Dave Harrington truly entered the Grateful Dead universe just in time for their 50th anniversary. Though the New York City-bred Harrington grew up attending jamband and jazz shows and studying Jerry Garcia’s guitar parts, he scored international fame as one-half of the indie-electronica duo Darkside. Along with his Darkside partner Nicolas Jaar, Harrington toured the world for a few years, connecting the dots between crowds of electronic, improve and rock music with his holey original style. In late 2014, he invited some of the friends he met on the road to take part in his first Holiday Spectacular at the DIY venue Glasslands (just a few days before it shuttered). Harrington and his diverse collaborators, which included the members of Real Estate, closed the night with a sing-along version of the Bob Dylan and The Band classic “I Shall Be Released.” Then, the dominoes started to fall: Real Estate’s Alex Bleeker revealed Harrington had deep roots outside the hipster blogosphere and invited him to take part in the Brooklyn Is Dead show he was putting together for Relix’s 40th anniversary. At that show, Harrington met Joe Russo, who was also on the bill, and the new friends started gigging around the New York improv scene with a diverse mix of collaborators. Their friendship also exposed Harrington to the larger jamband world and, two years later, he has shared the stage with members of the Disco Biscuits, Antibalas, Yellowbirds, Woods, Fat Mama, Guster and many other like-minded improvisers. Tonight Harrington will also take part in Russo’s Hooteroll?, show at Port Chester, N.Y.’s Capital Theatre, where he will show off his skills on a different instrument altogether—the bass guitar.
Your two current projects under your own name are the Dave Harrington Group and the Merry Pranksters. Can you talk about the origin of those two bands and how they correlate creatively for you?
I put out a record as the Dave Harrington Group about a year ago, so the group came out of learning to play that record live, and reinterpreting the stuff that was made for that record. Then it’s evolved, and it’s had different members. We did some tours in Europe over the summer, and we just got back from Big Ears Festival in Knoxville. The group plays pieces that I’ve written or composed.
There’s always improvisation at the core of pretty much everything that I do, and certainly both of these bands. With the group, it leans more in the direction of small group playing, and it leans more in a jazz influenced direction, for lack of a better word, in the tradition of—for me, which I’m influenced by, which is ‘70s ECM records, and electric Miles period, in the early moments of fusion before it became a genre. Also, the group plays live improvised film scores as well. When we were in Tennessee, we were doing a live improvised film score to No Country for Old Men, and we’ve done silent films over the years. We’re going to Moogfest in about a month and change to do a film. That’s what that band is about.
The Merry Pranksters is a no rehearsal, no songs idea band that got started because my friend—who’s a promoter in New York named Chris Tart, he runs Tango Presents—asked me if I wanted to do an after-party at Rough Trade for when Dead & Co. played at Citi Field a little over a year ago. I was like “whoa,” because he had come to see me play a trio show with Joe Russo, and he was like, “You should do something for this,” and I was like, “Oh, cool! Nothing against it, but I’m not going to do Dead tunes,” because I’ve played with Alex Bleeker and stuff before where we’d done after-parties playing Dead tunes. And that’s super fun, but that’s not something that I do with my own projects, though I always have a blast doing that.
I was like, “I want to do something in this Bitches Brew tradition of improvisation, but I want to do something that is more groove-oriented for a late-night party vibe, but still comes from a purely improvised place.” And he was like, “Cool. Great. Put the band together. Do whatever you want.”
Then I was hanging out with my friend Andrew Fox—who has a project called Visuals—and that’s actually who I’m with upstate now, and we’re working on his next record. He was helping me brainstorm what to do for this gig, and he was like “Well, it’s an after-party for a Dead thing,” and it was his idea to call it Merry Pranksters. So that’s what I did. We had two drummers, and a vibraphonist, and a three-piece horn section, and a keyboard player, and a bass player, and a percussionist, and it was huge, and crazy and a blast.
I continued to do that band, and now we’re doing an informal, every couple of months, residency-type-thing at Nublu, and refining it. It’s had a rotating cast of characters, different musicians every time. The band has gotten a little bit smaller, but it’s always large format, at least six, seven, eight people, and different people every time, and guests. The last time we did it, this Moroccan band that’s based in New York called Innov Gnawa played with us, and I’d been working on their EP, mixing and doing a little bit of production for their next EP. The bass player who was playing with Merry Pranksters plays with them, and he was like “The guys want to come and jam,” and I was like “Great!” So, during the second set, we did like, a 20-minute Moroccan Gnawa jam onstage at Nublu, with the full seven-piece band. So that’s the vibe of that band, is that it’s always a late-night party band, in a way. Like a groove band, but via improvisation. I’ve been really lucky to have new friends and old friends play with that band. Yuka Honda has been playing with us lately, Stuart Bogie, Ilhan Ersahin—who runs Nublu, he’s one of my favorite musicians—he’s been playing in the band, and a bunch of the guys that I usually play with from Brooklyn and the New York scene. So, that’s a long-winded answer; you’ll have to edit me down a little bit, but that’s the idea.
So, while not a Grateful Dead cover band, certainly within the spirit of the Dead.
There’s definitely a nod to that tradition, and whatever the in-between is between the Dead and Miles Davis and the 2000s, groove, downtown New York, Tonic stuff that I grew up on.
You recently released a new song for the Ourfirst100days project. Can you walk us through how you created this number?
I’ve known the people who organized that—from Secretly Canadian—for a while, and when I saw that they were doing it, I just thought it was such a great thing to do, and I wanted to get involved. I was like “I know you guys need 100 songs. Do you want one from me?” and they were like “Sure! Absolutely!” I went in, and I wanted to make something that felt like I made something pretty special for it. I wrote something particular for it that was, I guess, my version of instrumental tacit politics; anarchic jazz noise.
You’ve witnessed a number of different musical scenes coalesce during your time living in New York. How would you describe the community that is currently evolving at the Nublu venues and how long have you been part of that world?
Well, it’s been one of the most exciting things for me in the last couple years to be involved in that community. I mean, I grew up—when I was in high school and college—sneaking into Nublu, the old Nublu, and going to places. I mentioned Tonic before: that was really the music that was coming out of that time in the mid-2000s in New York had a huge influence on me. So to now, 10 years later, feel like I’m part of that community is really a pleasure for me.
I used to go see Ilhan play years and years ago, before I knew him, and now to get to play with him is just I blast. They recently opened a second Nublu—Nublu 151, or what we call the New Nublu, and it’s a bigger venue. You can comfortably have an eight-piece band, or a 10-piece band there. There’s been a lot of overlap lately amongst—I don’t know how to characterize the community exactly, but people like myself who have, variously, a foot in the free improv world, or the electronic world, or Brooklyn indie scene and the jam world. There’s been a co-mingling that I certainly have been trying to do my best to show up for, and be a part of, and try to foster as much as I can by booking gigs and playing a lot. That’s been really exciting!
I was playing every Wednesday with a project called EXO, EXO Sessions or EXO-TECH, depending on the way that they organize it, where it was similar to the—with a different musical goal in mind, but a similar approach of the Merry Pranksters being an improvised band. That is a band that’s led by Sophia Brous and Kimbra—who are both vocalists—so that is like an improvised song thing. There was a whole other cast of characters who were involved in playing those shows, widening this circle, people like Greg Fox—who I’ve started playing with a little bit now—who plays in Zs, and people like Trevor Dunn and Mark Ribot—who I also got to play with this month—who are people I grew up listening to. So, there’s been an uptick in people in our community wanting to do improvised shows, which is, for me, one of the most exciting things possible.
In a few weeks you are going to be playing with Joe Russo and members of Antibalas as part of the Hooteroll? show at the Cap. What have you learned about both Jerry Garcia’s playing and your own from rehearsing for that album?
I’m definitely influenced by Jerry, as a guitarist, and have been for a long time. So, that got re-ignited for me when I was playing with Alex Bleeker, doing some Dead music, which was also when I first started playing with Joe. But what’s interesting for me about this is that in the Hooteroll? band I play bass, which is what I grew up playing; I grew up as a bass player.
The way that Joe’s approaching it, and they way that we started rehearsing it, it’s very open. it’s really doing the spirit of the music. I don’t want to speak for Joe too much, but my feeling is that what we’re doing is really in the spirit of Hooteroll?, and it’s not about replicating everything to a t. It’s about using the ideas and—it’s the same thing I was talking about before. Part of why I love that record so much, and it’s so fun to learn and play that music, is because it walks this line between Bitches Brew, improvisation, and there’s a psychedelic Pink Floyd type element to that music that actually predates some of the Pink Floyd stuff. I had to look up the dates at some point to make sure, because there’s a track on that record that feels like it has DNA deeply in common with “Breathe” from Dark Side of the Moon, but it predates that record by a couple of years. So, Hooteroll? is so interesting to play because it suggests all these tendrils into these other worlds that are really dear to me, musically.
You have recently performed with Stuart Bogie on a diverse mix of bills. How did you first connect and what attracted you to his playing musically?
He’s been playing a fair amount for the last year. These circles just keep overlapping, and we met doing an EXO-TECH gig a little less than a year ago. It was just one of those great coincidences, because we had a lot of friends in common, but we never played together, and we never hung out.
That was a huge gig. There was 20 people onstage, maybe more. It was in the round, and we happened to be in one corner of the stage. So, there was one corner of that stage that was me, and Stuart and Colin Stetson, so we just ended up playing together more in that corner of the stage that night, because that’s who you could relate to most directly in the moment. We hung out that night, and hit it off, and it was just this thing of—I love the ideas that he comes up with. He’s such an interesting multi-instrumentalist, as a reeds player, his clarinet playing is virtuosic, but he doesn’t play clarinet like anyone else I know.
In the middle of a jam, he’ll pick up his bass harmonica and just do something that is purely textural, and can shift the whole idea of something that’s going on without necessarily doing it in a horn-player with a capital H way. Those are the musicians I get really excited about playing with, so playing with Bogie is always great.
The other guys in the Hooteroll? band, I haven’t really played with before other than Joe. But playing with Joe is one of the most fun experiences I have, because both as a bass player and a guitarist—I hope this sounds right—it’s the perfect mix of easy and challenging . He always keeps me on my toes, but he’s so fun to play with because he’s full of ideas. I never come up dry; there’s always something that’s gonna change, that’s gonna happen next. So, it just happens really naturally. It’s the way that we ended up playing together, on and off, for the last year or two, just getting in a room and seeing what happens.
As a lifelong New Yorker, how would you compare the health of the current DIY and “out there” music scenes to when you were growing up?
The thing that was always so exciting for me as a show-goer in high school and college was seeing that overlap. Going to a show at Irving Plaza or something, and then seeing a trombone player sit in with a band, and then going to Tonic afterwards and seeing the trombone player’s band playing that night, and that constant overlap. Or, going to see Steve Bernstein’s Millennial Territory Orchestra play, and then seeing Michael Blake Trio play after them at Tonic, and then Bernstein sticks around and he ends up being in the Michael Blake Band for the night. That co-mingling of communities, and the way that that was overlapping at the time between the groove-oriented jam leaning stuff, and the more experimental free improvised stuff, that was what was really exciting for me.
To feel like there is some element of that that is happening more and more frequently right now between—Bogie and I went to Tennessee, and now we’re going to play my music, and now we’re going to the Cap to play Hooteroll? with Joe. This overlap of similar musicians showing up in different contexts is, for me, one of my favorite things about being a musician, and being an improviser being in these different contexts with people, and getting stretched in different ways. that that seems to be—certainly right now—happening a lot, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
You have deep roots in the jamband world. What was your initial exposure to that music?
I grew up, in high school, studying jazz, and going to left field jazz and jam band shows. So, I’m not sure if I can put a moment on it. My musical education was part going to afterschool programs in Harlem, learning jazz, and then, on the weekends, going to these shows. I went to see the Allman Brothers at the Beacon when I was 15. Does that count? [Laughs.]
And where does the Darkside, electronic influence come into play with all of that?
Well, I ended up in—through a mutual friend Will Epstein—Nico’s touring band for his solo music. Out of that, we started this band, Darkside. For me, learning how to play with Nico and learning how to play in that context was an electronic music boot camp. Being on tour for a couple years doing that was—and we played a lot in clubs—techno clubs in Europe where they would usually just have DJs, and they would put up a stage and then we would play.
It really changed a lot of the way that about improvising too. I learned a lot from playing with Nico—even before we did Darkside—about the structure of electronic music as a different way to think about the architecture of improvising. that was then also a central part of how we tried to do Darkside, no two shows the same, and always trying to push each other, and surprise each other and interact. We were doing it in the context of, I guess what you would call electronic music, but improvisation was always central to that band, so that it was the through line for us.
Also, Nico is a producer, and a composer, and a singer and many, many things, but also a great improviser. When we’d be working on music, he’d sit down at the piano and play these Keith Jarrett inspired things, and I’d pick up a guitar and we’d end up somewhere, and then maybe that could turn into a song, or an idea, or a molecule that could turn into something else.
What would you say you learned about yourself and your playing during that time?
More than anything, that’s how I learned to be a guitarist. [Laughs.] That was my changeover from being a bass player to being a guitarist. I had always played guitar, but not in a serious way; I had never studied guitar. I grew up in high school and college taking upright bass lessons, and playing in jazz combos and studying music theory and stuff. Through playing with Nico, I learned to be a guitarist, and use the guitar to interact and create those musical structures. Also, I started the journey of discovering—that sounds so ethereal and overwrought [Laughs.]—what guitarist do I want to be.
What’s next for you? Are you working towards another solo record after Become Alive ?
I’ve been collaborating with a lot of people on other people’s records. Right now we’re working on a new Visuals LP. I’ve been working with Nick Murphy—formerly known as Chet Faker—on his next record. I’m actually working with Ilhan from Nublu on his new Istanbul Sessions record, producing that and playing on it. We did the recording sessions for that a little while back, and now we’re treating it, and figuring out what we want to turn it into. I love collaborating; that’s why I love improvising. Out of all of this, there is another solo record of some kind that’s taking shape from me in the off-hours, but I haven’t quite figured out what it is. I’m getting there.
You have a project called BLADERUNNER. What’s the focus of that?
It’s funny, I try to draw these subtle, fine-line distinctions between these bands [Laughs.], because they’re all really rooted in improvisation, but they all have a different identity. That one, that’s really a collaborative project with me and Will Epstein, who is the saxophonist and also a great songwriter who introduced me to Nico in the first place, and also, Tlacael Esparza, who is an incredible drummer who I’ve known forever. That’s one of the only other bands I play bass in anymore! [Laughs.] BLADERUNNER is more about exploring the further reaches of psychedelic krautrock, more experimental in nature, and leaning more into the kraut and the psych rock elements as a vehicle for playing freely.
What’s the future of that project?
I mean, we do it periodically when everyone is free and in town. We make sure to try to get in at least two BLADERUNNER gigs a year. that, when the stars align, it’d be great to make a BLADERUNNER record. Nico’s played with us before; we’ve done a couple of gigs with Nico in that band, which is awesome. We did a gig—it was one of my favorite gigs—a little over a year ago where we played with Nico in the band, and another drummer, and a bass clarinetist and Arto Lindsay played with us, which was amazing, and such a privilege and just a joyful anarchy to play with him. My feeling with all these projects is keep doing them, and then eventually they reveal what they want to be. And that, one day, BLADERUNNER will reveal itself in album form [Laughs].
