 |
Photo By Jimmy Katz
|
Medeski Martin & Wood straddle the line between
groove party music and more avant-garde material.
|
One of the charms of Medeski Martin & Wood albums is the way songs frequently have a single-take, offhanded feel. According to keyboardist John Medeski, that sort of spontaneity is no accident.
"We try to find ways to keep that sort of spirit or process or whatever, trying to find a way to make a studio kind of record while keeping that process alive, not killing it with over-thinking or overworking (the music)," Medeski says.
For a Medeski Martin & Wood record, this means bringing the kind of improvisational approach one might expect from their live shows to the writing and recording process.
To create much of the music on the group's latest, Uninvisible, Medeski, bassist Chris Wood and drummer Billy Martin set up shop at Schaklyn, their New York City studio, and simply began jamming.
"It's been our approach to writing music always, to kind of have it come out of something that we create together, and then we're able to work on it, develop it," Medeski says. "We call them seeds. We'll work on something, and we'll find maybe something out of a particular rehearsal or improvisational thing. We'll have something that feels extra special, so we'll go back and replay it and work it out and create a piece of music that way, by playing them over and finding other sections and melodies."
Eventually the raw tracks are edited down to a more focused finished song. And while the typical Medeski Martin & Wood song on Uninvisible clocks in at around only four minutes, the free-form spirit of the performances remain.
Medeski says the approach to the music on Uninvisible was so open-ended that the players had virtually no idea what they would play until it happened. There was only one loosely stated goal going into the recording.
"We were going to do a record that was a little more groove-oriented and more consistently grooving than the last one maybe. That might have been our only goal, really," Medeski says. "How that manifested itself we didn't know."
The groove element is certainly more pronounced on Uninvisible than it was on the trio's previous studio effort, The Dropper. On The Dropper, the band's long-standing Funk influence was present, but the music frequently veered into spacier, almost psychedelic territory, taking a more unhinged brand of rhythm with it in the process.
By contrast, a thick, funky pulse is central to many of the tracks on Uninvisible. There are still moments of cosmic musical exploration (for instance on the song "Take Me Nowhere"), but for the most part Medeski's organ, synthesizer and piano parts remain anchored more closely to the deep grooves created by Martin and Wood.
For instance, the title song gets a decidedly '70s Funk feel from its descending base melody, while Medeski's keyboards mix freely with blasts of horns. "I Wanna Ride You" continues the funkified feel, as Medeski's trucking keyboards bounce around a jazzy yet grooving rhythm pattern.
The Hip-Hop feel that has increasingly found its way into the Medeski Martin & Wood sound since 1998's Combustication is also a prominent ingredient, especially informing such Uninvisible songs as "Pappy Check" and "The Edge of Night."
Even though the songs are concise and entertaining, the music has enough complexities to satisfy more cerebral fans. Maintaining a mixture of innovation and entertainment is a major goal for the group, Medeski says.
"There's entertainment and then there's art. I think both things are important and both things are good," Medeski says. "Sometimes you just need to be lightly entertained, and sometimes it's fun to be taken on a journey."
"There are those lines," he says. "It's a hard one, because sometimes people want us to be more of a party band and other people want us to be less of a party band and enjoy the more, I guess, avant (garde stuff). It's wild. We are kind of in a weird place. But we love all that stuff."
Medeski Martin & Wood have been creating music that moves the mind and the feet since 1991, when the group formed in New York City. At the time, Medeski and Wood, who had attended the New England Conservatory of Music, were busy playing in such Manhattan clubs as the Village Gate. The two were introduced to Martin, who had worked with such notables as John Zorn and John Lurie, through a mutual friend. When Martin sat in with Medeski and Wood for a week at the Village Gate, the three quickly realized they had a winning chemistry.
The trio has been redefining that musical chemistry ever since. Over the course of nine albums -- four on Gramavision Records, the four most recent releases on Blue Note and a 1992 debut on Accurate Records -- Medeski Martin & Wood have gained a reputation for funky improvised jams that have linked Jazz, Blues and Rock in creative and surprising ways.
The trio have also stayed busy with outside projects. Recently, Martin has started his own record label, Amulet Records, to release percussion albums by himself and other artists. His first release, Drop the Needle, came out in October. He's also organized a "Turntable Sessions" concert series in New York to bring together DJs with some of the city's best Jazz and experimental musicians.
Wood, meanwhile has kept busy recording and touring with a variety of artists, including saxophonist Karl Denson and drummers Stanton Moore and Bob Moses.
Perhaps the busiest of the three, though, is Medeski, who over the preceding year has recorded with such artists as Sex Mob, John Scofield and Gov't Mule and has also formed a side band, The Word, which released an acclaimed debut CD last year.
The Word started to take hold in 1998 when the North Mississippi All-Stars opened for Medeski Martin & Wood on tour. During that tour, Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars and Medeski discovered they both shared a love for instrumental Gospel music. In particular, they spent time listening to a pair of CDs, Sacred Steel and Sacred Steel Live, that compiled Gospel tunes built around pedal steel guitar.
Medeski and the members of the North Mississippi All-Stars -- Dickinson, his brother Cody Dickinson and Chris Chew -- had already agreed to record an instrumental Gospel record when one evening pedal steel player Robert Randolph opened a North Mississippi All-Stars show in New York City. Immediately Randolph, who to that point had only performed in church, was invited into the project and The Word lineup was complete.
"He (Randolph) was there and he was just ready to come out and play with some people outside of the church," Medeski says. "So there we all were the same week. It's pretty wild how it all came together."
According to Medeski, instrumental Gospel has a long history, but little of the music has been recorded. Medeski says he thoroughly enjoyed exploring the form and says there's a good chance that The Word will continue to record and tour.
"I would say it's been thoroughly explored, probably since the early 1900s, the '30s or something like that," Medeski says of instrumental Gospel. "But it hasn't been, no one has heard it but the people who go to the churches until recently. It's kind of like this innocent, pure form in the 20th century, which is hard to find."
MEDESKI MARTIN & WOOD perform at Bogart's on Thursday.
Printer-friendly version
