Mixing Vocabularies: A Conversation with Mike Dillon on Punkadelick

Artistic expression has a unique power to flourish even when the soil is arid and lacking nutrients. The COVID pandemic, which destroyed many societal bonds, structures, and lives, nevertheless presented opportunities for artists to craft new works and explore additional avenues of creative expression. Even as social distancing made congregation difficult, many artists were able to form new ensembles. One great example is Punkadelick, a trio with percussionist Mike Dillon, Jacob Fred Jazz Oddessy founder-keyboardist Brian Haas, and Nth Power drummer Nikki Glaspie. Even with venues shuttered, the group found ways during 2020 and 2021 to collaborate and present their music live, culminating with the group’s debut release, Inflorescence (Royal Potato Family, 2023). 

Dillon has a long association with bands featuring witty names – Go-Go Jungle, Garage A Trois, and Dead Kenny Gs, among them. But there is a particular poignancy with the title “Punkadelick.” Instantly, one’s mind goes to the famous George Clinton outfit, and there is certainly a wild funkiness to the tracks on Inflorescence. One also notes the “Punk” in the ensemble’s name, and there are obvious ties between the trio and groups like Bad Brains or Black Flag. But only the most careful observer would notice the “k” at the end of the group’s name, something lacking in the P-Funked original. That extra “k” is more than just an errant letter. The decision to end the group’s name with “lick” is a subtle nod to the jumping-off points for the improvisatory core of the trio’s work. Dillon, Haas, and Glaspie are all well-versed in jazz, and their familiarity with improvisation-based music lies at the soul of their debut recording. 

On January 20, 2023, we sat down with Dillon to discuss Punkadelick’s formation, his influences, and the connection between music and visual art. 

PostGenre: How did Punkadelick come together? 

Mike Dillon: This trio came together as a direct result of the pandemic and everyone being shut down from the normal non-stop touring activities. [Brian] Haas and I play together all the time, including with the band Nolatet. These days I go back and forth between Kansas City and New Orleans. My wife has been based in Kansas City for years, and I have my place in New Orleans. Haas kept coming up to Kansas City, where I was, or we’d go down to New Orleans to play with James Singleton. At that time, people were having porch concerts and outdoor venues. Many indoor places were shut down by the pandemic. One day, Nikki Glaspie showed up at a show I was doing at the Far Out Lounge in Austin. She said she was going to be in New Orleans over Mardi Gras and would play there with me and Haas. 

PG: And that is how the trio was formed?

MD: Well, the band we played in together was known, before the pandemic, as the Mike Dillon Band. I’d been thinking about the name Punkadelick for a while now. During quarantine, I did three records that we released in March of 2021, and then Haas and I started touring as a duo. About a month after the Mardi Gras performances with Nikki, she said she was down to do some touring with us as a trio. We did a couple of gigs, mostly playing songs from my quarantine albums, and then toured. We did another tour in September, then a third, of the West Coast, in December. With three tours under our belt, we started to fully develop our own vocabulary. After the end of the third tour, we decided to record a collection of tunes I had played with other projects and those we did on the road. Even though it is an instrumental album, we wanted to make it a rock and funk album. I find the pairing of Nikki and Brian to be very special as Nikki’s such a deep funk player, and Brian is a creative, almost free jazz kind of player. Our vocabulary together is something very unique and special. I just sit, listen, and smile like the approving uncle. [Laughing].

PG: Do you feel it is that shared vocabulary that makes this group stand apart from your others?

MD: Yeah, I really do. Every musician has their own vocabulary. On paper, things can look like they are going to be great, but it’s only once you actually start mixing those vocabularies together that you can know how things will turn out. For some reason, the three of us clicked together really well as a trio. 

PG: Where did the idea for the album’s title, Inflorescence, come from?

