Minimalist and pop music have always been closely linked, the vocabulary of the latter coloring the austere principles of the former. Terry Riley and Philip Glass drew inspiration from jazz, just as Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, in their monumental symphonies for electric guitar, did from rock 'n' roll. Since 2005, and February, his first opus, Jonathan Kane has been revisiting the history of the blues. What could be more logical? "The blues is an intrinsically minimalist art form," he shares. "John Lee Hooker [...] often played consisted of one droning chord and a melodic, repetitive riff. Minimalism, yes?"

A child of the blues (his first band, formed with his brother Anthony, opened for the greatest groups of the genre in the early 70s), Jonathan Kane began frequenting the New York experimental scene in the early '80s, participating in the creation of Michael Gira’s Swans and bolstering the group with the rampant groove that would become his trademark. On the lookout for musical encounters of all kinds, Jonathan Kane notably surrounded himself with major players from the current New York minimalist scene: first Rhys Chatham, who chose Kane to seat the explosive rhythms of his symphonies for electric guitars, then La Monte Young, who recruited the drummer in the '90s for his Forever Bad Blues Band.

This steady musical maturation, largely a mingling of the timeless heat of the Old South and the smokey dives of '80s downtown New York, reached its term in 2005 when Jeff Hunt, the head of the experimental label Table of the Elements, offered its artists the opportunity to interpret a contemporary work of their choosing for a compilation. The compilation was never released, but Kane’s interpretation of Chatham’s Guitar Trio (1977) would open a new chapter his career: that of composer. Mining the vein of "minimalist blues" for sharp riffs, with obstinate bass and unrelenting groove, Jonathan Kane, little by little, amassed the fragments that would form his first album, February. With Jet Ear Party, recently released on Radium (Table of the Elements), he pursues his tireless quest for the exemplary riff. Some Commentary below.

Where does the title of your new record, Jet Ear Party, come from?

It's from a Babel Fish translation of a Dutch review, into English, of my record February. The phrase “guitar parts” came out as “jet ear party”!

You began your musical career with the Kane Brothers Blues Band, which opened for some of the greatest bands of the genre in the '70s. What did you learn from listening to and playing the blues as a kid?

That emotion and intensity were critical, but that the groove takes priority over everything. Also, if you're not a sweaty rag after you play, you haven't really done much!

What did you learn from your extended work with art music composers like Rhys and La Monte? Was their work an inspiration for you?

That the evolution of sound was necessary for music to evolve. It struck me as similar to Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and Little Walter plugging their blues into amplifiers in the 1950s. Also that repetition and the pursuit of a trance state are not all that different from making people dance. I try to do both.

When did you first have the idea to mix the principles of both musical traditions? What pushed you in that direction?

I've been experimenting with blues hybrids for more than 25 years, but certainly my experience working with La Monte Young and Rhys Chatham helped guide the sonic landscape of my music.

How would you describe the evolution of your music since your first solo record, February?

I've tried to distill the sound to a relentless undeniable groove, while expanding on the principles of trance and serialism.

When and how did you compose Jet Ear Party? What did you want to achieve with this new record?

I started writing some of these songs when I was touring in support of my February release in 2006. The rest, throughout ‘07 and ‘08. I wanted to dig in further to my sound while introducing some new elements. I also wanted to throw in more fireworks from my drums than on my other records.

How did you record it?

On a laptop in my studio in Long Island City and upstate in Bovina, NY. My producer, Igor Cubrilovic, has some amazing Russian mics that make laptop recording sound like you're in Radio City Music Hall.

There are a lot of collaborations on Jet Ear Party: Anthony's harmonica, David Watson’s bagpipes, Holly's lyrics and Lisa's voice. Can you tell me more about some of those collaborations, and what they bring to your music?

Harmonica and bagpipes are two of my favorite instruments. Both are capable of pushing my emotional state to the limit. My brother, Anthony Kane, and David Watson on harmonica and bagpipes, respectively, are the best players in NYC. I was thrilled to put them into the context of this music and find out that it sounded even better than I hoped. Lisa B. Burns and Peg Simone singing a duet of Holly Anderson and Lisa's song “Up in Flames” deliver a mysterious and spooky love song, a harmonic soul ballad, if you will. I couldn't have imagined any other way to introduce vocals in my music.

