Jake Cinninger has been playing with his original band, Ali Baba’s Tahini, since long before he joined jam-scene staples Umphrey’s McGee. “Ali Baba's Tahini is just a bunch of good buddies that go way back,” said Cinninger, speaking the day of Umphrey’s Hindsight 20/20 tour opener at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. “We happened to take our own paths and courses in life throughout the years, but we always had this music connection.” The band has released five albums over their 20+ year career, beginning with 1999’s Hopi Champa. Their most recent record, Bottom Feeders, marks their first release since 2010.
While Umphrey’s McGee is often laudedfor their technical prowess, Cinninger notes that working with Ali Baba’sTahini allows him to move away from that technicality. “Bottom Feeders...really gets away from the technical aspect ofmusic and gets more inside production and real song writing. Ditching fusionand jazz a little bit and going towards grandiose songwriting.”
Cinninger is currently in the midst ofUmphrey’s sprawling (and aforementioned) Hindsight 20/20 tour. “It’s likedownhill skiing for three months, that’s what tour feels like,” he says. Below,we talk about Bottom Feeders, how AliBaba’s Tahini differs from Umphrey’s McGee, the benefits and drawbacks of ProTools and balancing a heavy touring schedule with family.
Tostart, let’s talk a little bit about the new Ali Baba’s Tahini release Bottom Feeders. It’s been ten yearssince Living Room, and you’ve beenworking on this one over the course of the last two years. I was wondering howthis new record came about and what made you want to return to theproject?
Yeah, the first thing is that Ali Baba'sTahini is just a bunch of good buddies that go way back, and we happened totake our own paths and courses in life throughout the years, but we always hadthis music connection. Whenever we could get a chance, whenever there would beholes in the schedule, we would look three or four years ahead and say, “Itlooks like in January 2018 we could all get together and start blueprintingsome new songs. We could start to get some demo stuff down.” That was lastJanuary and then the guys came up to my studio, the Boondock Studio, in Niles,Michigan. It was during a blizzard, it was super cold and we were locked in mylittle studio in the middle of nowhere, Michigan. We just started crankingstuff out and everything was really working, so we kept all those demos. Wewere trying stuff out and that recording session ended up being the bed for Bottom Feeders. We were like, “Man thisstuff is really feeling great, I think we’re on to something, let’s try tofinish this idea.”
The hardest thing with a side project isactually finishing the project the way you perceive it to be finished. To makea quality recording and say, “Okay this is going to be our next release.” Itall just kind of cannonballed after we started the recording sessions inJanuary. It was nice to back away from everything, to see my old buddies backin the homeland and hit the recording studio, and have a good time mainly. It’sbasically a collaboration of friends trying to make great music together,really.
Andthese are the people you were first playing music with before you joinedUmphrey’s McGee?
Yeah exactly, Ali Baba’s Tahini wasplaying the same clubs Umphrey’s was in ‘98, ‘97. We were always on the samebill together and we kind of created our own South Bend musical connection. Butyeah, it started with Ali Baba’s Tahini in ‘97.
Forsome context, Karl Engelmann, who you work with in Ali Baba’s Tahini, also doessome songwriting and collaboration with Umphrey’s, correct?
Yeah, definitely. There’s definitelylike three old school Ali Baba’s Tahini tunes that are sort of brought over toUmphrey’s. There are probably 35 Ali Baba’s Tahini songs that are now Umphrey’ssongs; it was almost a case of how quickly we could build our repertoire.That’s the reason Karl is just such a good buddy and on top of that, he’s justan amazing songwriter. He’s kind of a Syd Barrett of the south in a weird way.
Isthe way Bottom Feeders came togethersimilar to the other records, like 2010’s LivingRoom in 2010 or 2005’s Rock Stars andLawn Mowers?
Yeah--what’s great about the last threerecords that we put out is I would get basic tracks in the time that we wereall together. For Rockstars, Itraveled all the way down to Asheville with a mixing console. We were on the sideof a mountain in North Carolina in a little shack and we were there for a week.I got the basic tracks and basically took them back to Boondock Studios inNiles. I spent a year tweaking stuff, adding stuff, pulling stuff away, gettingit to where it sounded feasible. And that’s kind of how each of the recordings,each of the three albums was prepared and made. So Living Room was kind of the same way, but the technology was stilla pretty bare-boned recording situation. The thing that’s different from Bottom Feeders is that now you have ProTools. I’m an old analog kid--I’m always into twisting knobs and doingeverything the hard way. So over the last five years, I was kind of gettingcomfortable in the digital domain and trying to get the same results in thedigital world that I was in the analog world. So, Bottom Feeders is like a crash course in new technology but stilltrying to make a classic rock record in a way.
