The members of Taper’s Choice have taken to calling their project a “subversive jamband,” which feels like an appropriate way to describe their approach. Though the four members of the five-year-old group all came of age in New York and New Jersey, in the shadow of the jamband scene, they each initially made a name for themselves on the indie-rock circuit. Guitarist and in-house producer Dave Harrington is best known for his work in the psychedelic-electronic project Darkside and as a journeyman musician on the Downtown New York experimental music scene; bassist and singer Alex Bleeker co-founded the jangly indie-pop group Real Estate with his high-school friends and leads a more freak-folk-inspired group under his own name. Drummer and singer Chris Tomson put together world-inspired “big indie” group Vampire Weekend with his friends at Columbia and worked with The Black Keys’ Patrick Carney on a solo release between VW LPs. And keyboardist Zach Tenorio blurs the times between indie and pop with his Providence, R.I.-bred group Arc Iris and has worked with a range of big-name acts, most recently helping shape Willow Smith’s 2024 set, Empathogen.
Now all based in California, the four musicians have used Taper’s Choice as an opportunity to both revisit their jamband roots and have some fun with the fan-friendly minutiae that have long helped their heroes build distinctive jamband universes of their own. At the end of last year, the quartet dropped their proper studio debut, Prog Hat, and this winter they’ll spend some time on the road touring the East Coast as they head to Jam Cruise. Along the way, they’ll return to New York’s Brooklyn Bowl on Jan. 31, just over a year after they served as the house band for Relix’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Shortly before embarking on their most extensive run in some time, Taper’s Choice looked back on the creation of their first record, their favorite collaborations with members of the Grateful Dead and Phish, and how to walk that fine line between being funny but not a joke.
Dave, you are listed as Prog Hat album’s producer, along with the full band. Can you start by describing how and when Prog Hat was recorded and what type of atmosphere you aimed to capture in the studio?
Dave Harrington: We made the bulk of the record—all the “proggers”—at Lucy’s Meat Market here in LA with Pete Min engineering. Pete makes a lot of great modern jazz/improvised records and has an incredible synth and keyboard selection, so I was psyched to do it with him. In the studio, I always like to keep it as loose as possible, even and especially when dealing with challenging material like the knottier stuff on Prog Hat. I’m also notorious for not wanting to listen back to takes very much or at all. Once I feel like we have good sounds coming out of the mics and the board, I like to dive in and keep moving. I trust the other guys’ ears in the band implicitly, and especially in terms of picking strong performances, so I usually leave that to them and focus on the sonics and the arrangement and just trust that the take will come. I don’t think we did more than two or three takes of anything when we were there.
Alex Bleeker: We had been playing all of the songs on that record for some time, with the exception of “Song Hat.” “Song Hat” was a spontaneous “in-studio” composition, and it might just be my favorite tune on the record. We’ve yet to debut it live. I’m not sure what any of that means, but maybe we’ll work it up and bust it out on our upcoming East Coast dates. As far as the other tunes go, I feel like we possess a secret weapon in Dave’s production and post- production skills. So a lot of what you’re hearing was recorded live—playing together—and then it was all run through Dave’s metaphorical pedal board before it was finished.
Prog Hat features several extended, jam-forward originals but the Taper’s catalog is actually already pretty big and this record feels carefully curated. What was the song-selection process like for this first album?
Chris Tomson: For me, the classic flow of some tense, heady composed madness releasing into open improv tends to be the highlight of many jam sets/shows/albums. And when Taper’s started to accumulate such tunes, it seemed like a fun idea to just stack them all onto one record, hence Prog Hat. I also think of the more composed sections as statements of intent—there is a lot of fun to be had playing around with the idea of being a jamband and playing jamband music, but we also take this shit seriously. We wouldn’t have crafted these kinds of tunes if we didn’t.
And then, speaking for myself anyway, I think “Song Hat” is kind of a spiritual tribute to the drummer from ZZ Top, where despite being the only non-extremely hirsute member of the band his last name is, in fact, Beard.
DH: The band tracked all of the proggers on Prog Hat live together. It’s the only way for me that makes sense in capturing the core of the recording music like this—even when it’s through-composed, all the little micro-interactions that happen along the way add up to something very important for the feeling of the final record. When that is at the core, I am very un-precious and sometimes truly anarchic when it comes to postproduction and treatments and overdubs. I come from the production school of Teo Macero and King Tubby, where everything can be a dub, and so anything goes—I am always liberal with my own overdubs and general dub-concepts. Sometimes the live take needs to get dumped into a vat of codeine and emerge from the ooze in the next section by way of a mandocello Derek Bailey freakout. The guys are really trusting and supportive of my more chaotic production techniques, so I feel like it’s really a wide-open field for me to try anything with the recordings, no matter what the material.
