Creative Necessity: A Conversation with Skerik

Since first picking up the horn in fifth grade, Skerik has charted a less traditional route for a saxophonist. While inspired by music that came before, he’s never seemed confined to it. Instead, over the last few decades, he has been constantly searching for new and different sounds. This quest led him to become a pioneer in saxophonics, the use of amplifiers and pedals on the instrument to give it new effects and color. It has also led to his membership in some of the most sonically eclectic groups in modern memory. By surrounding himself with equally open-minded artists in groups like the Dead Kenny Gs, Crack Sabbath, Critters Buggin, Omaha Diner, and his Syncopated Taint, visiting ideas as wide-ranging as heavy metal, mariachi, and pop hits.

One of Skerik’s best-known bands, Garage a Trois, has taken many forms over its twenty-two years of existence. But it was originally born as a trio with guitarist Charlie Hunter and drummer Stanton Moore. With Calm Down Cologne (Royal Potato Family, 2021), the group revisits its initial membership. But even with a return to origins, the music remains different from that which came before. We sat down with Skerik to discuss the new album and his thoughts on music more generally.

PostGenre: The last Garage a Trois album was released in 2015. What is behind releasing the new one, Calm Down Cologne, six years later?  

Skerik: Well, there have been three different versions of the band. They’re each very different. The original – Stanton Moore, Charlie Hunter, and myself- came about when we all met to record Stanton’s first solo record, All Kooked Out! (Fog City, 1998). As a trio, we released one album,  Mysteryfunk (Fog City, 1999). After Mysteryfunk, we became a quartet with Mike Dillion joining the band on percussion. That version of the group recorded Emphasizer (Tone-Cool, 2003) and then Outre Mer (Telarc 2005) as a quartet. After Outre Mer, Charlie began focusing on his solo stuff and Marco Benevento joined the group on keyboards. The quartet with Marco recorded Power Patriot (Royal Potato Family, 2009) and Always Be Happy, But Stay Evil (Royal Potato Family, 2011).  

Calm Down Cologne is a return to the original trio and it’s very different from the other Garage A Trois albums that came after Mysteryfunk. We started playing again as a trio a couple of years ago and it was a lot of fun. Charlie and Stanton have this incredibly magical chemistry. They just keep going and going. If you put them in a studio for a week, they could make 100 records together, easily. It is pretty amazing. 

PG:  What do you think sets Calm Down Cologne apart from other Garage a Trois albums? 

S: The album is very different from what came before, in large part because there’s only one written song – the title track – with the rest fully improvised.  The other albums were all built around songs.  

But, you know, as Wayne Shorter has said, “composition is improvisation slowed down and improvisation is composition sped up.” When you hear the record, you will definitely hear really powerful grooves and melodies and sections that sound like pre-written songs. That approach reminds me of Miles Davis’ 70s records where he was just getting combinations of people in the studio to record and build off of little ideas then he and Teo Macero would shape those ideas into something else. It is like taking a piece of wood or marble and sculpting it from a rough thing into something new. That’s something I have always been interested in.  

PG: What was behind the idea of taking the group back to its original trio?  

S:  Honestly, it was mostly out of convenience. Because everyone is so busy these days, when any combination of people is available, you just go with it. It’s really funny how sometimes certain musical groups are born from very practical or mundane things like artist availability. But, obviously, none of us are going to do something unless we believe in its creative and artistic merit. Especially Charlie. You can’t force him to do anything and I mean that in an incredibly positive way.  

PG: You first worked with Charlie and Stanton over 22 years ago. How do you feel like the music the three of you create together now differs from that two decades ago? 

S: We all continue to study music and practice and play a lot. We are always bringing something new to the table when we get together. All three of us have also all learned how to perform in the studio better and how to make better use of time and improvise more efficiently.

When we recorded this album, Charlie was very into exploring just a bunch of really hardcore groove rhythmic material instead of writing songs. He really wanted to improvise and try and find some deeper things that were very current with him. He’s been more into the blues the last few years and a lot of his playing has been very consonant and grounded in that tradition. He’s also using very different guitars now than he did when we first started playing together in the 90s. He was using eight-string guitars then, with three bass strings and five guitar strings. Now he is using these hybrid Big Six guitars with three guitar strings and three bass strings. There are a lot of things going on differently there.