Absolutely,I definitely hear the classic rock influences.
Yeah, just trying to make more of atimeless sound rather than being in the present.
Wouldyou ever go back to using analog stuff or is Pro Tools too powerful?
Well, I’m starting to see limitations inthe digital world--I mean there’s nothing like the sound of real hardwiredpreamps and actual electricity running through steel wire and gold cables. Onlyabout three percent of the population can actually tell the difference. But inthe long run, like 25 years from now, people might actually be able to hearthese differences. Our ears are getting more refined with time. Spending timein the Pro Tools world is really amazing because you can do so much bad tosomething that’s good, you can overdo everything inside the box. So the idea isto start off really sweet, then treat it like it were a hard-wired unit eventhough you’re pressing a button.
Forthe new record, what was the songwriting process like for each song? Would youbring in a musical idea and Karl [Engelmann] would bring in something else? Ordid you each individually craft songs?
Yeah, well for a lot of this Karl wouldcome in with a simple folk version of a song, just like an acoustic guitar andvocals. It was kind of my idea to be like, “Well what direction can we takethis and how can we make it a little more interesting?” That’s why Bottom Feeders has kind of a diverse,Ween-esque quality to it, where you can’t really put your finger on, “where arethese guys going, they seem to be kind of going everywhere.” That’s intentionalin the long run. In a production setting, it’s almost like each song is its ownseparate production. A lot of it is experimenting, just throwing paint on thewall and seeing what sticks. And really having a good crap filter, knowingwhat’s going to work, what’s not going to work. And if it’s not going to work,get rid of it.
Havingjust listened to the album a couple of times now, one thing that jumped out tome was the variety. The first song “Ksenya” reminded me a little bit ofsomething Umphrey’s might play. Then you have a song like “Last Night inAmerica,” with the strings and the orchestral aspect. I wanted to talkparticularly about the title track, “Bottom Feeders,” which is obviously thelongest song. I personally hear some Pink Floyd influence in terms of thegrandness of that song.
Yeah, really broad, deep, and wide, andsubtle, you know? It tells a story; you can really put yourself inside of thewords. What’s really cool about that particular song is that it was the lastthing we did in the session. It was really late at night and I had this simplechord progression. Nothing was preconceived at the time, we just startedwriting the song and it just wrote itself. Karl goes, “Wait keep on playing it.” The next day he came in with likethree sheets of lyrics. That song was literally written in 48 hours andrecorded. And obviously we went back over after a period of time and added allthe cool David Gilmore slide guitars, then the piano parts. But yeah, “BottomFeeders”just came out of thin air,literally--it was like two in the morning and we were getting tired and thistempo was super slow and syrupy. I remember picking up the twelve stringelectric and it really sounded nice on the twelve string, kind of chimy.
Yeah,that’s a great sound.
And another cool thing about Bottom Feeders is that it really getsaway from the technical aspect of music and gets more inside production andreal song writing. Ditching fusion and jazz a little bit and going towardsgrandiose songwriting.
That’swhere I wanted to go next. In Umphrey’s McGee, you guys are known for fusionand progressive music, sometimes, and of course your improvisation. But interms of songwriting, you set aside time for Ali Baba’s Tahini. When you arewriting songs for these respective projects, how do you think about themdifferently?
Yeah, I think it's kind of that midwestrock syndrome. It’s kind of in the middle of America and it’s like all thestyles come to the center. In the midwest there’s just this confusion on whereto go, East or West, South or North. It’s like, “Why don’t we take all the directionsand color in all of them and try to make sense.” Some sort of cohesion tosomething that could be so wonky and far apart from each other. Each song is sodifferent from the next. I love that about a certain band that can change thecharacter, like how the muppets could change a character. Each song is like amuppet, and it represents a different character. Just taking those simpleanalogies and placing them inside an actual full LP release. It’s challengingand fun at the same time.
Andwould you say for Umphrey’s, the band is more like one character that has a lotof different aspects? Obviously you guys have a defined sound in Umphrey’sMcGee, but there is still a ton of variety there.
Right, it's kind of like an octopus withtentacles.
ARocktopus, if you will.
