Even if you don’t know him by name, you’ve probably heard Stuart Bogie play the saxophone sometime over the course of the last 15-years. As the musical director of Antibalas and an early contributor to TV on the Radio, Bogie helped introduce countless ears to a range of afro beat, soul and indie sounds. He’s performed and recorded with everyone from MMW, RANA, Gomez, State Radio and Burning Spear to Massive Attack, The Roots, Paul Simon and The Wu-Tang Clan. More recently, Bogie and several of Antibalas’ other members made their way from Brooklyn bars to Broadway as part of the onstage house band for the hit play Fela!. While the show cut away at Antibalas’ tour schedule, the Broadway run has introduced Bogie to an entirely new—and far reaching— audience.
Bogie also won over some new fans last month when Phish handpicked several members of the extended Dap-Tone/Antibalas family to sit in during its Halloween show in Atlantic City. The saxophonist and his longtime companions helped Phish cover Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus and returned for a surprise encore of “Julius.” Below, Bogie discusses his recent time with Phish, his Superhuman Happiness Project and his future goals for Antibalas
Let’s start by taking about your recent Halloween show with Phish. When did the band first approach you and the rest of the Antibalas/Dap-King family about sitting in?
I guess Phish asked a year ago. We got asked to do the Rolling Stones record [ Exile on Main Street ] but we couldn’t do that because we had black out dates for the Fela! and had to play a certain number of shows at the theater. When I say we, we is loose [laughter]. This year we were able to do the Little Feat album when they asked us again. I don’t think we knew about it until the second week in October, though. It was pretty last minute
It was the first time I played with Phish but it wasn’t my first time in the same room as them—I’d gone to see them as a young musician, like most young musicians in the world or at least America [laughter]. But Halloween was the first time we were all onstage with them.
Were you familiar with the Waiting for Columbus album in particular?
No—I knew about Little Feat and their sound and I had enjoyed it at moments. But I didn’t own the record, and I hadn’t delved into it like we did before the shows.
I talked to Sharon Jones right after she sat in with Phish last Halloween. She was on tour with the Dap-Kings right before Festival 8 and didn’t have much time to actually rehearse with the members of Phish until the show. How much rehearsal time did the horn section put into the shows?
We had two days of rehearsal with the band, and we met as a horn section and went through the arrangements on our own. [Antibalas member and Fela! musical director] Aaron Johnson transcribed the arrangements from the record, and we played through those before we met with Phish. They were lovely. They were so laid back and it really was just a pleasure. It was their chance to play another record they love—learn about the music, and they got so into it! They had the specific pedal settings Little Feat used. I don’t know that much about guitar pedals but Trey [Anastasio] had two of them and set them just the way Little Feat had set them. When we got to the gig they had another drum set tuned to Little Feat drum set sounds. Isn’t that wild?
When you think about it, it makes total sense. That’s what they do if you’ve ever heard a Beethoven symphony played by a period group. You don’t want to hear a classical symphony on modern instruments.
This is the first time Phish covered a live album on Halloween, which means that the band aimed to recreate the experience more than the songs. Did you feel the performance was able to re-create the feel of the Little Feat concerts documented on that live record?
It’s cool because the Phish audience deserves so much credit for being open minded, enthusiastic, lovers of music that probably received the Little Feat records when they were first played live. Really, only Phish could do this—and when I say Phish I mean the band and the audience. Everybody made this happen and it’s pretty neat. I’m surprised at how much I learned. I thought, “Okay this is going to be a fun show to play with a great band” but I really had a new experience and it was wonderful.
The other song you sat in on was “Julius,” which is a Phish original that appears on Hoist. Did you prepare for that song as well or was it spur of the moment?
Phish had the horn chart ready, and we learned that in the rehearsal. It was great to play that. They originally recorded that song with the Tower of Power horn section, which is also the horn section that plays on Waiting for Columbus.
You mentioned earlier that you were a Phish fan growing up. These days you play everything from afro beat to indie rock to funk and klezmer. Did Phish and the jam scene have a specific effect on your playing as a young musician?