MD: Inflorescence means to bloom. It is related to specific kinds of plants and the concept of a weed blooming into a beautiful thing. When we started to tour as a trio, inflorescent attitudes emerged. It also reflects things we’ve each learned in our lives. There are things I tripped on in my twenties and thirties that older people would tell me didn’t matter. Now that I am 57, I see that they were often right. That is part of this trio too; Brian is 48 and Nikki is still in her 30s. The three different points in life and our different experiences brought new layers to the group. There is a lot of learning in the band between the three of us. 

PG: A little earlier, you mentioned that the trio revisits some of your older songs, for instance, “Devil’s Playground,” which you previously recorded with the Dead Kenny Gs. What was your process for choosing which older songs to reevaluate with the trio?

MD: Actually, for “Devil’s Playground” specifically, Nikki really wanted to record that song. It is also one of my favorite compositions. I have played it on a near-nightly rotation with my bands. At first, I wasn’t sure we should record a new version as we already had a great version with the Dead Kenny Gs. But we decided to record it for the heck of it and not release it if we didn’t like how it turned out. 

Sometimes you just don’t know how something will turn out until you sit down and record it. I’ve tried to record Thelonious Monk tunes so many times but then once I sit down and hear them, it makes me feel like I have no business releasing a Monk song. Sometimes a song sounds cool live but once you get it on record, it loses something and doesn’t sound nearly as good. With “Devil’s Playground”, we recorded it as the trio, and I love the layers Brian brought out and how he reinvented his part by using a synth bass instead of a regular bass as Brad Houser did with the Dead Kenny Gs. And then Nikki puts a deep pocket into it. We completely reinvented the song while staying true to what it is. 

PG: What is it about Monk’s compositions that give you some pause?

MD: I think Monk is one of the sacred guys. I think it is one thing if someone like Miles Davis plays “‘Round Midnight,” or if Milt Jackson covers “Straight No Chaser.” Those sound great to me. But I am reticent towards approaching those songs myself. It is like how people try to cover Elliott Smith and try to sing as he would, but so much of his music is personal to Elliott Smith. If you are just trying to recreate the music of the greats, you are doing the composition a disservice. When I think of the great approaches to someone else’s works, they are mostly where the artist does something different with the compositions. A good example would be Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt.”

PG: Even Trent Reznor [who wrote “Hurt”] felt like Cash’s version was better than the original. 

MD: Right. And that is something I learned back when I was young. If you are going to cover something, do it so differently that it is its own thing. Otherwise, save the song for the artist who made it. I have recorded one version of a Monk song; “Green Chimneys” [on Stanton Moore’s All Kooked Out! (Fogt City, 1998)] with Charlie Hunter, Skerik, and Stanton [Moore]. I didn’t hate it. But we also turned it into a very slow funk tune. 

PG: Do you feel you have a particular reverence for the work of Monk given you first got into the vibraphone by watching Clint Eastwood’s Monk documentary [Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (Warner Bros.,1988)]?

MD: Yeah. I was on tour around 1994 or 1995. I was in a crummy Motel 6 hotel room somewhere in Kentucky, and the movie came on tv late one night. I was taken aback by just how beautiful Monk’s compositions were. They hit me on some deep emotional and spiritual levels. In the moment, I was inspired to get my shit together and to get back to playing the vibes. I was a classically trained musician before that, having studied mallets at [the University of] North Texas, but I was always intimidated by improvising on the vibes. In that moment of watching Monk, I knew it was something I needed to do. 

PG: But Monk was a pianist. Do you feel you draw more inspiration from pianists than vibraphonists when it comes to playing the vibes?

MD: No. I mean, Bobby Hutcherson, Milt Jackson, Cal Tjader, and Terry Gibbs are all influences. The list goes on and on for vibraphonists. All those guys are in my regular listening rotation along with lesser-discussed vibraphonists like Wes Montgomery’s brother Buddy Montgomery. Or Arthur Lyman, who was the vibraphonist behind all the exotica music. I find inspiration in all of those guys. Listening to Milt Jackson and Bobby Hutcherson as I drove between tour dates in the mid-90s greatly impacted me. Especially the way Bobby played on [Eric] Dolphy’s Out to Lunch! (Blue Note, 1964). That record gave me the courage to improvise. 