[Laughs] Yeah, like a Rocktopus,totally. With [Ali Baba’s] Tahini, each song is its own entity and its ownproduction style. Then on an Umphrey’s record there’s got to be this Umphrey’ssound that kind of runs through the whole record. In Umphrey’s, I play acertain role too, so each one of us in Umphrey’s has a certain thing that we dobest and that’s what we do. And on something like Tahini, I can play piano,play percussion, play most of the bass parts, you know do all the guitars.There’s a myriad of different amps and guitars whereas with Umphrey’s, I want aparticular guitar sound that runs throughout the record and that’s myfingerprint for Umphrey’s. So I can classify the two sounds in their own world.
Umphrey’s just released “Suxity” a couple of days ago. I think that is aperfect example of what we were just talking about. When I first listened tothat, I would have known it was Umphrey’s McGee if I just was hearing it. Thatbeing said, I read the piece in AmericanSongwriter where you talked about how this song is something like Sly Stonedating Alice in Chains.
Yeah, exactly.
Soeven though the song sounded like it was definitely an Umphrey’s Mcgee song,there was still the merging of genres, which you guys will often do. It’s alsoa seperate, funkier thing than you guys have a tendency to play. When you werecoming up with that demo, was it intentional? Did you set out with the ideal:“I would like to write a song that’s like Sly Stone dating Alice in Chains”?
No. I go up to my studio every day whenI’m off the road pretty much. I drop the kids off at school in the morning, goup to my studio until I have to go pick them up. I have a strategic schedulewhen I’m at home. So it was just a random day going to the studio, and I’m allabout getting chiller drum sounds. I’m just such a freak for plain drums, and Igot this killer, simple, Andy Numark style drum track. There weren’t any ghostnotes or anything really weird going on, just AC/DC meets funk.
I laid down this simple drum beat and Isaid, “Let me see how little I can play to make this as big as possible.” So itwas kind of a lesson in simplicity and arena rock-funk, in a weird way. And Idid that whole demo in like two hours at the studio and my demo sounds prettyclose to the backing tracks of the finished product. We took my demo into thestudio and all the guys sat around the studio with the speakers and got insidethe parts. The bass part is very separate from the guitar part and everythinghas a spot. And no one is playing over each other. So it’s a lesson insimplicity and creating air inside of a super pocket groove. And then when the chorus comes up, we changeradio stations, big-half time Seattle grunge chorus. Then there is air, then itpops right back to the super abbreviated funk.
Yeah,it’s cool. I feel like sometimes when I hear people talk about what influenceda song or what they were going for with a song, not that it should be, but it’snot always that apparent to the listener. But in this song, as soon as you say“Sly Stone dating Alice in Chains”--that really is what it sounds like. Thatbeing said, it still sounds so much like Umphrey’s. The funk has a heaviness toit.
Yeah, we’re hitting the strings hard,we’re hitting the drums hard; it’s not light and chippy.
It’snot a low volume funk that it seems to be in vogue these days--like you saidit’s an “AC/DC meets funk” hard rocking funk.
What’s great about the “Suxity”recording with Umphrey’s is that we went down to Blackbird Studios in Nashvilleand we all set up in a circle and that’s us basically playing just straight totape. There are not a whole lot of overdubs. You do the vocals later obviouslybut that’s us grinding that track straight through. That’s where you get theUmphrey’s flavor: all of our blood and bones and brains hitting the tape at thesame time. It creates a certain pocket, a certain energy, and “Suxity” justsort of has that electricity right when it hits.
Ireally love the new song. Is there a new album on the horizon?
I think we were just doing a singlething. Cause we’ve been putting out records for so long, and the whole formatof a record just started to get a little lost in the last couple years.Everything comes back around; we’ll probably do a record after this single. Ithink it was just cool to have a song with its artwork attached to it. Andthose are the two things. With things like Spotify, kids are looking forsingles--they’re not listening to albums anymore. We kind of took that routefor a year to see what it did.
Thelast thing I wanted to talk about in terms of Umphrey’s is the hour long“Ringo” from your show inDenver on December 30. I’m curious about the backstory of that. You guys oftenperform these huge impromptu improvisations, but considering the guests, thisone seemed a little more orchestrated. I was just curious how that cameabout--how much planning occurs before that kind of thing?
