streetsound interviews

Soul Coughing

How did you guys get together?
MD: Um, I was working at the Knitting Factory and these cats just camethrough in various bands, various projects, and I was looking to get acollaborative thing together, so, you know...

What was it like...? You say, "Knitting Factory", sort of toss that off,while everybody else says, like, "Oooh, Knitting Factory." I've seen John Zornthere. You can't really say that next week you'll see these people on the Top10 chart, but it's been such a Mecca for new music...
MD: Well, it's a really strong community. Actually, the communitypre-dates the Knitting Factory - all those Zina Parkins and Wayne Horovitz andBill Frisell and Zorn...
YG: They were doing it in other places...

Yeah, it was a place for them to actually get together...
YG: But then, you know, New York rent goes up and people get kicked outand out of the blue came that little room, Knitting Factory, and then thatwhole scene found kind of a home.

Were you guys playing? You guys don't look old enough to be part of thatscene...
MD: Well, the Knitting Factory opened in 1987.

So you've seen this kind of stuff before, then?
YG: I was in that scene, unfortunately, since 1984.

Why "unfortunately"?
YG: Well, because I look back at it like a stepping stone. I don't lookat it as like, "ohhh, my Biblical thing".

But isn't everything like a stepping stone?
YG: No... Some stuff is like the supporting columns and some stuff isthe stepping...

OK, I know you guys hate this and I've actually heard you say that youhatetrying to figure out what your music is about. Didn't you used to doreviews?
MD: Yeah, which is why I hate it; which is why I completely disassociatemyself from the examination of something that is the most nebulous andunexaminable artistic form there is.

Yeah, but you're a reviewer. What's the purpose of reviewing,then?
MD: Well, the purpose of reviewing was so I could get my rent.(laughs)

You gotta pay it somehow...but I always felt doing reviews had a purpose.You want to say, "I got this great album by a band called Soul Coughing", but Iwant to tell these people what it's about. And how do I describe theband...?
MD: Well, it's your job...not mine. (laughs)

Yeah, but before, it was.
MD: It was, but happily it is no longer.

So you're going to leave it back there in the past. It's your steppingstone...?
MD: Indeed, indeed.
YG: In a way, it keeps us free from having to do anything that we put ourselvesinto. If we say, "This is that", then we're gonna have to be that. But if wedon't say anything, we can be anything, and we like that freedom...
But is that your call? Most of the time it's the record company'scall.

YG: No, not really, although they have big problems describing us, too.It's not like you're the only one. They're in that category.

Well, I usually don't even want to describe anybody as it is. But if theysay, "Look, give me another Beck...'"
MD: Happily, we're on Slash... Well, I don't know. There's things wecertainly feel akin to, I mean, certainly trip hop and jungle.

What is, I think you call it, "sugar-free jazz"?
MD: What is it? It's actually a piece of graffiti that was on theKnitting Factory wall on the bathroom. Somebody wrote "Free Jazz" and underthat, someone drew a cartoon of Bert from Sesame Street behind bars andwrote "Free Bert", and someone wrote "Free Drinks" under that, and thensomebody amended the "Free Jazz" and put "Sugar" in front of that.

'Cause I had heard it was sort of a dis on acid jazz?
MD: It kinda is...

Why would nice guys like you want to dis acid jazz?
MD: I think there was...I think it's still happening, but not in thereal exciting sense that it was happening in New York a couple of years back. Alot of players were doing this thing that almost became something really newand really exciting, and I think really what prevented it from going anyfurther than it went was they had to put the tag "jazz" on it. And I, for one,don't understand why they couldn't just say, "OK, we're trying to makesomething new here", as opposed to trying to cross-reference the jazz thing.

Is it because of where you came from, because of what you've seen at the Knitting Factory, the sort of free ideals and then you see a more structuredform of this new kind of music, the more dance, club-based, looped kind ofstuff?
MD: Oh, no, I love it...pop star structure is what I'm about, throughand through. It's not that. It's just, why do you have to call it "jazz"? Itseemed to me that the real influence of jazz was in, like, old sepia-tonedphotographs of guys holding saxophones.

Yeah, the Blue Note covers.
YG: There was, for a minute, these people were getting together andplaying with the DJ, playing the beats and they would, like, play otherinstruments with it and for as long as they were searching for something,'cause they didn't know what exactly...they were just trying to put togethersomething like hip hop and jazz musicians...as long as they were, like,searching, it sounded really good. But once they found it...
MD: Exactly!
YG: ...it went down. Because from there on, it was, like, (snapsfingers) "Give the beat." (faking holding a trumpet) "Blah, blah,blah, blah, blah, blah, blah"--and that's not what it's all about. It's notabout soloing over a beat. That's not jazz.

So did they sort of hit a formula?
YG: They totally hit a formula which kind of locked them into this thingthat got really boring quickly, because I know that some people still are intohearing long saxophone solos or whatever but that's not the essence of jazz.Jazz is so much deeper than that. If you listen to the real stuff, CharlesMingus or Thelonius Monk or Duke Ellington, it's not about solo-ing oversomething. The structure is deep and it's complex and there's all these anglesthat once they reached something that sounded good, they just couldn't go anyfurther. And that was the problem. That, I think, is why we kind of were like,'OK, this is over', 'cause we were, in a way, experimenting with the samething, trying to put like a kind of a jazzy feel with a strong danceablesomething that'll make you move, you know. And but we didn't find the formula,luckily enough. So we left it where it was.
MD: Still haven't. Still looking.
YG: You know who did a really good job on jazz and hip hop was like Guru. Hedid a great job on that.
MD: Until Jazzmatazz...
YG: Yeah, he's got his one record before and the one record after...Jazzmatazz, he really tried to make it like "jazz-hip-hop"...

He was searching for that formula...
MD: Exactly. I think he found it. (laughs)
YG: When he tried a little bit less hard, it sounded much better.
MD: I saw Premier and Branford Marsalis and Ron Carter play at the Red Hot& Cool. I was at the taping. And it was just so incredibly sad 'cause it'sPremier and Branford Marsalis and then somebody's like, you know, "Ladies andgentlemen, Mister Ron Carter", and Ron Carter steps out with the bass and thecrowd is like, "Yeah, Ron Carter! Alright! Ron Carter! Woo! I own that TribeCalled Quest record! Alright, Ron Carter!" And then he starts playing andeverybody turned around and went to the bar...
YG: ...they start talking...
MD: ...literally! Just like. It was completely ridiculous. It was like, "Oh, Isee. Jazz."
YG: That was hype. That's where the definition of the word "hype" comesfrom.

What did they expect from him? Did they expect Ron just to play that oneloop and everybody else to drop stuff over the top?
MD: I don't know. They expect a photograph of a guy in a suit on stageplaying a saxophone.

Interview by Reynold Gonsalves
Soul Coughing are M. Doughty & Yuval Gabay Current LP:Ruby VroomLabel: Slash/Warner Bros.


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