MISTER (GIANT) SANDMAN Howe Gelb (Pt. 1)
Jul 01, 2010
With a new solo - flamenco! - record out in Europe and another Giant Sand album en route, it's 25 years and counting for the desert-and-Denmark dwelling maestro.
BY JOHN SCHACHT
Howe Gelb, the iconoclastic architect behind the prolific Giant Sand/Band of Blacky Ranchette/'Sno Angel/Arizona Amp & Alternator empire, views his second half-century as an "ambassadorship." The 54-year-old was referring to his solo shows -- "a discussion with a collection of tunes attached," he calls them -- but the honorific suits Gelb's recent global endeavors, too.
After the dissolution of the longest-running Giant Sand lineup in 2002 saw Joey Burns and John Convertino leave to concentrate on Calexico's growing profile, Giant Sand's new roster took on a Euro bent when Gelb hired a trio of Danes to fill out the band for 2004's Is All Over the Map. (Gelb is married to a Danish woman, and they and their children spend each summer in Denmark.) Then came Gelb's Montreal-based ‘Sno Angel project, an unlikely blend of the secular and spiritual featuring a Canadian gospel choir adding their traditional sounds to Gelb's self-described twangy "muck."
And now Gelb has turned recent tours to Spain into his next eclectic project - an album of Gelb compositions recorded with a trio of Spanish Gypsy flamenco guitarists. Called Alegrias, the recording was released in Spain at the end of May (Gelb says he's in talks with U.S. labels about the record and Has another Giant Sand release already in the can; for now, Alegrias is available on the Spanish label Eureka through PIAS distributors at http://company.pias.com/en).
Blurt recently spoke with Gelb at his Tucson home about the new record, the contended Danes, Giant Sand reissues, the record business, and various other Gelb arcana.
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BLURT: It's good to talk with you again Howe -- what have you been up to lately?
GELB: There are several things - there always seems to be that. The most correct form is to specify a particular work that you want promoted or marketed, but I've never gotten that straight. So I'll just lambaste you with several clumps of sonic plops and you can discern, remove, edit, whatever you want. So, at the moment I'm sitting on a live ‘Sno Angel CD and film, all packaged in one CD/DVD thing (#Winging It#). That obviously was stemming from the 2006 ‘Sno Angel posse, which was a record made in Canada with all Canadians, the drummer who went on to be the drummer in Arcade Fire, and an entire gospel choir attached. That turned out so well, and turned so many heads, that as a memento, we followed up with this live thing and the filmmaker was Maria Mochnacz, who does the PJ Harvey stuff (#PJ Harvey On Tour: Please Leave Quietly#). We just assembled that and put it together on our own, kind of a little on-going, tour-only thing and also available at our website, Ow Om.
The next thing up is recently completed, and exactly similar to the ‘Sno Angel project in its template. Since 2003, I'd been going to Cordoba Spain, and over three years I'd finished this record in the same exact manner as the ‘Sno Angel thing. Except instead of a gospel choir, there are flamenco gypsies attached to it. These guys play guitar that just continue to blow my mind every moment we sit down together. And they play without wires, they play like they invented the guitar - because they did. And I can't pretend to have ever attempted those rhythms. I can't play those rhythms, those rhythms totally make me dizzy. They give me a buzz, and I love ‘em. But I can't ever figure ‘em out; I can barely handle 4/4.
It must be kind of intimidating...
No, here's how it went down. At the moment of impact, this is my opinion, I don't really know because my Spanish really sucks - I speak some Sonoran, but it's nothing like Castilian. But we don't rely on actual words - we have discussions, but it mostly has to do with melody, and emotion inside that melody, the texture of the growl, and the yippity of laughter. And then of course with guitar none of that applies. Anyway, this guy had asked me to come and hang out in Córdoba and record - and I get that invitation a lot from different parts of the world, and it's very sweet, but you never know if you can make time for it or what to gamble on and all that. But then he mentioned the word "gypsies" and the more I began to hear him out and hang with him, the more I liked him. Then I went to his place - and his place is incredibly like Tucson, except more dense. More Tucson than Tucson. Exact same climate, same kind of tastes. I stayed at his house, it was like an old wobbled barrio, very similar to where I live here in town in Tucson. And one by one these gypsy fellows would show up, and they'd throw down some guitar, and I'd go, ‘man, that's the shit, that's where it came from.' That's like when you recognize the source of the Nile. I had to think quick there - I thought, ‘well, I can't do that. I can't go anywhere near that.' But then I know I can play something that will completely boggle them - or so I hoped.