Surprisingly the thing with Umphrey’s isthat the improvisational part of our brains is like an exercised muscle, right?So we really didn’t go into that with any preconceived ideas, we were like, “Ifsomething gets boring I’ll look at you to start a new tempo or something.” Wehave this deck of cards that if we run into trouble we can pull out a card and change direction. Becausethe six of us have been doing this thing together for so long, we can kind ofread each other's minds. And if something gets weird, we all go together.Instead of being like, “What are you doing, you’re ditching me,” sort of thing.It’s very democratic and we all flow together toward the next movement.
I think the reason why we did that wasthat we had so many shows in Denver. So just to make each show a little morespecial than the next, we thought we’d do something a little out of theordinary. It’s one of those tricks up our sleeve that we do well. We can pullit off and feel comfortable about it, it doesn’t feel like pressure. That’swhen the art will flow; an hour will feel like a half an hour, it’s like, “Yeswe should do this.” It’s so easy to, at the same time, fall flat on your faceif you’re thinking about it too much. We really went out there with horseblinders onto the audience and we just focused on us. Like, “Can we get throughthis hour?” It was almost like a challenge for ourselves, as much for ourselvesas for the listener.
Ithink that is one of the great things about the music listeners in the generalUmphrey’s scene, and beyond. On that very same night, there were many jam bandsperforming long jams and people were all on the edge of their seats. As a fanmyself, seeing the fact that you could fall on your face and ultimatelydon’t--or even if you do fall on your face--that’s like the best part of it. Tome, it’s like a high wire act, musically.
It really comes down to just totalconfidence up there. If you go up on the stage with any doubts, your song isnot going to be open to turning that energy into physical form and muscularform and it comes out in the instrument. You have to be an open current forthat to seem like it’s all written in the moment and it feels like it’ssupposed to happen. There are all these excellent analogies that carry itthrough.
Onemore question going back to Ali Baba’s stuff. You guys don’t really play live,other than I think one charity concert in 2017 that I came across. You talkedabout how you find a spot in the calendar, like, “Oh we can do something then.”Is there ever a thought of, “Oh maybe we’ll play some live shows”?
Yeah, I mean that’s always coming up.It's really hard to fit in family, Umphrey’s and then another tour. That’s whyI don’t do too many things outside of Umphrey’s, our tour schedule andeverything is pretty heavy duty. We are probably one of the heavier touringbands in the last ten years. I could see doing a one off at Summer Camp, whichI think we did five years ago. We did a Tahini show at Summer Camp, we werejust like, “Summer Camp’s the perfect place, let’s get together for anafternoon set or something like that.” That’s more of a feasible thing. Or do a Southbend, Chicago,Milwaukee--just three shows something like that. We’ve talked about that. It’ssort of penciled in in areas like, “Oh here’s a hole here in August.” It’sdefinitely on our minds. We’d love to get out and play for our fans, let thesesongs breathe a little bit live.
Backto Umphrey’s--are there any particular things on this tour, like shows or newthings you are going to try, that you are excited about? Or do you not knowbefore you start?
I don’t like to think about time.Usually I don’t think about what month I am in, a lot of the time I don’t evenlike looking at clocks. I just lock into each day as if it were yesterday orthe next day coming so I really don’t think about time too much. I just focuson the task at hand.
Last week was the first time I looked atmy tour schedule because I didn’t want to think about it until I had to,because I wanted to think about family. Over the years of touring, I've learnedhow to put up barriers to what I need to think about compared to what I shouldthink about in the future. So I can kind of put things on the back burners.Then it’s like, “Whoa, let me look at the Umphrey’s tour schedule and get inthat mode.” Then I don’t burn out on Umphrey’s because I’m not constantly inthat world every day. I get a break from it, then when I come back, I miss it.And I want to play the songs again. I want to see my buddies and just go outthere and play some good music. That’s part of my ethos to our crazy maddeningschedule.
WellI’m sure that also helps in terms of the improvisations. If you don’t havethings on your mind, you can let the music come through instead of trying toplay the music.
It’s like the old jazz mentality. Assoon as you start thinking about it too much, your listener knows you’rethinking and it sounds garbled and disjointed and not fluid. So there is afluidity to not thinking. When you go out for a jog, you don’t even have tothink about jogging. It just happens automatically in your body. When you startto harness an instrument, it’s like Tai chi, like Karate. You gotta use some ofthese other sides of the coin--it’s not just playing notes. There is so muchmore than that. All the best players have that spiritual side along with thetechnical side. And then it’s the Yin and the Yang for that great artist. Thatis sort of the destiny or the final achievement of every great artist, to findthat balance between the spirit and the complexity. I think about that all thetime and that is what keeps that river open, that current open.
