwads that came to me and said, “Here’s the money to keep doing what you’re doing.” It was a great opportunity for me to go, “Thanks, but that’s actually not what I want to be doing.” I wanted to be directing bands, creating the educational component, not just be an administrator.

What I’m doing now feels like I’m contributing. Even with the numbers – I’m working with 150 students instead of 1500 students so you might say that’s a step backwards, but I’d say it’s not because we’re able to dramatically impact the lives of those 150 students. And the beauty of this program is that  each of these kids is required to be contributing, active leaders and members of their public school music programs. So by really having a high-quality program available to these 150 students, that’s actually impacting thousands of students across Utah.

JAZZed: Your curriculum has been picked up and recognized by so many schools as this program has gained success – what’s made it special?

CC: Well, that’s the question, you know? I’ve had some of the publishing companies approach me about writing a book or doing a video and I’ve thought about it, and I’m not really sure that I’ve got any secret sauce or any special techniques. I have an articulation technique that I’ve developed that’s kind of proprietary, but I don’t think that’s what makes the difference. I think what it comes down to is simply setting the expectation level higher than most people think you can set it, and then clearly articulating those expectations to these young musicians. I think as educators, so often, we simply don’t set the bar high enough. Young musicians want to be challenged. They want to have someone tell them that they’re capable of amazing things because, once you give them that permission, they’ll go ahead and do the work and make it happen.

JAZZed: Now are these really all just local Utah kids?  How far are they traveling for class?

CC: If you’ve ever been to Utah, you know there’s two parts – the part where people live and then there’s the part where nobody lives. The average is about an hour’s drive for all the kids. Some are closer, and I’ve had some kids that drive three and a half hours each way to rehearsals. I had a kid that would fly in because he was about four-and-a-half hours away. He’d fly in and out of every rehearsal and he made it every time. It was the most insane thing I’ve ever seen. But most of the kids are from the Salt Lake area – Oren, Provo, Park City.

JAZZed: Do you think the locale plays into the success of the program?

CC: I think the exciting thing about this program is that it absolutely could be done anywhere and I think the fact that we’re doing it in Utah is testament to that. It’s not like there’s something in the water here in Utah where we have this incredible individual talent. I think for the most part, as kids start in my program in junior high, they’re kind of average kids that are just willing to work really hard.

Regardless, there were over $1.5 million in scholarship offers between 26 kids that graduated from the program last year. You do the math on that. And most of these kids have a 3.9 or 4.0 GPA, and they’re going to be successful. They’re going to be arts advocates for the rest of their lives and they’re going to play music for the rest of their lives and they’re going to be people supporting the arts. That’s what we really need. We don’t really need tens of thousands of new professional musicians, you know? [laughs] It’s nice, but we’ve got plenty of great musicians right now, many of whom are starving. That’s why I think a program like this is important.

JAZZed: You only get two hours a week with each of these groups – how do you organize things so everything gets done so efficiently?

CC: To the outside world, is this a music school? Yeah, I guess it is and I’m a music educator. But the way I talk about it to the kids and to the parents, I don’t ever mention the word “school” or “music education” or any of that stuff. We talk about this as a professional musician training program. They’re auditioning for spots in a professional band, every group, even the junior high groups, we run as professional bands. And so that means if you’re going to miss a rehearsal, you have to send a sub. Once we hand out music, the next time you show up for rehearsal it’s expected that that music is perfected. When we have gigs, you get docked on your pay if you’re late for sound check or any of that stuff.

JAZZed: So the bands function like the real-world working bands?

CC: When these kids go on tour, a good chunk of their fees or all of their fees in some cases are covered by the gigs they’re doing. So where a lot of high school bands are out selling candy bars, these kids are out playing shows and making real money to pay for their programs. They work. The Super Band just did two shows here before they left for Europe where they got paid $10,000 for one night and $15,000 for the other night. I mean try to find college bands getting paid that kind of money, you know? Or professional groups. I mean I have Grammy winning musician friends who will call me up and say “Hey I’m in town, if you can get 500 bucks together, we can come play with the group.” I mean, we don’t take it for granted. What it means is more opportunities for these musicians to be performing, to tour, to improve their musicianship and to just grow as individuals.

JAZZed: I’ve noticed the group even has pro endorsement deals.

CC: Right, just like the big guys have, where they’re featuring them in their advertising and sponsoring them in clinics and stuff like that. The companies that are working with us right now are Rico, Evans, Cannonball, ProMark, D’Addario, Yamaha. I think it’s really cool that the companies are realizing they need to support education and not just the big celebrities because if we don’t have support for education and these programs it all goes away, like I say.