Yeah. I suppose the thing that I probably picked up on was a love for playful composition—things that happen and take the music into dramatically different places. In one sense you can explore the single picture and the depth of it. You don’t want it apart from that picture, you don’t want to see the frame. You don’t want to know it’s a picture. But in another way, you can be looking at a picture and then you can draw a frame around it and detach and step back, and then draw another picture. The musical environment changes and Phish has this way of steering through that—it is very interesting. The audience goes with it and they love it and they dance to it. It’s a physical reaction for them—to these changes in environment—and I must say that’s something I tremendously admire right now. I want that to influence the music I’m working on, more so even then when I was younger. I had seen Phish and was aware of their work but I think I like it now more then ever.
A lot of my friends contacted me after—more than any other concert I’ve done before, actually. One of my friends is a drummer with the Blue Man Group and he was like, “Man, I’m listening to you on a webcast now.” Another couple of friends were in the audience that I had never talked about Phish with and then a couple of friends were backstage. My friend Ryan Thornton—who plays drums in RANA and Sean Bones—was backstage at the show and Joe Russo’s fiancé was there. I felt like I had been living next to this whole artistic community the whole time that never came over.
When we started rehearsing, Mike Gordon was talking about Giovanni Hidalgo and the group he played in with Mickey Hart. I kind of jumped back because when I was 16 I read Mickey’s Planet Drum book, and I’d be lying if didn’t say it really opened me up. I took all of these ideas and traditions into my heart via that book and, really, that book was the first thing that opened me up to the idea of music as a beautiful tradition—and how that tradition can go in-between genres and how it can lead you back through generations. Then I got the 20-year-old syndrome where you think you know everything for 10 years. Thankfully, that ended and I’m back into an open space, and I look back at that book and the recordings that Giovanni and Mickey Hart have played on, and feel the whole thing coming together.
Let’s move on to Antibalas for a few minutes. Though Antibalas has done a little touring recently, the band’s focus seems to on other projects, including Fela!
Well, Antibalas has a lot of tracks that we’ve been working on for a long time. We kind of always have them in the works and different situations grow and evolve. If you imagine a garden, it can become overgrown with ideas or it can just kind of become overgrown from neglect but then you can go in and weed it out and see what’s still alive in there. We had that relationship with a handful of situations. We’ve recently finished a 12-inch version of Bob Marley’s “Rat Race” that we’ve been playing for years. We’ve finally committed it to wax and [Antibalas keyboardist] Victor Axelrod produced it. He also did some dub work on it that is fantastic. Also on this 12-inch is a song called “Say Cheeselo” by Marcos Garcia. It’s a fantastic fusion of afro beat and Latin music. Victor is an amazing producer and an amazing musician. He’s definitely one of the most fantastic artists that I’ve ever worked with.
How do you feel the afro beat music in Fela! relates to the afro beat music Antibalas has explored for the past decade or so?
I would say that the musical come from the same foundation as Antibalas but it is a different approach. It is a theatrical approach, which is totally different from Antibalas where were are a bunch of psych dudes on stage rocking out to their favorite rhythms. The musical is not that. It draws on that and it uses some of that energy, but I’d say it’s a different thing. In practice it’s a completely different experience and Antibalas concerts are, by and large, really exhilarating and refreshing and full of possibilities—where as in a theatrical situation the musicians play a much smaller and more defined role. I’m fortunate enough that I get to improvise all my solos all night in the musical while the actor mimes his solos. I’m lucky in that way in that I get to try to make something new and exciting every night.
There’s only 3 guys from Antibalas that are in the show right now, but as it evolved from the first model of the play, Antibalas was a critical component of the construction of the musical. It was never a situation where someone said, “We need musicians. Let’s hire a guy to hire musicians.” At least musically, Fela! started as the framework of Antibalas. I think that gave it so much of its power and its energy.
Besides the musical and Antibalas, your other primary focus is Superhuman Happiness. Do you plan to work on another recording with that project?