There was also my teacher, Bill Ware, who is a great player. I remember my first lesson with him. At that point, I was playing with Les Claypool and felt pretty comfortable with the vibes. I went to study with Bill because I wanted to get some vocabulary to use on the instrument. He told me he would teach me the way he was taught, but that making music was like learning to drive a car. When you are driving, you never think about how all the parts in the transmission or engine work together. Bill told me he could teach me how the pieces of the instrument worked together. But ultimately, I had to drive on my own. He did demystify the whole concept of playing over changes and got me to a point where I was comfortable playing over chords and more comfortable composing. 

And by composing, I include improvisation. I ascribe to the quote by Wayne Shorter that improvisation is just composition sped up. When you view things more broadly, several non-vibraphonists are, of course, influences as well. Horace Silver was huge to me. I especially love his solo on “Senor Blues” [6 Pieces of Silver (Blue Note, 1957)]. Also, Wes Montgomery with his solo on “S.K.J.”, the first song on Bags Meets Wes (Riverside, 1962). And, of course, anything by Charlie Parker. I especially love the classical nature of his improvisations and have been particularly obsessed with “Scrapple from the Apple” lately. Everything is an inspiration. 

PG: Do you feel that spending more time in Kansas City, a city so closely associated with Parker, has made you more connected to his music?

MD: Well, you know, Kansas City is an interesting place. I first came here in 1992 to get away from Dallas for a while. It felt like Kansas City’s jazz scene was still vibrant, and though he had moved to New York so many years before, Charlie Parker’s legacy was still very strong here. At some point, I started seeking out some of the players in Kansas City, in particular one guy, Brian Hicks. Brian was one of the top call bass players in Kansas City and became my friend. He took me under his wing, and I learned quite a bit from gigging with him. The Kansas City legacy is alive and well through him and other great players here. But, of course, like any other city, the gig scene does change. Everything is a condo now. In Austin, I used to play at Liberty Lunch and now I think it is a condo. Same thing with Tonic or the Knitting Factory in New York City. Condos now. I miss all those places, and others, dearly. But it’s part of the journey. The music still survives. 

PG: But, of course, jazz artists are only part of what makes up your creative influences. One can’t talk about your music without mentioning the punk aesthetic. It doesn’t seem like the vibraphone and marimba are a very common instruments in punk music. Do you find it freeing that you are using instruments that are rare in the punk scene?

MD: Well, that is one thing I loved when I started playing vibes. When I was at [the University of] North Texas, there were a hundred drummers. Almost everyone wanted to play the drum set, but no one else played the conga, so I started playing them. I reveled in the fact no one else wanted to play my instrument. There were only about five of us who were playing other percussion instruments. That gave me a chance to play with some of the best drummers out there – people like Earl Harvin and Matt Chamberlain. Then, all of a sudden, more people started playing conga. 

I was very happy to jump to the vibes because, once again, there were not a lot of vibraphonists out there. By the time I started playing with my band, Billy Goat, I was incorporating ideas from punk rock because I had seen Bad Brains and was part of the whole Deep Ellum scene back in the late 80s. I was also seeing Fishbone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers perform, back when the Chili Peppers were more punk than pop. I went to shows by Dinosaur Jr. and the Flaming Lips. The list goes on and on. But there was always something real about their music. Not that other music was somehow fake, but there was a rawness and do-it-yourself aesthetic to punk that spoke to me. You weren’t in some fancy club with a two-drink minimum. Seeing Bad Brains when I was twenty, in the summer of ‘86, blew my fucking mind. No one was phoning it in; everyone gave 110%. That energy became very important to me and my music. 

I don’t know that many punk vibe or marimba players on the planet. But I also don’t know many groups that combine punk with cumbia, and I’ve been playing cumbia since the 80s. Carl Finch and the Brave Combo was another big influence on me and they introduced me to cumbia. I’ve been playing cumbias since the late 80s. Billy Goat wrote a cumbia in 1990. We may have been one of the first punk bands to ever do cumbia. But it works with the punk rock aesthetic as well. Doing things differently provides more opportunities. It’s very important to me to go my own way on my instrument. 