JAZZed: Here’s a professional dilemma for you then – is there ever a danger in customizing your performances too much to grab those kinds of gigs and miss out on certain areas of the music you could otherwise be focusing on? “Selling out,” maybe?

CC: Sometimes there’s an attitude in jazz where we play the music that we want to play and if the audience doesn’t get it, then they don’t get it. And of course that attitude brings us to where we are today, where there aren’t audiences for jazz music and there are no record sales, right? I get really frustrated with that.

So you’re absolutely right to wonder about that, but for me it’s not a conflict. What I’m running is a professional musician training program. And I think it’s really important for these musicians to understand that for them to find fulfillment, they need to pursue the kind of music that really speaks to them. That may or may not be the music that’s going to connect with audiences, but they need to be able to play music that’s going to connect with audiences and play it with integrity. It just takes some effort. A lot of times maybe jazz musicians especially take the easy way out and say, “I’m just gonna play this and that’s what I want to play.”

JAZZed: Was there any hesitation about deciding to run the groups like professional groups? Any pushback or insecurity from the kids or parents?

CC: What was important for me as a young musician was that I wanted to be part of something real. I’m very careful with my groups – we don’t call them, like, “The Music School Jazz Band A.” Who wants to be part of that? I want to be part of the “Soul Research Foundation.” I want to be part of the “Crescent Super Band” or “The Voodoo Orchestra.” So you’ve got the concert tees and the CDs and you’re on the road and that’s the real thing! It’s exciting. So no, it was the opposite. I think that was part of the success and it helps us with the attitude of, “We’re going to make these demands of you as far as quality goes because it’s a professional group.”

JAZZed: Was part of the “pro band” concept to avoid having to secure donations and grants, or was that a happy accident?

CC: I’m on several non-profit boards and you spend 50 hours filling out the form for a grant to get $300. I want the program to be good enough that parents are willing to pay tuition to be a part of it and I want the music to be good enough that people are willing to pay to see and buy tickets to come to it. I don’t want to have to rely on grants and other funding.

That’s been a big deal to me from the beginning to not go the non-profit route and walk around looking for handouts and grants and kind of begging. I feel like we need to work to make what we do quality enough that people are willing to support because they want it, not because there’s some kind of obligation to fund the arts. Again, we’re in a bankrupt country, so if we’re counting on the country to bail out jazz, it ain’t gonna happen. We have to do this on our own. As musicians and educators. You can quote me on that.

JAZZed: How did you begin working with these big names that are involved with the program? Who was the first person that walked in to work with you?

CC: As a young musician growing up around Boston, it was my dream to just shake hands with Branford Marsalis or Michael Bradford or get an autograph or something. To me, they seemed to unapproachable, like I’d get the magazines religiously as a kid and I devoured music and was such a huge fan. But the first year I had the Super Band, I thought, “What would it be like if we could get just one artist to come play with them?” You know, just once! So I dared myself to start calling guys and see if I could get anybody to come play with them.

I remember exactly where I was and the whole conversation when my phone rang and it was Bob Berg. He was just one of the guys I’d always worshipped. I picked up the phone and he was like, “Hi, is this Caleb? This is Bob Berg.” I couldn’t even talk. I was totally star struck. But he agreed to come out and do a show with the band. We sold the show out and it was the first – it kind of set the stage for everything that happened since. It was like five or six months after that performance that he was killed in the [automobile] accident. But luckily for us, he was so excited about it that he told a few guys before he passed away and one of those guys was Randy Brecker. So I called Randy because we wanted to do a tribute to Bob the next year. He came out and loved it and started telling everybody, so it just snowballed from there. Since then, we’ve had so many guys come out.

JAZZed: How big is it to have the kids work with these kinds of musicians on a regular basis?

CC: It’s a big, big part of it. Over the course of a year, if you’re in the CSB, you’re probably going to play with 10 to 15 A-list artists. I think in my entire high school and college career, I played with zero. [laughs]. Just this week, on Saturday night, the Super Band did a show with Jeff Coffin from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones and the Dave Mathhews Band now. It was our feature show with “special guest Jeff Coffin” at a 2,000 people outdoor venue. The kids want to show the guest artists that they can play at that level. That they can hang and that they can do it. So I’m trying to convince them that they’re a professional band and there’s nothing better for that than for them to actually be the professional band for these guys. Last summer, they were Toshiko Akiyoshi’s backup band at the Teluride Jazz Festival. I mean I know pro guys that are scared to death to sit in Toshiko Akiyoshi’s band, and here are these high school kids throwing it down.

JAZZed: What’s the touring schedule like for the bands?