And that was some stride piano. Because they can play every instrument, these guys, including piano. But the rhythms in stride were as curious to them as theirs were to me, fortunately. And that's when all of a sudden the smiles came out, and once that broke the ‘let's see what you've got' austerity of the moment. We all want to hang with each other anyway, peoples of the world, but there's that moment where you go, ‘wait a minute, I just can't be a sap or be taken advantage of, or why should I spend my precious time here with you' or whatever. And then you realize there's something going on here. And then it's all about, ‘let's work together to see what this thing is and where it can go,' not where it can go on record, but where it can go just within the moment of playing, or will it be a complete train wreck. So that's how it kind of started, and then it began escalating and escalating and escalating, and then I would just go there, supposedly to record, but for the sake of just living there for a little bit, because it just felt like my life, it felt like my home. The end result was this record.
The players who kept showing up to play and kept appearing just kept getting more and more incredible until finally the grandest player of them all showed up. Raimundo Amador, the first guy in the late ‘70s to combine flamenco with the blues. Anyhow, what I came to learn was that through the years flamenco was redelivered to the counter-culture in the ‘70s the way Led Zeppelin redelivered the blues to our western counter-culture. It was done with this two-piece group, Lole y Manuel, and this woman and this guy came up with this full-on flamenco but adorned with the sensibilities of the era, to the counter-culture. They are folk heroes. Raimundo was a kid of 14 or 15 on the streets, and he would go and hang out at their house, started playing within their camp. There's a lineage, then he started playing with this guy named Tomatito, and I happened to discover Tomatito in the ‘80s when we were on the same label with him as Giant Sand (Imago Records). I would play his record when I lived in Joshua Tree in the late ‘80s - the only three records I'd play were him, #Swordfishtrombones# by Tom Waits, which had just come out, and this Miles Davis record, "Ascension to the Gallows" (#Ascenseur Pour L'échafaud#), was the English translation of it, it was a film soundtrack. So, anyway, when Raimundo finally showed up and he played, he did a few riffs that reminded me of that time-frame and took me back to Tomatito, and it turned out that Tomatito was getting his juice from Raimundo, they were playing together all that time way back then, so it was a wonderful full cycle-event for me to meet this guy. And he's a national treasure, you walk down the street with him and everybody in every walk of life knows his name.
The record is called #Alegrias#, which is a form of flamenco, but also taken from the root word meaning joy, alegria. So, anyhow, I just did what I do, and they applied themselves accordingly, the same way that the gospel choir did. I just play what I play. I took some old Giant Sand songs, like I did with the choir, that seemed to have the chord structure that was similar, or aligned to, the chord structure to what I thought gospel was, and in this case with what the flamenco chord structure was. Then I wrote a whole bunch of new songs just from being so titillated and tantalized and downright inspired by the event that all these new songs started popping up, just like the ‘Sno Angel thing. It's coming out in a couple weeks in Spain first because the Spanish are embracing it like sort of the indie rock version of whatever the counter-culture thing was with Lole y Manuel. A few times flamenco would be reinvented for the decade, or the period of time, it doesn't happen every decade, for those that we used to call the counterculture, the subculture, the underground, whatever. Where it's not really forced, it's not a tourist thing, it's not like, ‘oh, I'm getting old now, let's go make the blues record' kind of thing. It's the same sensibilities that can be discerned - it's encoded, you can hear it - but it's utilizing a big part of that culture. I don't understand that, it's not my part, I just saw how much I loved being there with it, and with them, and surrounded in that sound, and how it really just juiced me - it was the same kind of dizzy thrill I would get from them playing as I got from the gospel choir. That makes me know that I'm in the right place - and what comes out of it I never have any idea before.
We talked when shortly after ‘Sno Angel, and you said of the collaboration that you ‘knew when to get out of the way' and let them do their thing. Did that apply here as well?
Yeah. It's so good that way. A lot of times I have to lug everything along. It started feeling that way in the ‘90s for me, I don't want to be the guy lugging it along so much. I want to be part of the fabric where the thing starts up and you just get to enjoy it. You get to be Duke Ellington and only play a few chords in the song and then just enjoy the sonic swarm that's occurring. Because it's such a fantastic feeling - the best feeling in the world is just to be surrounded by players and not to be on one side of the PA system and just get sort of a relatively flat representation of what's going on. In a circle on stage, or in a rehearsal room, when you're in a circle the music has so much dimension.