Some of your songs are tributes to your musical heroes. On February, it was Richie Havens, with a home-cooked version of “Motherless Child,” then Mississippi Fred McDowell, with “I Looked at the Sun” (one of my favorite pieces of yours). This time, it's Sly & The Family Stone, with a wild version of “Thank You Falletinme Be Mice Elf Agin.” Why this one?

Well, first of all, I love the song. Larry Graham invented popping funk bass on it, which is part of the reason my version doesn't even have any bass at all for the first 4 minutes—who's going to try to compete with Larry Graham?! Second, it's in E, my favorite key, although I tune it down to E flat to accommodate the bagpipes. Also, it's capable of being a drone piece with a big fat swampy groove, but it has that melody and hook that are so damn bluesy.

On your albums, you play almost every instrument yourself. Who is February live?

Jon Crider, Peg Simone and David Bicknell on guitars, Adam Wills on bass, and me on drums.

What do your musicians bring to your music when it's played live? What does a February concert sound (and look) like?

My band is amazing. They play my music note-perfect, but they each have their own style and approach that brings something different to the sound. People yell and scream at our shows, which I love, but what I really love is when people dance, which seems to happen a lot when we play. When all that is happening it makes us play better.

Where should we listen to your music? In the beauty of Bovina's nature, or in the frenzied streets of NYC?

In the car is the very best, on a long drive, but any place will do, as long as it's at or near lease-breaking volume!

Today, you still play drums, but you're also an accomplished guitarist and composer. How do you identify yourself? As a drummer, a guitarist, a composer?

All of the above, and bass too. But I guess to prioritize the list, I'd say I'm a drummer and composer who plays, writes and arranges on guitar. To be honest, right now I play a lot more guitar than drums.

What's up with the Kane Brothers Blues Band? Are you still playing together sometimes?

It's been a while, but we're looking at some possible performances in the future. KBBB will always be ready to go, if something interesting comes up.

Any other musical projects in the works? What about that new Kropotkins record?

I'm working on a duo with Peg Simone where we both play guitar, and she sings. We have just finished a 20-minute track that will appear on her forthcoming new record. Dave Soldier is pretty near, I think, to finishing up the new Kropotkins record. Krops is his baby, like February is mine.

Do you still listen to blues, jazz and funk as much as you once did? Have you heard anything new and interesting that you would recommend?

I do listen to a lot of all of those genres. Mostly the classics that I never, ever tire of. There are some great new artists out there, not necessarily playing those styles of music… I like Megafaun, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Agathe Max, New Randy, Tinarawen, to name a few.

When are you coming back to Europe/France?

We're planning to tour in fall of 2009 or winter 2010 in support of Jet Ear Party. Hope to see you there!


Interview: Sophie Pécaud, 2009
Translation: Khira Jordan

Originally published on Chronicart, June 2009, along with a review of Jet Ear Party.

Once upon a time there was Jonathan Kane, a volcanic drummer as comfortable in the world of industrial rock as in those of minimalism and blues. Co-founder of the mythic band Swans and regular collaborator of Rhys Chatham and La Monte Young, Jonathan Kane is probably best known as a drummer. But he is also a talented composer, and has been crafting minimal pieces with a definitive blues feel since 2005, available on Radium, a subsidiary of Table of the Elements.

The story begins in 2005. Jeff Hunt, head of Table of the Elements, asks the artists on his label to interpret and record a piece of their choice for a compilation. With one constraint: the piece has to have been composed by a significant 20th century composer. Jonathan Kane chooses Guitar Trio by Rhys Chatham, a piece he has been performing for a long time in various contexts: “I've always loved playing Guitar Trio with Rhys, but for my own arrangement I needed to slow it down and make it swing. I turned it into a nasty blues. Once I did that, and it worked so well, I immediately started writing my own music for massed electric guitars, with my own, particular, blues-based perspective.”