CC: I try to make sure each of the bands has one tour during the year and try to limit it to that with the younger groups. Again, these musicians are all involved in their school programs as well, and are involved in sports. The Super Band is a different story. Especially in the summers during the festival season, they’ll be out at least a couple weeks. Again, it’s not like a completely professional band – they’re all high school students. But they’ll probably do a good three to four weeks of traveling per year.

JAZZed: And what are your plans with the new Caleb Chapman Institute?

CC: It’s building on the success of this ensemble program. I’ve gotten accredited, meaning we can offer high school credit and grading. So we’re offering ensemble programs to musicians that don’t have access to it in their educational settings, to private schools that don’t have bands or orchestras or home schoolers or schools where they’ve already cut the programs. Places where ensemble opportunities don’t exist that this program makes those ensemble opportunities available to them.

It’s a hybrid learning program, so part of it is done online and part of it’s done in person. We’ve had a lot of success with these kids getting together once a week for two hours and we really think that can be replicated. We’re hoping this can be a solution to bring music programs back to the areas where they’ve been removed. We feel like the education product is going to be something that school districts and smaller schools can afford but still be high-impact and high-quality.

JAZZed: Will you be working with teachers from your old program?

CC: We’re using the very, very best public school educators in Utah for this pilot program this year, then we’re going to be launching in California and Nevada and Arizona next fall. It’s a bit different personnel than I employed previously, but we’re really excited about it. And really, all of this goes away if we don’t find some way to make education available to kids again. It doesn’t matter how good our teaching methods are for improvisation or technique or whatever if nobody has access to it. And without making education available, I think the consumers start to disappear pretty quickly.

I don’t know, this year JEN and Berklee awarded me the John LaPorta Jazz Educator of the Year award, and it was kind of a shock, you know? I wasn’t planning to be doing this. I was planning to be working at a computer at some corporation. I’m not sure how we ended up here but I really feel like I’ve got the best job in the world. Since they honored me with that award, I really feel like now I’ve got to go earn it.

**

Originally published in JAZZed here.

His CANT is more than sweet nothings

The story behind “Dreams Come True,’’ the first “solo’’ album from Grizzly Bear producer and bassist Chris Taylor, sounds like a one-off gimmick. Taylor and friend George Lewis Jr., recently of Twin Shadow fame, holed up in a friend’s secluded Catskills house last year with a car full of recording equipment and nothing else. Two weeks later they had a new batch of songs under Taylor’s moniker, CANT, which had to date released a total of one song, on a split 7-inch.

Taylor, based in New York City, had by then moved to the forefront of the current field of record producers after resourceful, transformative work on the last two Grizzly Bear records, while Lewis has steadily built an independent career with chameleon sensibilities and a magnetic stage presence. Neither had plans to form a band around it, nor do any plans for the future exist, leaving the music out on its own.

As it turns out, its nonchalance might be the band’s greatest asset – “Dreams Come True’’ is a solid set of pouty dance-pop and smoky ballads that wanders into varied musical nooks and crannies with the freedom of a project that has no strings attached. It’s an effective mission statement for Taylor’s style of traversing influences and duties with ease.

This month, Taylor assembled a full band of friends that spent a week learning the songs and he’s taking them out on a tour that pulls into the Middle East on Monday night. Lewis won’t be present – his extensive Twin Shadow touring places him in Europe at this point – but the spirit of adaptation lives on.

“I love it when music can continue to be an ongoing project,’’ says Taylor, calling in from a tour stop in Denver. His restless track record reflects that. Taylor began to emerge once Grizzly Bear’s second album, “Yellow House,’’ came out. That band had first gained attention as the meandering solo project of Ed Droste, but the band members he added slowly stepped out of the shadows as strong individual voices. On paper, Taylor looked like just the bass player, but live shows expanded on that – his Beach Boys falsettos and pitch-altered clarinets often took center stage.

There was a time when it seemed like willfully independent musicians like Wilco and Son Volt had taken roots music away from the mainstream. They made it sparse, hushed, wry, and contemplative. It was like a mild-mannered and acquired taste.

That’s not so much the case any more, with West Coast bands like Dawes and Blitzen Trapper shredding through shows like Friday night’s at Royale. The cowboy shirt is still the garment of choice, but these bands proudly harken back to the days when rock bands blasted county fair-worthy anthems and ripped solos destined for Guitar Hero.

Blitzen Trapper, ofPortland,Ore., is the more bombastic of the two. The five-piece has grown a healthy disregard for boundaries and it’s as comfortable with pseudo-Dylan acoustic ballads as with Deep Purple-style proto-metal riffs. Singer Eric Earley alternated between reedy Dylan croons and Black Crowes squawking, all the while handling fuzzed-out guitar duties like a sorcerer’s apprentice.

