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Music has a unique ability to unite humanity. As Ella Fitzgerald once noted, “Music is the universal language…. it brings people together.” This power is particularly evident when artists are willing to take inspiration from diverse sources. An openness to different ideas, regardless of where they derive, permits the creation of something more substantive than merely chasing trends or ensuring compliance with some preset categorical boxes. Thievery Corporation – the three-decades-long collaboration between Rob Garza, Eric Hilton, and their colleagues – provides a great example. You can catch them at the Newport Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 4, 2024.

It is easy to label Thievery Corporation as a group making electronic music, and there are certainly influences from that realm. But such a label is also ill-fitting as an inherent warmth and passion often missing from electronic music permeates their recordings. This affection comes from a wide range of sources. The romanticism of Bossa Nova. The compositional ingenuity of jazz. The spiritual yearning of Indian classical music. And the deep grooves of dub, to name a few. In so doing, they borrow concepts from around the globe and explore what makes them great without culturally appropriating them.

While a purist may question Thievery Corporation’s inclusion at one of the world’s most historically significant jazz festivals, no precise genre-based event would properly fit their incredible music. But, at its core, jazz is the wedding of diverse elements, including the Blues, African rhythmic rituals, ragtime, and Western classical music, to create a new whole. In this sense, it is difficult to find a group more welcome at the Festival than Thievery Corporation.

PG: What interested you in having Thievery Corporation play at Newport? 

RG: Well, first of all, we’re incredibly honored to be playing there. We are big fans of many different types of music, with jazz being one of them. We’re incredibly excited to be part of such an amazing festival with an incredible relationship to jazz music.

PG: The Newport Jazz Festival has long hosted all kinds of music outside the traditional jazz idiom  – Muddy Waters, Mahalia Jackson, James Brown, and the Roots, among such artists. But, because the Festival has such a rich history with jazz music and this year is its seventieth anniversary, there will inevitably be some jazz purists who question your inclusion in the lineup. Is that a worry at all?

RH: Not really. I live in San Francisco, where there is a bluegrass festival called Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.  And while it is a bluegrass festival, all types of artists perform there.  And I know many jazz festivals have similarly morphed over the years to include eclectic lineups. I think that is just the world we live in today. And, hopefully, people can come to terms with a lineup that maybe isn’t all bluegrass or all jazz. 

But at the same time, jazz has influenced both Eric and myself in terms of listening to music. And it has been an inspiration for the music that we create. We’re also not putting forth the idea that we are a jazz band or anything like that. But jazz is a type of music near and dear to our hearts.

PG: How much improvisation is there in Thievery Corporation’s music? After The Cosmic Game (ESL, 2005), you have been orchestrating jam sessions and building records from those. That approach would certainly seem to open itself up to improvisation.

RG: When we play live, there are elements of improvisation here and there. But, again, we’re not a jazz band, so improvisation is not our primary focus. If you look at a song like “Lebanese Blonde,” the vocals are provided by Pam Bricker, who was a jazz singer we grabbed out of a café one night and had her come to the studio and perform. We have worked with many different jazz musicians on our albums. 

PG: And in 2001, Thievery Corporation released an album called Sounds from the Verve Hi-Fi (Verve, 2001), where you compiled some of your favorites from that label’s 1960s output, mostly jazz recordings. How did that project come together?

RG: Between mine and Eric’s record collections, we listen to many different styles and genres of music. Verve was one of our favorite record labels. We’re both heavily influenced by Bossa Nova and a lot of Creed Taylor’s production work. 

For the project, we went through our record collections and picked out a bunch of various random tracks from the Verve catalog that we loved. And, so, there is stuff that sounds a little more Near Eastern, like the Cal Tjader track [“The Fakir (feat. Lalo Schifrin)”], and we also have some Bossa music and other stuff. When we made that record, Verve was also doing remix compilations. We did a remix of an Astrud Gilberto song for one of them. [“Who Needs Forever?” On Verve Remixed (Verve, 2001]

PG: Actually, Thievery Corporation has been involved in several fascinating remix projects. You have remixed music by Herb Alpert, David Byrne, Paul Simon, and Bob Marley, among others. What do you enjoy most about doing remixes? 

RG: Well, it’s interesting to take a track apart and reconstruct it into something that is sometimes totally different from the original. It’s also fun to see how people recorded all the different tracks that exist in a particular song, to lay those out in front of us, and to be able to take bits and transform them into something that sounds more like something we would do. 

PG: In terms of Thievery Corporation’s sound, the group seems to maintain an identifiable voice regardless of the environment surrounding you, whether Bossa Nova, dub, or something else entirely. Have you had to work hard to maintain that identifiable voice?

RG: I don’t think so. I think it’s just our musical fingerprint and something that comes naturally when we get in the studio and start messing around. And that thread continues through all of our music. 

PG: That voice is very warm. Is it difficult to find a proper mix between electronic and acoustic sounds to get that voice? 

RG: I think that that’s one of the things that made us unique when we started. At that time, a lot of electronic music was either very cold or aggressive. We wanted to incorporate things that stylistically related more to the exotica era, loungy jazz, and the warmth of those sorts of things. We went back to some of the Verve records, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Claus Ogerman’s incredibly beautiful work with strings. We always loved the warmth of those recordings and tried to incorporate it into our sound.