Combining the principles of minimalism with those of the blues? Carving out a sound within that combination that is at once formally rigorous and irresistibly festive? For Jonathan Kane, all this seems completely logical: “I think I was doing it a long time before I ever knew what minimalism was. Coming from a blues background, as a kid, there were plenty of blues jams that went on for a really, really long time, and not just endless solos, but the groove… deep and long.” And he adds: “Listen to Mississippi Fred McDowell, Son House, John Lee Hooker. These artists will often play pieces consisting of one droning chord and a hypnotic, repetitive riff. Minimalism, yes?”

It is only after returning to straight blues that Jonathan Kane is able begin composing the pieces that would later become February. Gradually, the composer distances himself from his first great musical loves in order to tackle an entirely new one. “After decades of playing minimalism, industrial, experimental rock, improvisation, free music, noise, jazz and just about everything else, my brother Anthony and I reformed Kane Bros Blues Band, our first group. In doing that I rediscovered my absolute love for, and need to play....the blues. Kane Bros. Blues Band gave me the spiritual lift to return to the kind of feeling in music that I crave. Of course, once that was established, then I needed to push the sonic landscape of my own blues further, and so here I am, but Kane Bros Blues Band continues to help me to keep it real.”

February is an opus of five instrumental pieces, each deploying the musical possibilities of the blues in an original way. Imagine Terry Riley copping a Muddy Waters riff and obstinately repeating, deconstructing and recomposing in an exploding kaleidoscope of sound--supported by voluble bass and ardent drums--and that should give you a pretty good idea of what Jonathan Kane's music sounds like.

Why “February” ? “Several reasons. First, and easiest, I finished the record in February, 2005. Next, this music is Blues, and let's face it, February is the coldest, darkest, meanest blue-est month of them all. Nonetheless I love it, I love the winter. I'm very productive at that time of year. Which brings us to the last point. Some bad things have happened to me in February. To the point where the memories caused me to dread the month coming around. When I made this music, it was a cathartic experience, reclaiming the month for me and demanding celebration. And there it is. For me, February represents the best and worst that life has to offer, but in the end it's good, it's positive.”

Since then, Jonathan Kane has continued exploring the musical path he embarked upon with February, first with I Looked at the Sun, which offers a fiery version of the Mississippi McDowell classic, and, more recently, with an interpretation of "The Little Drummer Boy," a Christmas season song revised in an exquisitely incongruous and effective way. “I found myself picking out that melody on my guitar a couple years ago at the holidays, and thought it would make a nice minimalist holiday song. Then last year Jeff Hunt asked all the Table of the Elements artists to record a song for a holiday compilation, and I put dibs on The Little Drummer Boy. Apparently, I was the only one who made one, so he released it as a single!”

A new LP is in the works and should be released at the end of the year. "I have a lot of new material I'm very excited about. It's going to dig deeper into the direction I've begun with my first three records, but there will be some surprises, some new elements introduced, you'll see. I don't want to say too much. I hope to see it released in the Fall of 2008." In the meantime, Jonathan Kane and his live band called… February (!) will be on tour in Europe next Spring. Do not miss them.

Words: Sophie Pécaud
Photo: Bridget Barret



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In 2004, Rhys Chatham was at le lieu unique, Nantes, with An Angel Moves Too Fast to See. Last October 29th, the New York composer was back in Nantes to headline the Soy Festival with his very first electric guitar piece, Guitar Trio. After the majesty of a 100-guitar symphony, the fury of six punk guitars.

Rhys Chatham’s music has two origins. On the one hand, it comes from the minimalist avant-garde, the composer being a part of a hallowed tradition which goes from La Monte Young to Tony Conrad and from Terry Riley to Charlemagne Palestine, and also including the better known Philip Glass and Steve Reich. On the other hand, it comes from the rock of the Ramones: it was a Ramones concert at CBGB’s that allowed Rhys Chatham, who was 25 at the time and more familiar with French composer Pierre Boulez than the effervescent rock scene of his hometown, to “find his own voice”, the voice of a pionneer now known as the initiator of the noise rock movement, and a major influence of many experimental rock groups, such as Band of Susans or Sonic Youth.

“I was composing minimalist music in the vein of La Monte Young at that time. And then, I went to a concert of the Ramones at CBGB’s, and it changed my life. I felt a link with the music. At that precise moment, I borrowed a friend’s Fender electric guitar, and this is how I went into rock. Essentially I thought that if Steve [Reich] could work with african music, and Phil [Glass] could work with jazz, I could work with rock. Why not?”

