The Interviews

 

Tonight, Carlo Rossi & The Organic Jam will step on stage with one DJ, some samples and an 

orchestra. There's no score, and no one has any idea what they'll be playing. 

 

Tim Richards tells us about the ultimate improv gig

 

Five years on, