John Lurie has a penchant for balancing serious artistic endeavors with the infiltrations of his tilted humor. The mild absurdity expressed in his television show Fishing with John, his paintings (johnlurieart.com), and twitter entries (@lurie_john) is equally present in the name of his once and future trio, the John Lurie National Orchestra, and the song titles of the pieces offered on this year’s The Invention of Animals and its 1993 debut Men with Sticks. Featuring Calvin Weston and Billy Martin, the de facto drummers of Lurie’s Lounge Lizards, the music of the National Orchestra is bold, incendiary, even hypnotic, and anything but comical. The title track, a 20-minute opus of sonic combustion, is available now as a single for $1.98 at the Amulet Records shop With over 20 years between its two albums, the new release puts this downtown NYC unit back in the discussion. Lurie spoke about the history of the ensemble and its furious flights of improvisation.
How did the John Lurie National Orchestra come into existence?
It was 1991, over the holidays, and Calvin and Billy and I got together to just play. We were kind of hoping to come up with new Lounge Lizard material. What we had been working on a lot at that time was music with two or three odd time signatures on top of each other. So it made sense to look at that with the drummers. But very quickly, it began to seem like something that could be special.
So, did you roll tape on a writing session and this is what you got as a result, or are these pieces actually worked out as written pieces and recorded as such at a later time following that initial get-together?
No, we went into the studio immediately, with very little planned. This was a mistake. There were one or two things that came out pretty good, but what that music became later, after touring a few times was much better. Looser and stronger and more succinct. That was why we are putting this out, for the two live tracks on there which take up most of the record.
Did the studio cuts on the record come from the Men with Sticks session?
One. “Men with Sticks” is from Men with Sticks. Three or maybe four of the shorter ones are from a session we did and that music, I ended up using for Fishing with John because it worked so perfectly. But it was not originally intended for that.
Is this the same “Men with Sticks” piece as appeared on the Men with Sticks album?
Yeah, it is the same, but most of those previous studio pieces are faded out early because we wanted the album to be under 20 minutes. As I remember, sonically that would be better for an LP. And the pieces on there have said what they were meant to say. We put a good deal of work into figuring out when to fade them.
How much of these pieces are improvised?
With the trio it is 99% improvised. There is basically one phrase or melody per piece. There is a certain plan to the landscape of it as far as dynamics but that is kind of it.
Where was the starting and ending point for a piece of music? Was there any idea of structure ahead of time?
We would have different kind of sections, but nothing really worked out. It’s hard to explain. The three of us were very in tune with each other. I don’t even think he was aware of it until I asked him about it, but it got to the point over the years that I began to realize Calvin would slightly change something up by watching my feet. Or that Billy would hit some clanky piece of metal trash when I hit a certain multi-phonic section.
Let’s take “Men with Sticks” as an example. Those five minutes, what are you hearing in those particular five that says to you, ‘this is a piece of music that should stand as a song.’ Or am I misunderstanding the process? I’m under the impression that those five minutes were extracted from a larger piece of music, or am I wrong there?
Kind of wrong. Each was a little fragment of an idea that we started with. We found where we were and played on it. We faded two or three things on the album out early. What we cut out was not bad in any way, it could have stayed in. It is almost like the mind can imagine how it would be going forward, or at least my mind can. I suppose that is dumb of me to assume the listener will do that also. But it is kind of like when a flock of birds fly past- you could watch them for hours or you could watch them for 30 seconds.
The record industry in the early ‘90s was essentially pre-internet, and still somewhat closed to such unconventional approaches. How did you get it produced?
I paid for us to go into the studio. Then we sold it.
And when you performed as the John Lurie National Orchestra, was the approach the same? No real plan, just total improvisation?
There was very little discussion. On “Invention of Animals,” and who knows what the title of that song was at the time when we played it, it would start with Billy on the marimba with those metal bars placed on it and then I would play over it. Not the same melody but would normally be the same scale, the same key. The same kind of idea. Then the only discussion would be about when Calvin should come in because Calvin coming in would indicate that it was about to slowly change to another kind of thing. But it was really about how many minutes he should wait before he should come in. He had to pay attention to the idea that what Billy and I were doing alone might grow thin after a bit, but Calvin had a remarkable thing of being able to read my body – how my feet were, if I was leaning forward or back, or how I was rocking when I played. None of this was ever discussed but clearly Calvin was doing this whether he consciously realized it or not. There was so little discussion I think it would be shocking to you. But there was hardly anything that could be discussed really. There was no language to discuss it other than what we were actually doing while we were playing.
There was a short period where Calvin was supposed to come in on the opener – “The Invention of Animals,” after four minutes. So he would sit back there and look at his watch and come in at four minutes exactly like someone with a punch card coming to work. Because Calvin just wanted to play, no matter what. Sitting there not playing was hard for him and I sort of put him in musical time-out by saying, ‘Wait 4 minutes before you come in.’ But that didn’t work. I don’t know. Sometimes it worked.
