Duane Denison plays guitar in the Jesus Lizard, a band with a particularly pitiless perspective on rhythm and melody. But today he is talking about playing something different-completely different-in his side-project band with drummer Jim Kimball.
“It seems like more and more younger people want to find something to listen to when they’re not listening to rock-jazz, experimental stuff,” he says, relaxing in his Humboldt Park flat. “When I’m on tour with the Jesus Lizard, I’ll hear 20-year-old kids talking about hard-bop in Texas. Is it the resurgence of people like Kerouac and the Beat generation? Is it that people are getting bored with guitar-bass-drums-vocals rock? Whatever it is, it’s definitely in the air, especially in Chicago. . . .”
On the couch, Kimball has been listening to his musical companion speculate, and adds his perspective: “You can’t be angry all the time. Sometimes it’s nice not to be clobbered by music.”
Besides Denison and Kimball, who used to clobber the drums for the Laughing Hyenas and Mule, two of the more volatile rock groups to emerge in the past decade from Ann Arbor, Mich., other Chicago rock musicians have been branching out. Among them are Doug McCombs, the bassist in Eleventh Dream Day, renowned for combustive live performances in the tradition of Television, Neil Young and beyond, and David Grubbs, who once played guitar in the pre-eminent Louisville punk band Squirrel Bait.
Some, like Denison and McCombs, continue to play in the rock bands they helped popularize. But all have found respite and release in music that sometimes has only the most tenuous connections to the world in which they started performing.
Groups such as Tortoise (which includes McCombs), Gastr del Sol (co-founded by Grubbs) and the Denison-Kimball Trio have emerged from within Chicago’s rock community to play what is essentially non-rock music. Other kindred spirits, in the bands the Sea & Cake and the Coctails, specialize in off-kilter rock but also venture far outside that realm for inspiration. The Sea & Cake sprinkle their angular pop songs with jazzy voicings and play the occasional boundary-leaping instrumental, while the Coctails in 1993 released an entire album of wordless soundscapes, “Long Sound” (Carrot Top), which owed more to the influence of film scores, cartoon music and pioneering jazz saxophonist Albert Ayler than it did to rock.
Although these bands sound nothing alike, they have created a vibrant underground whose membership and audience overlap with jazz and avant-garde-oriented groups such as the Vandermark Quartet, Liof Munimula, the NRG Ensemble and Math. The music also sometimes dips into the worlds of movie soundtracks, television themes, electronic sound collage and lounge combos.
“Neither one of us considers ourselves a jazz musician,” Kimball says of the Denison-Kimball Trio. The “Trio” is actually a duo, formed in early 1994 to create backing music for a local play about Andy Warhol and then a soundtrack for an independently released movie, “Walls in the City.”
“This is kind of an experiment in playing around with ideas, having a good time and trying to do something different besides loud, bombastic rock music,” Kimball says.
“I just wanted to do something different from the Jesus Lizard,” Denison adds. “I wanted to play something where I could be a lot more atmospheric, improvise, experiment with different sounds, a non-rock thing.”
Kimball plays frequently and deftly with brushes instead of sticks, while Denison eschews the riffing, rhythmic style he uses in the Jesus Lizard for a lighter, airier tone. But the music hardly sounds like warmed over neo-jazz. It’s edgy, atmospheric, multi-textured and sometimes surprisingly melodic.
On the duo’s outstanding new all-instrumental disc, “Soul Machine” (Skin Graft), the combo explores the beautiful contours of Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman” while venturing into more experimental terrain by incorporating short-wave radio and thick, atmospheric washes of sound. A rotating cast of friends, including local jazz saxophonist Ken Vandermark, makes Denison-Kimball a true trio on several tracks. Denison says he would even consider using a singer on future discs.
“It would seem natural to have a vocalist with the brushes and jazzy guitar,” he says. “For some reason, I think of a female voice . . . something different from the usual screaming men.”
There are no screaming men to be found in Gastr del Sol, though founding member David Grubbs once played in Squirrel Bait, a band with a vocalist (Pete Searcy) who sounded like he was fed up with being treated like a piece of bait. Grubbs, studying for his doctorate in English at the University of Chicago, provides the sparse lyrics in Gastr del Sol songs, and sings them with a relaxed lilt, as though telling a bedtime story. They emerge at unexpected points in the group’s journeying compositions, which draws attention to the unconventional arrangements. Grubbs points out that the composition “Eight Corners,” from the group’s recent EP “Mirror Repair” (Drag City), is “a 45-second song with a seven-minute coda.”