Blitzen was promoting its new album “American Goldwing.’’ It melded the new batch of rural rockers with older, almost prog-flavored tunes using a mix of electric and acoustic guitars and a battery of sleek modern synths spread across the stage. The members tempered the new down-on-yer-luck ballad “Love the Way You Walk Away’’ into an Elton John crawl (think “Bennie and the Jets’’). “Baby, I’m on the make / In my old sport coat / My head it aches,’’ Earley crooned. Later, the band made its own headaches with big swamp rock riffs and a very banging version of Led Zeppelin’s “Good Times Bad Times.’’

Dawes played more to the crowd. ALos Angelesband built on the sibling core of guitarist Taylor and drummer Griffin Goldsmith, its sound is a retro-fittedNashvillesoul. It’s a more vintage approach, with bearded keyboardist Tay Strathairn playing lush organ parts through a spinning Leslie speaker cabinet. Dawes could also gunsling its way through relaxed solos (Taylormay be a closet Frank Zappa disciple). But the main focus with Dawes is direct and to the point – find the heartstrings and yank. Taylor has a cute Bruce Springsteen/Rick Moranis thing going on, and he hammed up narratives about suicide cases and brides-to-be with relish, milking every corny possibility out of the pop-country prom dance epiphany of “A Little Bit of Everything’’ as fans across the club swooned. It was cool and calculated and worked, the way a generation’s worth of bashful alt-country would never admit it would.

**
Originally published in the Boston Globe here.

On the first night of last year’s Xiphoid Dementia tour, Egan Budd found himself billed at a coffee shop inBurlington,Vt., set to perform right after a hippie jam band and a guy doing solo acoustic guitar covers. As a noise artist, the musical chasm he was about to leap could not have been bigger.

But the oppressive electric hum and cavernous squall of circuits he proceeded to rustle into that unsuspecting crowd turned out to have a strange effect that night – people liked it. Curious audience members nodded their heads, watched each slider adjustment and sample tweak, and even bought records afterward. With a genre so often antagonistic toward anything approaching normal music, it’s not often that the uninitiated get a chance to hear noise actually work.

Budd learned a lesson that night. “Sometimes,’’ he says, “the basic idea of seeing these odd sounds coming out of someone performing live is enough for people to think it’s neat. As long as they’re able to get beyond that initial feeling of ‘Oh my God, this is terrible!’ ’’

Budd runs Existence Establishment, a catch-all boutique label and booking and promotions operation. Thursday night it will celebrate a run of increased activity in town this year with what could be the area’s only actually scary Halloween bill of music, “Horror Sounds’’ at the Yes Oui Si gallery. It pairs inarguably spooky sounds from New England artists hand-picked to bridge “noise’’ and “dark ambient’’ styles with a handful of obscure horror flicks – including the 1981 Italian zombie flick “Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror’’ and the 1978 Mexican satanic-nun thriller “Alucarda’’ – in psychotic triple-screen vision, and it could be the perfect time to jump onboard this musical endgame.

While rock music has cathartic bridges and choruses, and jazz offers endless variations on themes, noise offers one blunt question: To endure or not to endure? From the boom and scrape of antisocial pioneers like Throbbing Gristle in the ’70s to the sheets of white noise peddled by Merzbow from the ’90s on, listening to the noise generated from this subculture’s tables of pedals, synths, and tangles of cables can seem like more of a challenge than a pleasure. Its fans, Budd included, often describe it as the kind of music listeners arrive at once they’ve been through everything else.

“I think the common context that everyone has with noise is the way it’s used in films,’’ says Budd. “And I’m actually hoping that it can even be an entry point for people who are sort of newcomers.’’ Think of the industrial sizzles that cut through the “Saw’’ movies, or even the churning synth ambience in “The Social Network’’ as examples of how films have made audiences indirectly at ease with startling squeals and treacherous drones.

Horror Sounds is a celebration of a growing presence that Existence Establishment has had at spaces around town such as O’Brien’s Pub in Allston and Starlab inSomerville. In turn, the night is set up with a just-for-fun approach, with plenty of ways to identify with what can be an extremely tough scene to navigate.

“The main reason harsh noise won’t get really popular is that it can never be party music,’’ says Budd. “Harsh noise’’ is a technical term. Mentioning it to any aficionado will conjure a specific idea of cut-up static and audible chaos. “Dark ambient’’ has its drones and atmospheric arpeggios; “industrial’’ has the piston clang of Einstürzende Neubauten (or the poppier interpretations of Nine Inch Nails), and “power electronics’’ has its mess of feedback, haywire pedals, and confrontational performance.