CT, you and Bleeker are the primary singers in the band. Did each of you bring in kernels of song ideas to turn into full Taper’s Choice tunes, or was the material, lyrics included, built by the full band during rehearsals?
CT: There is no set way. There is no wrong way. And, most importantly, there is no right way. There have been fully realized demos that have only needed slight alterations and then there have been the barest wisps of a chord progression that have somehow mutated into fully operational jam vehicles. Everyone writes, everyone writes well, and it’s legitimately fun to do so in this band.
You have described Taper’s Choice as a “subversive jamband” with some pretty tongue-in-cheek song titles and you are all naturally funny people, but the music itself is often serious and thoughtful. How conscious are you of finding the proper balance of humor and seriousness in the music?
AB: I’ve often said that Taper’s Choice is funny, but it’s not a joke. Perhaps our most “subversive” quality in this musical world that we’ve been courting so aggressively is that fact that we unapologetically embrace the term “jamband.” I’m not sure why it still seems to be carrying some kind of stigma, perhaps chiefly among those who embody and embrace the genre wholeheartedly. That said, I think all of the best jambands—and all of the best bands generally—are funny, and we’re doing our best to be a good band.
Prog Hat includes “The Dave Test,” which contains some classic jamband-style theatrics when Dave gives a “yes” or “no” response to the song’s improvisational section. What is the genesis of that song and how often would you say you give a “yes” versus a “no?”
DH: Like most of the proggers in our book, it comes from the mind of CT, and we usually flesh it out to varying degrees together. CT had this idea based on something unhinged I said that I can’t remember now and turned it into a structure for jamming. It’s both silly and quite genius. I’d say I’m maybe 50/50 but you’d have to ask Ghost Llama [who runs their fan site] for the stats.
In many ways Taper’s is an amalgamation of your individual interests filtered through the lens of the jamband framework. From your perspective, where do you see prog music in the greater post-Dead, jamband Venn Diagram and did you make an effort to include Taper’s Choice’s more prog originals on this album in particular?
DH: Both CT and Zach bring a long and deep well of prog to the band, so it’s just kinda baked in there. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever had to learn so many notes, or at least remember so many notes, as I do in this band. I like to say yes and so I’m here to take the ride when presented with the music. I also love that whole lineage. I went to see Yes alone at MSG when I was 17.
Zach, of the four members of Taper’s Choice, you come from a slightly different musical lineage. Growing up, what was your initial exposure to the extended jamband world?
Zach Tenorio: There was definitely a love for jambands when I was a kid, but it was pretty random and circumstantial. I remember seeing Steve Molitz from Particle at Moogfest 2004 and thinking that’s the kind of music I wanted to make. I ended up starting a band in high school called Funkus, which absolutely was a jamband. I think we thought of ourselves as more of a funk band, but we played a melody of Nickelodeon theme songs—Hey Arnold!, Doug, Rugrats. I mean, could that get any more jam? As I got a little older, I got really into big indie—Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors—and that basically quashed any chances of young Zach moving further into jamland.
You have also worked with Marco Benevento for years. How did you originally connect?
ZT: In 2006, Marco and Joe [Russo] did a clinic at a music program that I was a part of. I missed the clinic, so the teacher invited Marco and Joe to jam exclusively with me, which was terrifying and exhilarating. I remember having a hard time knowing where the downbeat was and I probably played like shit. I think we played ELP’s “Hoedown.”
At that music program, we were basically taught that keyboards weren’t cool, which was traumatic. Then, when I saw Marco play with the Duo and his Wurlitzer had so much distortion on it, it fed back. I thought, “Oh, Marco is cool! Keyboards can be cool.” Obviously, I think keyboards are the coolest now, but for a 16-year-old kid, this was a watershed moment. Marco eventually became a mentor to me, and I’ve learned an enormous amount from him.
Though Prog Hat is the first official Taper’s Choice album, the band has released a few live/studio hybrid recordings, including the Dead-referencing History of Taper’s Choice Vol 1. For those unaware, can you talk a little about those projects and how you blend the live and studio recordings?
DH: It’s kinda the same stuff I was just saying, but with even more emphasis on the freedom and creative chaos of it all. Everything is a tape. Studio and live alike, you never know when a YouTube sample from an iconic interview from CBS Sunday Morning 10 years ago might become a new song. [Miles Davis’] Live/Evil is my north star in this—no wrong notes, be here now, nothing is true and everything is permitted.
No Comments comments associated with this post