“It’s not so much about betraying expectations about what a song is,” Grubbs says. “It’s more directed at stopping those expectations from occurring in the first place.”
The task is accomplished by music that is constantly mutating: Rarely does Gastr del Sol play live with the same lineup, and rarely does it perform a composition the same way twice. The group rose out of the splinters of the experimental rock combo Bastro, in which Grubbs began exploring textures outside the bounds of rock and experimenting with form. But the real departure came when he invited avant-garde guitarist Jim O’Rourke to a rehearsal soon after the first Gastr del Sol album was released in 1992. The newcomer quickly found he had no interest in playing in a rock band.
“Anything I find interesting in rock has been done and will be done by other people,” O’Rourke says. “I felt rather awkward that day.”
But O’Rourke and Grubbs found they had more than enough common ground on which to build something beyond the rock vocabulary. O’Rourke is among the most forward-looking of improvisers on guitar in concert, and his solo discs embrace electronics, tape-splicing and collage.
“We started writing on two acoustic guitars almost immediately, which was the antithesis of that really loud splat we made in the first rehearsal,” Grubbs recalls. This core dialogue serves as a starting point, because Gastr del Sol operates as a collective, involving as many as a dozen people, ranging from underground rock pillars such as John McEntire to jazz reed man Gene Coleman. It’s not uncommon for rock and neo-rock bands in town to share membership. For example, guitarist Archer Prewitt plays in both the Coctails and the Sea & Cake, while McEntire floats among Tortoise, the Sea & Cake and Gastr del Sol.
Perhaps the most significant of these moonlighting projects is Tortoise, which brought together five members of established bands to create a particularly evocative brand of instrumental music. Tortoise’s self-titled debut on Thrill Jockey Records constructs lush dreamscapes out of vibes, keyboards, double bass and percussion; no guitar solos, no linear pop-song arrangements. But this is more than just mood music, because its insistent melodicism and shifting textures refuse to be shoved into the background.
Even longtime Chicago underground tastemaker Steve Albini, whose band Shellac is devoted to punk-guitar dynamics, says he’s a fan. “You’re going to have dreamy, slightly jazzy movie bands springing up in the Wicker Parks of America in the next couple of years,” he predicts. “And I’m thinking Tortoise will be the band to start getting the national attention for this vaguely experimental instrumental music.”
Albini and Gastr del Sol’s O’Rourke were among the sound engineers enlisted by Tortoise recently to remix tracks from its debut album. The new mixes are more like reinventions, and will be released this month as “Rhythms, Resolutions & Clusters” (Thrill Jockey). The remixes not only touch on the avant-garde and experimental but also reconfigure the group as a hip-hop and reggae/dub ensemble.
In its omnivorous musicality, the new Tortoise album shows the allure the non-rock world holds for Chicago’s rock musicians and many of their fans. It’s commonplace to see a big under-30 crowd-replete with nose rings, combat boots, turned-back baseball caps and Fugazi T-shirts-at a typically pin-your-ears-back jazz concert by the Vandermark Quartet. A similar audience is gravitating toward Duane Denison playing guitar in a setting quite different than the Jesus Lizard’s: perched on a stool, plucking away like a postmodern Wes Montgomery in gym shoes.
“Can you imagine Tortoise five years ago?” Denison says. “People would be saying, `No way, this is Weather Report-this is my dad’s music.’
“I think a lot of it has to do with people being of roughly the same generation and making a natural progression. There’s a tradition of rock people who go into country or jazz, if they want to keep playing.”
O’Rourke says the music industry hasn’t begun to catch up with the trend. “The charts are so stratified, whereas I think people are interested in a wide variety of music that doesn’t necessarily fit into those categories. Somebody who’s interested in the Denison-Kimball Trio but is also interested in the Vandermark Quartet-as a consumer, that tendency is much stronger in America. It’s not one band or the other.”
Grubbs nods in agreement. “There’s so much music that is extremely obscure in America but is big in Europe. But here the audiences graze with other audiences much more freely”-the perfect atmosphere for some of Chicago’s most adventurous rock musicians to try something new.