What was it about Calvin and Billy that made them ideal for a project like this?
I had been blown away by pygmy tapes from this guy Louis Sarno. How they were singing and hitting logs with sticks in different time signatures, in this very organic real way. A way that we have had smashed out of our heads, 1-2-3-4, by the time we are six-years-old and just a general pattern of Western thought that must put everything into safe, clean brackets and life be damned. And just things like the rhythm of cicadas in the tropics – how it is so incredibly and perfectly rhythmic yet you could never play like that unless you threw everything you had learned out the window. So Calvin, whose playing is incredible, but as Erik Sanko used to say, ‘Playing with Calvin was like trying to roller-skate with a Rottweiler on a leash.’ Calvin had that thing, that ferocious innate thing, and then Billy, who is also a very muscular player, would play off of him in other rhythms. It created the thing I had been looking for forever.
Was there something in their respective personalities that allowed them to grasp it?
Well, they are both incredibly musical. But beyond that, Calvin and I had some kind of weird psychic connection that I don’t even know how to begin to explain. When Calvin had joined the Lounge Lizards, everyone in the band wanted me to fire him, so instead I fired the band and kept Calvin. Though having Calvin as your key figure is kind of like a pro basketball team having Earl Mannigault as their centerpiece.
And I wanted that thing with the odd time signatures. So I had hired this guy Pete Zeldman. You can find his stuff on YouTube I think. Zeldman is a freak of nature. He can play 17/8 with one hand and 23/8 with the other while playing 4/4 on the kick and God knows what on the hi-hat. But musically it doesn’t quite work. After I hired him, we would be in rehearsal and the groove would go funny. I would stop the song and say, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ And everyone’s eyes would silently go to Zeldman.
And Pete would say, ‘No it’s great! See? I am doing 31/8 against the 5/4 feel.’ But the overall thing in the music was that someone had just dumped a garbage bin in the midst of it. Poor Zeldman. He was so unbelievable and so impossible at the same time. So everyone said, ‘Get Billy Martin.’
If I could have been patient with Pete it may have worked but there was no time. We were about to go on tour to support the Voice of Chunk CD.
And Billy entered it knowing what had happened before him and really made the best of it. With a solid groove feel, he is really basically a drummer and not a percussionist. He also is a tough guy and, at the same time, he is malleable. So he gave up no power in meshing with what Calvin was doing together. Listen to the two of them playing together without me – is that normal? It seems shocking to me.
Did you take anything from the experience in the trio back to the Lounge Lizards or any of your other projects?
No, I wish it had, or really I wish it was able to. It was so much easier to play in that situation. The Lounge Lizards had terrible problems with sound on stage, because of the instrumentation and the number of people. The piano and cello could rarely be heard and the horns had to play harder than they should have had to play. It often led to the saxophones, well, me anyway, being a little sharp and the tone a little shrill. Plus, the amazing luxury of just going out on tour with three musicians was that I could afford to travel with our own monitor person, someone who knew the music and what each musician needed. We had that a couple of times with the Lizards but not so often and it made it so much more pleasant.
You have been away from music for a long time. What was your level of involvement on this record with regards to mixing, production, sequencing? And how did it feel to get back to music?
Billy was really helpful and great. Just one person. The record business, as a lot of business surrounding the arts, seems to be filled with people who want to make your life miserable. And make the simplest things very, very difficult. ‘Fill out these forms in billionicate and go and stand in that corner until you are called.’ I don’t know why. Maybe because you get to do this wonderful thing and they don’t.
This (project) was Billy and Nesrin, my assistant, who did the coordinating. Heung Heung Chin, who I worked with before, did the cover, and Billy’s mastering guy Mike Fossenkemper took care with it. I couldn’t be there to oversee it but they sent stuff to me. Everyone worked together to get it done. It was a little hard but basically just a nice experience all the way around. Also, what is important is that I know Billy and I know he is honest. A lot of time when you enter a project, a lot of it is figuring out the myriad ways that they might try to screw you and avoiding that. I didn’t have to go through that here.
There was no mixing to be done. Sequencing took a bit of time and figuring out where to fade the songs we faded. But there was no painful, horrible wall of mess at any point, which is unusual.
It’s been 20 years since the first and only John Lurie National Orchestra release. Do you think, especially with the Internet and the freedom of the creative marketplace it encourages, that the reception to the trio will be better than the first go around? That it can find its audience better?
Better is a hard thing to assess. There are so many wonderful and horrible things about the Internet. But it certainly makes it more available and for people who might be interested to know it exists.
Is there more in your ‘vault’ for possible future releases?
Yeah, there is a ton of stuff. A lot of it on DATs though and the shelf life isn’t long. But you know my situation isn’t so good for getting things like that together. This was possible because of Billy Martin being the record company and Nesrin’s excitement to get a new record out. This was work to get it out, of course, but to put more stuff out, the road would have to be set up nicely in front of me, like it was on this one.