Now I’m playing saxophone and keyboard melodies at the same time – instead of focusing mostly on the sax- to try and do something relevant on top of what Charlie and Stanton are doing. And then Randall Dunn, our producer-engineer, has also really grown a lot in the over twenty years I have been working with him. He’s able to capture this stuff and provide ideas for us to do stuff that we wouldn’t normally do.

PG: With performance spaces beginning to open back up again, do you see the trio performing live in the near future? 

S: It’s hard to tell. I think it is kind of dangerous right now to get people together. It might be OK for the musicians but not so much for the audience. I just want everyone to be healthy and for us all to get over this COVID thing. It will take a lot of patience to get past this pandemic. And as shown with the 1918 flu, Americans in particular generally have very little patience. The biggest concern is that there may be a huge resurgence with things ending up worse than before. People far too often don’t learn from history and doom themselves to repeat it.  

Hopefully, we will do some shows. I don’t know how motivated Charlie will be to go touring; he has been loving being at home and doing his almost daily videos from there. But maybe Stanton and I will go to Greensboro, where Charlie lives, and do some shows with him there. We are scheduled to do a big live stream show on April 16^th. I’m flying to New Orleans to do an hour-long live stream record release party. We will play parts of our new record, Charlie will Zoom in for a chat, and Stanton and I will play as a duo and live with a pre-recorded video of Charlie. It’s going to be really cool and a lot of fun. 

PG: How do you feel like your other projects – Critters Buggin, Dead Kenny Gs, Syncopated Taint, Omaha Diner, and the rest – have influenced the music on Calm Down Cologne?  

S:  Everything you work on will always influence your projects after it to some extent. That’s why it’s important to have a healthy musical diet. It is important to make sure you listen to and are involved with only good projects. I can’t even imagine where I would be right now if I didn’t have those experiences of playing with certain bands I had played with.  

PG: To pivot a little to your other projects, you have been a trailblazer in saxophonics – using pedals to get different sounds on your horn. How did that first come about?

S:  The phrase “necessity is the mother of all invention” tells the basic story. In the 1980s I was playing with different bands but only on acoustic saxophone. Over time, I started playing with a very loud trio and some electronic musicians. My acoustic sound didn’t fit and I wanted to find a way to be integrated into the new groups. I also really love Jimi Hendrix. When I started playing louder and more powerful music, I needed to get with the band texturally in a similar timbre and similar power. 

So, I got a distortion pedal and an amp and began experimenting with different mics on the sax and guitar pedals. That equipment, however, was not at all intended for saxophones. Now you can go on websites and see a lot of products made for horn players who want to experiment with their sound. But back then you had to do it all yourself. The experiments were very expensive – you had to buy all sorts of crap – and frustrating. It was terrible.

But the key to making the thing with pedals work is to hear the sound in your head first. That was incredibly helpful to me. I looked up to the trumpeter Jon Hassell a lot on this. In the 70s and 80s, he was finding ways to make incredibly interesting and tasteful music, with Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, and others, by putting effects on trumpet. I started by trying to emulate all this subtle, nuanced stuff that artists like Hassell were exploring. I was also checking out lots of heavier music like Black Metal and trying to find distortion pedals and extended techniques that could help the sound expand. Each little thing leads you to another kind of discovery and more things to learn.

Today, Sam Gendel seems to be really picking up Jon Hassell’s thing and running with it. I love his records, his videos, and the recent recording with Blake Mills and Pino Palladino. He’s also in Clown Core with Louis Cole. They do all that shit in the van with blast beats and crazy stuff that fits right in with Critters Buggin. I love the idea of incorporating all kinds of genres not just to do it but because it seems like the natural thing to do.

PG: Actually, you once described yourself as a “genre refugee.” Can you share your thoughts on the classification of music more generally? 

