Flatland
Green Onion, 15
SW 2nd Ave., 227-2372
8 pm Saturday, Nov. 20.
Cover.
Todd Bishop can't exactly say what his band Flatland is,
but he can tell you what it isn't. "This whole 'acid jazz'
scene going on that tends toward club, dance, party stuff,"
says the drummer, "we've never been a part of that. We're
not the next Jive Talkin' Robots or another funk project,
either."
Bishop shows his wide-eyed trust easily and lets his thoughts
flow freely, a lot like the music he creates with fellow
Flatlanders Don Corey and Matt Wayne. Like an educated punk/hippie
hybrid, he's in your face...sort of. His mellow stream-of-consciousness
rants match his group's trippy guitar-bass-drums lunar orbit.
Flatland is an anti-power trio, shedding rock heaviness
in favor of more delicate thunder, spreading out layers
of bass and guitar distortion while the drums nudge the
fever along. The feedback never threatens to swallow the
whole or bury the sound in electronic sludge.
How did a group of jazzheads that includes two Berklee
School of Music grads come to this? These guys know the
Fake Book, the monstrous photocopied compendium of standard
jazz rhythm changes, but they're busy trying to unlearn
what they've been taught. "Someone who goes to Berklee,"
says Bishop (the only member who didn't), "isn't going to
come out sounding like the Butthole Surfers."
But maybe they'd like to. "The point is we don't want to
be 'correct,'" the group's spokesman continues, "or do it
because it was part of a craft we've learned called 'jazz.'"
Though this manifesto may seem a little slippery, it's
not the least bit hazy to the boys in the band. They know
what they want: jazz as improvisation and experimentation.
They listen for a map to this land of the free in the work
of Charles Gayle, Sonny Sharrock, Albert Ayler and Charlie
Patton. Most importantly, they stab at the seminal '70s
free harmonic jazz of Keith Jarrett's Quartet and the Dewey
Redman/Don Cherry/Charlie Haden/Ed Blackwell collective
Old and New Dreams, a spacious sound of group interplay
where silence is a part of the band.
Bishop admits he and Corey came at their sound ass-backwards.
In '94, the two joined with singer-songwriter Jeff Groves
to form a macho rock band, Raging Woodies. "Yeah, well...we
were trying to get an aggressive rock sound with some of
the freedom of a Keith Moon kinda thing," says Bishop, sounding
more than a bit noncommittal. All the while, he and Corey
were delving deeper into free waters with their listening;
the bassist even began experimenting with wah-wah and Interstellar
Overdrive distortion during Woodies' shows. When the band
broke up in '97, the two knew where they wanted to go.
Corey met fellow Berklee boy Matt Wayne through teaching,
and soon after, they had their third man. "The chemistry
was there playing-wise," says Bishop. "I knew it was the
right decision when Matt started doing these crazy loops
and delays that we'd imagined."
They cut a maiden studio voyage, The Satellite,
in a single day, failing to capture the freedom of their
live shows. That set of straight tunes has evolved. "For
awhile we were doing 45 minutes of everybody playing at
once," says Bishop. "Now it's a lot more dynamically varied."
They've also added Seattle saxophonist Saul Kline (yes,
another Berklee bloke) to torque the dynamics even further.
Bishop cites their September gig at the Crystal Ballroom
opening for Herbie Hancock's Headhunters as a watershed
moment.
"The audience was there to hear the kind of music we play,"
Bishop remembers. "When Corey played the first few notes
of [Miles Davis'] 'Jack Johnson,' everyone cheered. They
actually knew it."
A new album, Origin of Species, will be released
in February. That disc was done right, with three weeks
of studio time logged in the past nine months, just enough
to get comfortable and stretch out a bit. "This disc was
really created in the studio," Bishop says. "Most of it
we never played before. It was improvised and refined with
overdubs, and it's more like the free-jazz movie soundtrack
we're about."
The disc's tunes snake together to form a sublime wall
of space. There are even homages to a couple of heroes in
cover tunes of Charlie Haden's "Chairman Mao" and Joe Zawinul's
"In A Silent Way," the classic Miles Davis side that sparked
the fusion movement.
Origin of Species nails the band's sound. Using
overdubbing and a format that alternates trio, duo and solo
pieces, it creates a free and spacious sonic om.
Bishop, Corey and Wayne aren't yet on the same plane as
their influences, but as with any DIY enterprise, half the
fun is getting there.
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Willamette Week | originally
published November 23,
1999
|