I play with Human Happiness regularly. We play a couple times a week—we rehearse and perform. Right now we’re doing a series of clapping exercises. They’re kind of studies on real, basic rhythms and then we’re composing collectively around them.
We clap, we sing our part, we try all these different improv games that I learned from studying theater a few years ago. It’s fantastic. We try all kinds of new things. We say, “Okay, we’re gonna do this song in a totally different way now” and we surprise ourselves. We always scratch our heads and say, “Man, that would be good on a record.”
We don’t know what to do with all our excitement in a way. Our plan is to record a full-length in January. I’m talking to a couple of different producers who have done some very significant work, and I’m gonna see if they want to do me a favor and work with us. Otherwise, we’ll produce it ourselves. I’ve been busy producing a bunch of other things with a few different artists. Me and a member of Antibalas named Luke O’Malley started a production company and we’re starting to work with different artists.
Your credits are all over the map.
So the question at the end of all that is: What does it create as a result? Super Human Happiness is supposed to be the funnel of all the beautiful things that I’ve encountered from working with everyone from TV on the Radio to Celebration to Antibalas, as well my young love for Fugazi, punk bands and Chicago house music. I want to include anything that strikes my fancy—not in a literal way, so it’s not going to be a musical radio station, but in a way that you feel. There’s a lot of exciting music out there right now that seems like it has successfully fused a lot of different forms.
Speaking of connections, can you talk a little about your connection to TV on the Radio?
Yeah. [Antibalas] co-founder Martin Perna, Gabe Roth of Daptone records and TV on the Radio singer Tunde Adebimpe all lived at the same apartment years ago in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Then everyone grew in these different directions, but we all share a lot of roots. I played on TV on the Radio’s albums and toured with them when they needed a horn section. We also share a lot of roots with Budos Band and, of course, the Dap Kings.
Every time we do a recording session the roots go deeper.
I recently did some work with Iron & Wine and it turns out he liked my song [from 2004’s Who Is This America? ] “Indictment” and loved the first TV on the Radio record and Martin’s parts on that record. Sometimes I look in the mirror and I’m like, “Ooh, you’re getting a little old.” [laughter] But things are just starting to combine and that’s an amazingly beautiful thing.
Another amazingly beautiful thing that has to do with age and trends in music is that popular music is starting to draw a lot on the music of my youth in the early ‘80s. Musicians are re-inventing those rhythms and those sounds. You hear LCD Soundsystem and you’re like, “Oh man! That reminds me of The Jesus Lizard or The Cars or Kraftwerk.” All of a sudden I’m 9 years old, dancing around my living room. They reinvent, they recombine. They find that fusion where you don’t know where one begins and the other ends. So this is an exciting time for music for a lot of people in there 30s.
It reminds me of Canada. In 2003 or 2004, we used to go to Canada on these amazing tours. I used to say, “Man, I love Canadians” because they’ll get down with some hip-hop and they’ll get down with some jam stuff and they’ll get down with the Pixies. I wished more Americans were like that, and I wished that they didn’t see music as a badge to put on to distinguish themselves from other people. That seemed ridiculous. It is important not to ascribe it to the whole movement of a social scene. That always ends up bad, every time.
By looking at the festival circuit, it seems people are finally starting to connect the dots.
I wonder how much people actually do connect the dots. I think Phish fans probably do because they’re interested in that but a lot of people are just like, “Okay, next party, next band.” I think that there’s some real potential to meet new audiences just like there’s potential for me to see new music. I mean, I got really open at that Phish show. They’re bonafide rock stars but you wouldn’t know it, you know? They are so nice.
I’ve had guys that I worked with saying Phish introduced me to The Who, they introduced me to Zappa. That’s awesome. I think that Medeski Martin and Wood did the same thing. They introduced people to Duke Ellington, and they’ve introduced people to all kinds of music. Because they consider it part of them, and they’re transparent and they’re not trying to sell you something for the first time. They’re really just trying to embody it and live in it, which I think is a beautiful thing.