S: Some people are more predisposed to improvisation and integrating different influences while others focus exclusively on one kind of music. There is no wrong way to approach music but I am definitely in the first group. Ultimately, I feel like all music is related, just like all people are related. All different types of music have some things in common and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with musicians exploring a wide range of different styles.  

People used to ask Matt Chamberlain, the drummer in Critters Buggin, what kind of music the group played. His answer was always that “we play our record collection.” In that band, we may be in a super heavy rock mode then suddenly go into this funk groove then this Joujouka thing in 9/4. In our Akai or Roland sampler we would have a Captain Beefheart sample and then have a Stravinsky sample. It was just incredibly natural for us to do those sorts of things. We are all listening to all kinds of music, so why wouldn’t we play it or let it influence us?

PG: Who would you consider some of your certain biggest musical influences then?  

S: Because I’ve been playing saxophone since 6th grade, I have always been checking out all the saxophone players, from basically Sidney Bechet on up. I love music from the African American tradition in general as well as many Indian, African, and Bulgarian musicians. It is just hard to name names honestly.  

Obviously, there are bigger things like the music of Miles Davis and all of the different styles of music that he helped pioneer. I love all of his eras and feel like people can learn from each one of them. But you also have to be careful; it is one thing to take inspiration and another to emulate. I’ve seen many people just trying to sound exactly like Miles’ 1964 quintet. But they’re never going to sound as good as that band. Instead, they end up in an endless loop of trying to copy something that even its original creator left behind decades ago to move onto new ideas. It has already been done. I started just calling it necro-jazz, referring to necrophilia, because of the obsession with ideas that are dead and done. I would rather risk failing at something new and different than commit to certain genres of music that had already been explored and completely realized.

But exploring many different sounds can also hurt you commercially. If you don’t fit a preset mold, most labels aren’t interested in supporting you after a while and you just end up on your own. I am not another fucking singer-songwriter with 20 songs ready to be turned into a record so most labels aren’t interested. When we released Critters Buggin albums in the 90s, we had an album with ten songs, each with completely different vibes and feels. The business people didn’t know how to sell it and explain it to people.

That happened to Garage A Trois once too. We had a really terrible manager who sat on an album for over a year because they didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t find out until years later. In the lifespan of a band, a month is an eternity, let alone a year. When you have a record done it needs to be released right then. It’s like making a cake or having fresh fruit or something. If you leave it there sitting for too long, it will just begin to rot away.

I am very grateful for really open-minded people like Kevin Calabro at Royal Potato Family. I’m just trying to make his life easier because I know my music makes his life more difficult. [laughing]. The hope is that ultimately our albums just break even. Even if we don’t make a lot of money, breaking even at least lets us continue to keep doing what we love and get ready for another album.

PG: Was it unusual then to be part of the Nels Cline Singers’ Share the Wealth (Blue Note, 2020) when the album received what seemed to be a lot of critical and commercial buzz? 

S: It is all relative.  

I was just thinking about that record the other day. It was such a great experience and I am so happy to have been a part of that.  

But even though it got a bunch of great reviews maybe it didn’t sell well [laughing]. Who knows? I haven’t heard anything from Nels about it or asked him about it. I usually don’t think too much about albums after they are done. Once it’s out, I move on to the next project. But I hope Nels’ record is selling well because then we can do another one. 

PG: What do you see as the biggest threat to creativity? 

S: Threat to creativity.  Well did you read that recent article in Wired magazine about how the big music companies should be broken up by the FTC? Read that article. The further consolidation of all of the major labels is toxic for everything. And in comes companies like Spotify who see an opportunity to go steal listeners and fans and make money off of them. They’re not creating anything and they’re not nurturing a relationship with fans over decades. They’re basically just like shady used car salesmen. No, that’s an insult to used car salesmen, so I retract that. And that’s not even getting into stuff like Live Nation for live performances.  