PG: As far as that shifting role of electronics in music, in an interview in 1999, you and Eric expressed some animosity towards electronic music and made clear that Thievery Corporation is not electronic music. The landscape for electronic music has changed significantly over the last twenty-five years. Do you still have an aversion to the label “electronic music”?

RG: These days, I don’t have too much of an opinion on it because, ultimately, all music today is electronic music if you think about it. Back then, electronic music was only things done on a computer with a sampler or drum machine. Now, electronics are such an integral part of all music. I mean, you can argue that even modern country music is in some ways electronic because it is recorded on digital audio workspaces and things like that. 

But I think the whole idea of being able to just push a button to make music is coming soon. It is just around the corner when you see all these things happening with [Artificial Intelligence (AI)] making music that can sound like any style with only prompts. 

PG: But do you think AI can actually capture the personal emotions behind the music that the audience responds to? 

RG: Right. I think the one thing that makes music special is its soul. Look at music like the Blues. If a computer creates Blues music when it has never experienced the Blues, is it truly the Blues? No. I’m sure that’s the type of question – whether something is music or not-  that people will spend a lot of time arguing over. But for me, the music comes down to that soul and warmth. And that’s important to me during the process of creating music as well. 

PG: Where do samples fit into Thievery Corporation’s music? The group used to rely heavily on samples but no longer does so as much as it once did. 

RG: Yeah, we were influenced a lot by hip hop and trip hop, as it was called back in the mid-’90s. People were using a lot of samples and samplers. When we started, we didn’t really know what we were doing. We just kept going back to our record collections and taking little grooves and little bits. We would do things like take a snare drum from one record, add a kick drum from another, add a conga line from something else, and start to create textures and mosaics of all these different sounds. 

But as we got further into making our music, we started picking up instruments. I played some piano as a kid, studied music theory, and took a bunch of classes at a school for visual and performing arts where I grew up. So, playing instruments was not coming out of thin air.  As we felt more liberated to play around with different music equipment, it made us want to do it all ourselves. We also weren’t shy about calling up some very amazing jazz players in [Washington] DC to come into the studio and be part of what we were doing. 

PG: In terms of pulling together all the different sonic influences, do you ever have genres in mind while you’re composing? 

RG: Well, that can happen for individual songs. We will have ideas in terms of genre as we create a song. Actually, for the entire album as well. We form a general sense of the direction we generally want to go in terms of genre, even as we keep it all pretty open. So, as one example, we made Saudade (Eighteenth Street Lounge, 2014), because of our love for Bossa Nova. It has some jazz influence on it, as well. Actually, I think we will be doing a few songs from that album acoustically at Newport.

PG: To ask you about another genre influence on your work, you and Eric are both on record as having been into punk while growing up. How do you feel punk that can be heard in Thievery Corporation’s music? 

RG: Well, it’s interesting because sometimes influences don’t necessarily make themselves visible or audible through the music itself. But we certainly adopted a punk-like do-it-yourself attitude by starting our own record label and going on our own. We were influenced by many of the punk labels back in the day when we started doing that. So, the punk ethos has filtered into all of our ideas on how to create music and not be part of the major label system. Also, between making records or recording tracks, we would listen to a lot of old punk records and things like that. So, while the punk influence may not show up in the music, it’s still there as an inspiration. 

PG: Being from DC and into punk, was Fugazi much of an influence on you? Two of the musicians from that group – bassist Joe Lally and drummer Brendan Canty – will also be performing at Newport this summer as part of The Messthetics with James Brandon Lewis. 

RG: Fugazi was a big influence. I grew up in a smaller town outside of DC, and Fugazi came to play different venues when I was fifteen and sixteen. They were the band that showed Eric and me that we could make music without a typical major label. But we are also into Minor Threat for that as well.

PG: As far as going your own route, do you feel that having your own label behind all of your albums has allowed you to be outside of genre limitations in ways you would not if you were signed to a major label?

RG:  I think so. One of the things about being independent is that we have had autonomy to do whatever we like and to talk about all different types of topics. Nobody was breathing down our neck and telling us we needed to make hit songs, that the next single needed to be better than the last one, or anything like that. We have had a lot of space to create the music we wanted to make. 

PG: Thievery Corporation will turn thirty next year. How do you feel, especially since you both had full control over the band’s trajectory, that it has changed the most over the last three decades? 

RG: It’s grown a lot. When we first started, we had no idea that we would even be able to have a career in the music business. We felt like we were messing around and tinkering with all these electronic instruments. Now, it’s grown into something big. The biggest change is probably just in our mentality. Now, we are incredibly grateful to have a career that’s taken us all around the world and introduced us to so many different people and fans.  

PG: And in terms of traveling all over the world, Thievery Corporation has also borrowed ideas from music from all around the globe. Do you have any thoughts on the power of music to bring people together? 

RG: Definitely. And I think it’s something that you can see on stage. I can’t think of too many bands that play major festivals and have a sitar player. We also have a singer from Barcelona, Spain, and another from St. Thomas. People from all over are in the group.  You can see the full spectrum of different styles and music. Ans when you look back at the audience, you see diverse people there. We definitely feel the power of music to bring people together. 

Catch Rob Garza with Thievery Corporation at the Newport Jazz Festival on Saturday, August 3, 2024. More information on the Newport Jazz Festival can be found here. We will be providing live coverage of the event. You can read more about Rob Garza on his website or about Thievery Corporation on its site.