PG: Is that part of what interests you in Igor Stravinsky so much? One of the tracks on Inflorescence is even called “Stravinsky Spectacles.” People now look back at his works like “Rite of Spring” or “The Firebird Suite” as essential but, at the time he made them, they were revolutionary. Punk did not exist during Stravinsky’s lifetime, but that shared attitude of “screw this, I’m going my own way” permeates some of his works, as well as free jazz. 

MD: I mean, Stravinsky is huge. I got to play “The Firebird Suite” when I was a 17-year-old in Houston. That was my experience of being in a symphony orchestra with other kids. I love the imprint Stravinsky and other great composers have left on twentieth-century music. There’s a reason why Frank Zappa’s wish for his 18th birthday was to meet Stravinsky. 

PG: Part of what made people view Stravinsky as revolutionary was the dance sometimes tied to his music. This is particularly the case with the unconventional dance used for “Rite of Spring.” Where do you see the interrelationship between visual art and your music? The art for many of your albums was made by your wife, Peregrine Honig, who is a gifted visual artist. How do you see her artwork as furthering your music?

MD: I have always loved hearing Peregrine’s take on art. Visual art has always been important to me and my music-making process. Visual art is one of those things that inspires me to do something different musically. I have loved Peregrine’s style from the get-go. I first started working with her when she did the art for Malachy Papers [Bones and Horn (Self-Release, 1999)]. Over the years, she’s done the artwork for albums by Mike Dillon’s GoGo Jungle [Battery Milk (Hyena, 2007)], Garage a Trois [Power Patriot (Royal Potato Family, 2009)], and the Mike Dillon Band. Peregrine was always one of those people I would talk to and get advice from. She also has a deep knowledge of art. Peregrine is just amazing and super talented.

We weren’t romantically involved at first, but she is a good balance for me there as well. She’s such a calm person, whereas I’m full of energy. She’s taught me how to be and stay in the process. I was aware of staying in the artistic process before her because music requires you to stay focused, but her focus is on a whole other level. I’ve seen her work on an oil painting for two years before she even considers it finished and that is mind-blowing. The additional time and focus let her add layers and layers that weren’t originally there. That is incredibly inspiring. She’s brought additional depth to my music. She’s sometimes my songwriting partner and especially helps me find ways to improve the lyrical aspects of my music. Her non-musician’s point of view allows me to approach things differently as well. 

PG: Which, in a way, ties back into Inflorescence. Although the album is instrumental, it seems you are taking a more collaborative approach to the compositions than on most of your prior albums. 

MD: That is completely right. This is the first record since the Dead Kenny G’s where the songwriting was a collaborative process. With the Mike Dillon Band and all the other records, I felt like I had to prove that I could do almost all of it myself. I couldn’t play all the parts, but I wanted to be the main songwriter. But with Nikki and Brian, I am much more open to collaborating on the compositions and seeing what we could create together. We didn’t sit in a room and put the songs together in some overly structured way. Instead, we improvised on the spot and put a little melody over it. All the songs on the album we wrote together, except for those that were previously written.

But even with the songs we had written before, liberty was given to each member to do what they wanted with them. So, for example, while “Pandas” is my song, Brian wrote the melody on his melodica, and we combined it with what I had and what Nikki was able to do with the rhythms. We all share a love of the collaborative improvisation you see in Black American music, and I think that’s where the heavy collaboration came from. It’s certainly how we would like to do the next record. I don’t want to share too much, but we are looking to do something that no one else has done before. There’s lots of punk jazz out there; we’re working on building in other influences, as well, including those by Cory Booker and Sergei Prokofiev. We each feel incredibly inspired to keep this collaboration going and to make something that is not only different but true to ourselves. 

Mike Dillon and Punkadelick’s ‘Inflorescence’ is now available on Royal Potato Family. It can be purchased on Bandcamp. More information on Dillon can be found on his website.

Photo credit: Joshua Marc Levy