I wish musicians had a really strong union right now because someone has to defend music. I encourage everyone to read Blake Morgan or David Lowery or look into the Future of Music Coalition. Keep in touch with the organizations that are trying to help independent artists and independent labels. I just can’t believe that the FTC and regulatory commissions on the Federal level allow these mergers to continue to take place. It is astounding. In any other industry that would never be allowed. Anti-competitiveness is terrible and never works for anyone besides the big corporations. Consolidation of power into a very small handful of powerful companies is the greatest threat to musical creativity.  

PG: What do you like most about doing solo performances and where do you get your ideas for them?  

S: Generally, I prefer pursuing music as a collaborative art form. I love working with other people and the more, the better. That even includes working with non-musicians – the crew, lighting people, video people, and the rest. It is like having a big family. My dream would be to have a large group filling five tour buses just constantly going around in circles around the US, rotating musicians and crew people together.     

But when someone asks me to do a solo performance, I take it very seriously. I’m always working really hard to try to come up with something. Actually, I have a live stream solo performance coming up on March 28 on loudswell.com. I have been working on the performance for a month, getting an effects array together and coming up with a concept. It’s a 20-minute set with saxophone and electronics that is inspired by the composer Steve Reich. I’m really excited about it. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to do this piece. I have been working on the show every day, often multiple run-throughs a day.  

PG: What else is in your future plans?  

S: We’ve been releasing stuff on the Critters Buggin Bandcamp page. Matt Chamberlain has an incredible studio in LA where he has been remastering some live recordings and editing them together. It’s just amazing stuff. And we recently found video footage from a 1995 concert at the OK Hotel in Seattle. We are going through a bunch of tapes that are in storage to try to find audio from that night. If we can match it with the video, it would be amazing. The music is killing, super high-energy stuff. 

PG:  One final question. What was it like working with the legendary Bernie Worrell and what did you learn most from that experience?  

S: [laughing] Oh my God. Sometimes you look back at certain moments in your life and just can’t believe you got to do that. I was just very lucky. We made six records together as part of the band Khu.éex’. Bernie approached his performances with such a total commitment and total economy. He had a distinct ability to integrate humor and technique and complex concepts into everything he played. It is so hard to combine those things, but he made it look so easy.   

I think what hurts a lot of instrumental music is that it sounds like people are just taking themselves so seriously. No one wants to hear people who are just shitting cinderblocks and going off about how important they think themselves to be and how incredible their own music is. They’re just pissing in the wind and trying to impress other musicians. What they should be doing is speaking to the greater universe and the greater spiritual thing that connects all of us, but they’re not.  

Having some humility and thinking beyond your instrument and who you think is listening is what Bernie was all about. He wasn’t trying to impress anyone. He was trying to tap into the universal soul and that’s just the greatest lesson to be reminded of. He was just beyond the trappings of any contemporary thing that was going on at the time. Playing with him, learning from him, and listening to him was just such a great time.  

Once we asked him if he could do a Rhodes overdub on one song. He agreed, but at that point had really bad arthritis and really could only go and do one take. You had to get that one take because he would be too sore to do it over again. The song we asked him to do the overdub on was a long, maybe 15-minute song. When he started playing, the 8 people in the control room just went silent and listened intently. Gradually, people we didn’t even know started randomly coming into the studio to quietly watch Bernie overdub on the song. As he’s adding all these amazing layers and parts on this one take, we’re left wondering where these people came from. Did they just wander in from off of the street? By the end of the song, everyone was clapping and cheering. 

You have to understand that the rest of the band had been doing overdubs as well.  It was just so routine for us. No one ever randomly wandered into the studio compelled to listen to what we were doing. People weren’t even quiet in the booth when we would do ours. How do you explain Bernie’s reception? It’s because he just had this magnetism. When he did something musically, it was an incredible event that everyone was just drawn to and compelled to listen to. In many ways, this story is such a great metaphor for his life on earth. He had such a strong ability to tap into everyone’s humanity and speak to them through the language of music.  

Garage A Trois’ Calm Down Cologne will be released on Royal Potato Family on April 16, 2021. A limited-edition 3D splatter vinyl is now available for preorder. A digital copy will be available on Bandcamp.

More information about Skerik can be found on his website.