How does that change the idea of the audience?
The thing with an audience is that it has an energy all its own. You pick up on what people are thinking and feeling when they're in a multitude like that. You know, I don't know if everybody realizes it sometimes, what's going on in their brains, but you're receiving these signals, whether or not you count them as that or not, or you acknowledge them as that. Way back when, when I first started, there was a thing called demo tapes - and you used to have to play a demo tape for an A&R person to see if they wanted to sign you. This was before we made any records. And I would find myself in these offices, I don't know how I got there, I was very young, and I would give them a cassette and they would play the tape. And at the end of the meeting with them, I would get visibly ill, really sick to my stomach, I would have to leave there and felt like throwing up. What I didn't realize is that there was something going on where I was receiving their signals from their brain listening to the music I had handed them. I would hear the music completely differently if they were listening to it. I think it happens to everybody, I think some people just discount it or they don't understand what it is, or they just shrug it off or maybe they've got a thicker skin, I don't know, but it fucked with me.
Anyway, then later, it would translate into a more positive manner on stage because you would be hearing everybody hearing what you were doing, immediately, and it has this kind of cyclical reverb echo-y thing going on, and it will totally direct where the music goes for any given evening. So, I guess what I'm doing is over-explaining the aspect of having a live audience. I'm just saying that what we've all grown to accept when we go to hear music or the presentation of music is, there's a stage, and it's almost like a flat-line, and the crowd is on one side the line, and the band is on the other side of the line. And that just works, so people just accept it and that's how it is, and it's still sounds better that way than any MP3 or even better than any form of recording - it sounds different, better, more alive and vibrant. But to be on the stage, regardless of who's watching, it doesn't matter, just to be in a room with no audience, and to be in a circle of people playing is the thrill. It's the thing that gets me off. It just happened the other day, I realized it, too. We wrote some pieces for a string ensemble, and I was just in the room and they were all around me, and wow, every time you turn your head you're hearing it in a completely different impossible way because of the panning of your head. That kind of texture is wonderful. Like, for example, when Lambchop asked me to sit in for the first time, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever heard because being in the middle of 14 people playing music was unbelievable. It's very symphonic. But that's what it was like with the gospel choir and to be surrounded by gypsies.
How do your shows differ then, as solo artist versus the band?
I think that's changed over the years, depending on what era we're talking about. These days, I think it's more of an ambassadorship - I tend to think that I can show up, I can play guitar, I can sing a song or two, if there's a piano I can be much happier, and then just have what's almost like a discussion, you know? A discussion with a collection of tunes attached. Because when you're over 50, you're in a different mindset with it all. You can form conclusions, whereas before, you don't really know the answers to things and you don't really care so much, either. You're just like throwing it out there to see what happens and you're going by your gut all the time. Now, you can decide what your gut was correct with and what it was a little bit incorrect with, and you can make all kinds of conclusions about things, life, people and all that. So when I go to play, it's almost as a surprise to me to be there - this might not sound tempting - it's like you appear, ‘how did I get here?' Almost like a ghost or a phantom, or like you're in a different time zone - literally, where you show up, you just materialize, and then you absorb your immediate surroundings and they mix with your luggage, the things you carry with you, meaning your songs, your ideas, the thoughts in your mind for the day. And then whatever happens there happens there.
Does that mean your setlist is rather...
Translucent? The only time I ever had a setlist was when I was with the choir - I should qualify that by saying I'm doing the same thing with the gypsies, too, because there's enough possibility for confusion as it is. And when I'm with a regular touring band I never have a setlist because I know there's a trick to developing telepathy. It's not that hard, it's just a thing that players figure out and I think it's more fun that way, it's more jazz that way even when you're not playing jazz. With the choir, because I adore them, I don't want to throw them. Though we play a little bit of hide and seek, but not much. It's ‘this is what we're doing, so you guys know.' Because it'll be a complete, domino train-wreck if I don't. And with the gypsies, out of respect, especially because of the confusion with the language, I don't want them to not know what the hell is going on either.
To be continued. Tomorrow, in Pt. 2, Gelb talks about Denmark, Giant Sand, operating a grassroots indie label, and the ups and downs of being signed to a major label.
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