David Dodson, a longtime noise artist performing as DVJ Deftly-D, will be in charge of music between performances throughout the night as well as the video projection array. “It definitely has the potential to end up being very genuinely chilling,’’ he says. “That’s not something you get at most Halloween nights.’’

Not that horrific imagery is anything new to the scene. Connecticut-based Chris Donofrio, who performs as Reviver, has his own list of visual inspirations: “dental procedures. Tooth extractions, root canals, those are always things I keep in mind.’’ As Reviver, Donofrio is a solo force of powerful drones and tingling pins and needles. He welcomes the chance to place noise in a context that filmgoers might relate to more, but the thought of being accessible doesn’t concern him much.

“I’m not even sure where to begin with accessibility because I don’t really even play music that I want other people to listen to. I play music that I want to listen to.’’

And really, the genre has persisted for decades without needing outside recognition. “I‘m kind of an accommodating guy, so I try not to annoy anyone,’’ says Budd. “Like anything, you kind of have to be in the right mood.’’

With Halloween around the corner, it’s no stretch to imagine that the mood may be just right.

**

Originally published in the Boston Globe here.

A battery of synths loomed over the stage as Nika Roza Danilova floated out in a flowing white smock. Above the band, a field of projected white radar rings shuddered as she grabbed the mike, and she let out a long snake moan that would last the whole night as her Zola Jesus project pounded out electronic banks of strings and heavy, primal drumming.

The romantic and industrial Zola Jesus is three albums into a young career as of this month’s “Conatus,’’ but Monday night showed the project in a few different lights. Though Danilova is tiny – and donned sparkling elven shoes – she never plays the part of a wispy fantasy princess. She bounced around the stage, a veil of blond hair over one eye, waving her hands like an R&B queen, stomping and headbanging at any chance. At one point, she descended into the crowd to bop around on her wireless mike and disappeared altogether.

Danilova’s music can sound glacial and somber – brooding pop stuff with mid-tempo beats, really – but the band made a convincing case that it’s not averse to a good time. The digital jungle chirping and thunderous keys in songs like “Vessel’’ conjure Trent Reznor, but when the beats started trucking, shades of everything from teen idol confessionals to bittersweet Springsteen keyboard bashes emerged. A contemporary touchstone for her deep roar is Beach House’s Victoria Legrand (who, like Danilova, grew up training for opera), but fans who let their guard down might hear a little Non Blonde Linda Perry in that howl.

Still, the strongest moments came in the churning, building “Run Me Out’’ and the desert desolation of “Night,’’ which best split the difference between rally anthem and grim fantasy. The electric bass droned heavy and the cutting hi-hats typed out a Terminator beat while Danilova bellowed a time-tested fatal love tale: “In the end of the night I can be with you,’’ she howled, stretching out the “you’’ on her fingers like bubble gum.

Opener Xanopticon pummeled with a terabytes-deep arsenal of shattered laptop beats, cutting them up rapid-fire with bird-like motions of the solo artist’s lanky frame and speedy, knob-flipping fingers.

**

Original article appeared in the Boston Globe here.

Once a user navigates past the title on Björk’s new “Biophilia’’ app for the iPad, the screen is plunged into a sea of constellations floating in a loose 3-D formation. David Attenborough’s knightly documentary voice droops in to introduce the big idea – “Biophilia’’ is about a love of all things seen and unseen in nature. He notes, “We are on the brink of a revolution that will reunite humans with nature through technology.’’

From there, we’re on our own. “Biophilia,’’ the new collection of songs that will be released Tuesday both as a CD on Nonesuch Records and as iPhone/iPad apps for $1.99 apiece, is billed as a new paradigm for the way music is distributed and experienced. It pairs game play and essays with endless variations on the songs, which users can manipulate with sparse interfaces (sometimes the games themselves) for homemade, off-key remixes of melodies. For these moves, the creatively restless Icelander can’t be faulted. Rebirth ballad “Moon’’ lays it out best, when she sweetly croons – in a line that no one else could pull off with a straight face – that it’s time to “kick it through the starthole.’’

The “Biophilia’’ project is a throwback to the clumsy days of the ’90s multimedia where our guides hardly knew where they were going in the first place. Back then, anonymous avant-pop crew the Residents made early award-winning CD-ROMs “Bad Day on the Midway’’ and “Freak Show, where users searched for animations, song lyrics, and sketched out story lines to go along with the songs. They seemed like the future at the time, but that format never really caught on. This was around the same time that Björk was making a name for herself with videos for songs like “Human Behaviour’’ and “It’s oh so Quiet,’’ two works of art that still hold up.