The result of that research was Guitar Trio, the very first piece to combine the principles of minimalism with those of rock. At first, Rhys Chatham experimented with various configurations– one of them, Tone Death, including a saxophone. After 1977, the piece was standardized as a trio for three eletric guitars, electric bass and drums. Its current instrumentation consists of two to ten electric guitars, electric bass and drums – Rhys Chatham being rather undecided as far as his definition of a “trio” is concerned.

Guitar Trio is based on a very simple principle, whose effects are extremely rich: repetition. Guitarists exert themselves at persistently repeating the same note, and then the same basic chord, for close to 20 minutes. Their aim: to extract all their harmonic substance. As Rhys Chatham reminds us, a note is never “pure” but contains, besides its fundamental frequency, an infinite number of other frequencies, some of them being more audible than others, depending on the instrument and the way it is being played.

From unity may thus arise diversity. From unison, melody. Recalling one of the first performances of Guitar Trio at Max’s Kansas City, Rhys Chatham remembers: “People would come back to the sound board to ask our engineer where we were hiding the singers. The overtones and harmonics we were playing rang out with such clarity that the audiences actually thought they were hearing vocalists.” (1)

Harmonic deployment is the main effect of the use of repetition. It’s not the only one. For Rhys Chatham, repeating the same chord ceaselessly at an obscenely loud volume, with the support of a single drummer who penetrates and structures the general waveform of the sound from the inside, is also a means of creating among his audience – and incidentally, among his musicians – a kind of shamanic state of trance.

The originality of Guitar Trio rests upon the transposition of strictly minimalist principles – repetition, playing with the overtones – into the field of rock, and their subordination to its instrumentation, playing techniques and gesture. Guitar Trio isn’t therefore one of those pieces that only hardened fans of contemporary music can appreciate. It does not rest so much upon a theoretical interrest as it does upon the visceral impact produced by a group of genuine rockers playing very, very loud and very, very fast – the performance ends up with an orgy of tremolos, as well as a certain amount of broken guitar strings…

The impact is all the stronger as Rhys Chatham always works with luminaries of the local rock scene: three quarters of Sonic Youth in Brooklyn, members of Tortoise in Chicago, of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Montreal. The composer could in no way content himself with a musical joke such as the ventures into rock of Tod Machover when he was at IRCAM (Vatican City of contemporary music in France), or even those of Pierre Henry – the model of the genre being the incredible Messe pour le temps présent of 1967. For it is a matter of respect for the genre.

“When I composed Guitar Trio, it was very important for me not to be an “infiltrator” on the rock scene. It’s very easy for a classical composer – Tod Machover, for example – to write a piece for quote and quote rock and to play in in a classical context. It was very important for me that I play this music – that I gave everything to, my background as a classical composer as well as my background as a rock musician – for a rock audiece, in a rock context, with rock musicians.”

Since 1977, Rhys Chatham cheerfully jumped from three guitars to six (Die Donnergötter, 1984-85), and then to 100 (An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, 1989). His work for electric guitars culminated in Paris' butte Montmartre district with the 400 guitars of Crimson Grail, a monumental yet delicate piece commissioned by the City of Paris for the Nuit Blanche 2005 festival, and – almost – performed last August in New York City as part of the Lincoln Center Out of Doors series.

Last year, the composer had a new epiphany. This time, it wasn’t about the punk of The Ramones, but the drone doom metal of Sleep: “Quite recently, I was touring in a bus, and I heard this group called Sleep in an album called Dopesmoker, and it absolutely blew my mind. I said to myself: ‘Why, this is my music!’” As a result, Rhys Chatham went back to essentials – three guitars, bass and drums – and hit the road again with his new group, Essentialist. His project: to break down metal to its basics elements; to reconstruct it; to transcend its primitive signification. To be heard again soon in Europe and America.

Words: Sophie Pécaud, 2007.
Photo: Renaud Certin.

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online culture magazine. Link to original article here.

Note :
(1) Rhys Chatham, Composer’s Notebook 1990. Toward A Musical Agenda For The 1990s, Table of the Elements, Atlanta, 1990.





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