There’s not a lot of replay value in Björk’s new mode, but it still works humbly well and the computer visuals go a long way toward expanding on the fragile, chamber orchestra feel of the music. Constellation and cell-scape animations dance like old wireframe arcade games to the warmth of her familiar cooing.

On its own, the music has the hush of an early computer age organ recital, with angelic choruses piped in from the wings. It’s a reverent, religious affair. There are hints of Stockhausen and shards of drum ’n’ bass (also kind of a throwback at this point), but this is largely Björk at her most collected, reclaiming the whispering harpy role that Joanna Newsom borrowed for her career. This side of her is backed up by a collection of rattling, jangly instruments custom built for the album, including the music-box chiming of the “gameleste’’ and a set of harp strings plucked by pendulums, which was engineered by MIT grad Andy Cavatorta.

Robotic lead single “Crystalline,’’ which appeared last month as the album’s opening salvo, serves as an elemental balance to the hymnal “Cosmogony,’’ a lush choral, electronics, and brass band arrangement played before the same altar of natural creation that Terrence Malick worshipped at this summer in “The Tree of Life.’’ They’re the only moments of the album that spoon-feed listeners much of a melody or a structure. Even then, the “Crystalline’’ app encourages users to fly through computer tunnels, altering the song by collecting crystals. When the game’s over, the final jumble of pink and teal crystals can be e-mailed to a friend – it looks like a graph generated in Excel.

The rest of the songs take more work. “Hollow’’ is particularly confounding, with a synth line that sounds like someone jammed a randomly punched player piano roll into an old floppy disc drive. Björk winds thorny passages of text through her typically twisted melodies. She slowly orbits howling hooks that seem to disappear just as they materialize, like the triumphant slow reveal in “Mutual Core.’’

One song app that works well (they aren’t all released yet) is the ballad “Virus,’’ an unwinnable game about symbiotic and parasitic relationships. It’s screensaver simple, but manages a few tender moments as a cell gets chewed to ribbons by overwhelming green infections, which the player hopelessly tries to flick away.

A tribute to what we know and we don’t, “Biophilia’’ has the ambitious, idealist spirit of an exhibit at Epcot. It’s not so much a paradigm shift as a return to a time when scientific exploration was charged by a collective excitement – a time when we could afford space shuttles. It can’t be an accident that so much of the album echoes the old Vangelis synthscapes that accompanied Carl Sagan’s awe-inspiring ’70s series, “Cosmos.’’

Space shuttles are obsolete, though, and only time will tell if anyone will want to keep dragging these songs around with their fingertips after the first test ride. Either way, our guide shoots for the stars and, even if the engines fail a few times on screen, it’s a worthwhile trip. “Have I too often now/ craving miracles?’’ she chides herself early on in “Thunderbolt,’’ though such concerns never got in the way of dreaming up this whole endeavor.

***

Originally appeared in the Boston Globe here.

It made sense for the tech-savvy trio Battles, which has spent years establishing itself among the new music elite, to invite ’80s new-wave pioneer Gary Numan for a guest spot on the group’s latest album, “Gloss Drop.’’ The ageless Brit, known for his groundbreaking 1979 song “Cars,’’ was happy to oblige and soon got to work on the track the band had sent over to his computer.

The first attempt didn’t work out.

“I did it totally wrong,’’ Numan says from his home in East Sussex,England. “I’m supposed to be the godfather of electronic music, so I shouldn’t admit this. When I got the files, I didn’t realize that they were playing at half speed and just recorded it that way. I sent it back to them with this vocal over it that way, and I think they thought I was being mad and eccentric and courageous or something.’’

Another stab yielded “My Machines,’’ a swirling anthem more straightforward than anything on past albums, with a hook that never really repeats and vintage, soaring vocals from Numan. The song’s video shows an unsuspecting shopper stuck on perpetual pratfall down an escalator. The record showcases the most ecstatic examples yet of Battles in those paradoxical moments where music is caught in a tumbling, unexplored territory. Numan, for one, took notice.

“I was really humbled to be asked to work with them,’’ he says. “They’re doing something quite a bit different.’’

Battles, which performs at Royale tomorrow night, has revealed itself slowly over the years. Early adopters drooled over personnel that included guitarists Ian Williams of Don Caballero and Dave Konopka fromBoston’s Lynx, drummer John Stanier from Helmet, and a rising star inBrooklynnamed Tyondai Braxton, who had been working heavily on solo digital looping projects.

The group scattered sparse songs and droning fragments over a handful of EPs in 2004, using thorny bits of guitar and drums as skeletons to support more and more new parts as the songs went on.

“Our process has always led itself to a gradual building – this additive process of composition,’’ says Williams.

The group’s debut full-length, “Mirrored,’’ came out in 2007. It and the live performances that followed made the band torchbearers for a cerebral new music that was equal parts dance strobes and swooping Stravinsky. Battles conquered fans across genres, embarked on big tours ofJapan, and popped up in Audi commercials and the “Twilight’’ soundtrack.

Halfway through recording the follow-up, Braxton departed the group, which left the rest of the members at an even busier crossroads than they thought, pressed to make a new album from scratch.

Old rules served them well. They stripped down the manic swells and upped the reliance on interlocking rhythms and the drive force of Stanier’s drumming. Guitars and keyboard loops are more elastic than ever, ping-ponging across speakers and coursing past one another like hyper marching-band drills.

But the scope never really left the dance floor, though, and that’s a good thing. The more terrestrial ambitions here are what give the songs on “Gloss Drop’’ their steady footing.

“I think it’s a little less heavy-handed,’’ says Williams. “It’s just things that we’ve always used to make sounds and rhythms and textures. It’s similar to what we did on the earlier material, but we’d gotten a bit more confident in the process we used. So rather than just parking the song at a place where it’s just a neutral statement, we could go a little further with it and create a sort of emotional piece of music that you might even call a pop song.’’

It’s true that a few of the songs could almost pass for standard pop compositions – lead single “Ice Cream,’’ in particular, takes glee in the hyperactive vocal performance from Matias Aguayo. But there’s plenty of room for the songs to meander as well. Sometimes that works, like the searching “Inchworm,’’ and sometimes it gets lost, like on “Sundome.’’

Either way, it’s the band’s relaxed approach to balancing experimentation and songcraft that makes it such a great record. In fact, Williams doesn’t betray a great deal of ambition to be much more than an average band of musicians.

“We’re basically what I think of as a garage band that exists in 2011,’’ he says. “If you went to any of these local big music chains, you’d find everything we’re using. So we’re just an honest reflection of that, as opposed to just jumping onto some conscious retro, old-fashioned thing.’’

Originally published in the Boston Globe here.

Handsome Furs take after-hours party anthems to far corners of globe

The cover of the Handsome Furs’ new album features a woman standing stark naked in the dim lights of a nighttime highway overpass. Like the origins of grimy dance-pop on the record, that concrete interchange could be anywhere or everywhere. Maybe she’s stranded inBerlinor wandering throughHong Kong, or maybe she’s milling about underMcGrath Highway. There are certainly no road signs to help out. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter much – she probably wouldn’t have any trouble catching a ride wherever the photographer plopped her down.

The last few years have probably felt the same to the Furs, who have crisscrossed the globe enough times to lose count. (They perform atBrightonMusic Hallon Wednesday.) Living in the shadow of singer-guitarist Dan Boeckner’s full-time gig in Wolf Parade (recently shelved indefinitely), the duo has taken every chance it can to dive deep into former Soviet bloc territories and the Burmese post-punk underground on out-of-the way concert itineraries, hitching rides with every scene they can sniff out.

With its latest, “Sound Kapital’’ (on Sub Pop), the band has assembled a slew of party blasts and after-hours anthems that hint at months spent navigating nameless intersections. They’ve made an art form of the world tour.

“We can travel around strange cities all day long and get back to the hotel and realize we have totally different takes on what went on,’’ says Boeckner, on the phone recently from Sibenik, a coastal city in Croatia.

He and his wife, keyboardist Alexei Perry, have just finished sound check at a festival in an abandoned Yugoslav army barracks. Boeckner tries to explain the fascination with traveling but often gets caught up in reciting tips and retelling details, which say plenty on their own: hiking the Great Wall, meeting hardcore bands from Belgrade, and playing a string of shows in Macedonia (“in some places that Alexander the Great traveled to’’). The present stop inCroatiais no bore, either.

“It looks like a Sergio Leone movie here,’’ he says, referring to the Italian director famous for his spaghetti westerns. “All scrub brush and rocks and the beautiful blue ocean, but then there’s this wind they call ‘bura’ that blows up all the desert dust. You know, it’s like how they have that ‘sirocco’ wind inAfrica.’’ Walking behind the barracks during the interview, he accidentally strolls into a field full of snakes.

“Sound Kapital’’ has a lot of the hallmarks of Western indie rock, like dirty home-cooked drum machines and synths and stoic sons-of-Joy Division melodies. But there’s extra adventure shocking it to life with fresh memories of foreign lands and bands. There’s no sensitive navel-gazing or make-believe storytelling in songs like the police brutality screed “Serve the People’’ and the steely world-gone-bad ballad “What About Us?’’ The Furs write songs like real-time foreign correspondents. “Nostalgia never meant much to me,’’ goes the line in “Memories of the Future.’’

Like Handsome Furs’ past music, “Kapital’’ is built on skeletal beats, spare synths, and a static scream of guitars. This time there’s an even stronger electric pulse, though.

“We did a couple of shows inChinawith electronic acts who played almost early ’90s house music,’’ Boeckner says. “Watching how the audience reacted to that stuff with that kind of relentless kick drum at 120 beats per minute just made us go, Yes, this is what we should be doing.’’

He and Perry spent their 2009 Asian tour patching together musical ideas on hard drives and smartphones, dumping the contents out at home inMontreal. The guitar took a back seat and shows up only in supporting roles or as thematic punctuation, like the skronky solo that twists around the worldwide basement jam shout-out “Cheap Music.’’ The pounding drums filtered through alleyways of reverb and the solid chunks of synth are firmly in control here.

That fact could also serve to highlight the distance Boeckner has put between this project and the unwieldy work of Wolf Parade, which features multiple songwriters grabbing the wheel and putting out increasingly varied collections. The Furs, on the other hand, seem to run a tighter ship than ever.

Boeckner insists that the only thing that has changed, though, since Wolf Parade’s shutting down, is that he and Perry have more time to plan their itineraries.

“That’s it,’’ he says. “Other than obvious things I learned about travel, like how you should drink more water.’’

Original article appeared in the Boston Globe here.

It must be a relief to realize that when you hit the stage, people know what they’re going to get. O’Death have spent the past several years banging out a reputation as grizzled folk punks who run their sets like moonshine raids. Which is great — you won’t find me complaining about a band who rampage through shows and leave crowds in tatters the way these guys do.

On the other hand, nobody wants to be a one-trick pony, and O’Death were on their way to becoming that kind of a deal. Not that it wasn’t a blast — towns burning down, drunken fiddles, topsy-turvy sea chanteys — but it’s always seemed they were sacrificing something as they ground everything they had into gunpowder freakouts.

New record Outside (Ernest Jenning Record Co.) — officially out April 19, but they might have a few advance copies at Saturday’s Great Scott show — goes a long way toward fixing that. “We sort of didn’t want to be a punk band that plays a banjo anymore,” said singer/guitarist Greg Jamie, from a tour van puttering through Oregon.

Anyone familiar with the band has followed what’s been a monumentally bummer couple of years. Drummer (and spastic heart and soul of the band’s live show) David Rogers-Berry was diagnosed with a form of bone cancer, osteosarcoma, while the band were on tour in 2009. He spent the next year in radiation treatment and getting a shoulder replaced, and most of the subsequent year recuperating. Jamie moved to Maine and opened folk club the Oak and the Axe in Biddeford while the rest of the band — banjo player Gabe Darling, bassist Jesse Newman, and violinist Bob Pycior on fiddle — stayed behind in New York City. They began writing the new record, slowly. “We normally write stuff and immediately take them on the road,” says Jamie. “And I think you can get sidetracked by it. What can I say? It’s a lot of fun to yell all night and have the audience yell back at you.”

The new material adopts another tack — every song conjures a web of rail-yard atmospherics, skeleton back-up choirs, and gnarled strings, but way out front are fine-tuned melodies and concise bits of songwriting that are the best ever from this band. Opener “Bugs” broods over kindling guitar picking while Jamie focuses his vocal palette on tender Neil Young–isms rather than Black Francis howls. The rest follows suit, favoring space and texture over brute force. Daylight fades and widows roam the earth. A hail of chains and steam-engine percussion paves the way for the medieval incantations of “Ourselves,” a furious climax of blown-out banjo that nevertheless seems to have been sent in to clear the brush for the quiet, funereal “Look at the Sun.”

But personal? Jamie doesn’t think so. “Personal is a weird word. I’m not even sure what that means with music. It was the first time we were really just writing songs and had thrown out the idea of ‘Is this an O’Death song?’ It definitely seems more sincere to me.” Whatever, it’s led to what feels like O’Death’s first substantial album.

Not to say that the old spirit is going anywhere — you can expect plenty of horsepower this time around, notwithstanding gentle new songs or Rogers-Berry’s new shoulder. “We weren’t sure how it was going to go in terms of playing every day on this tour,” says Jamie. “But David’s doing great. Even if he’s a little sore, he’s not complaining.”

Originally published in the Boston Phoenix here.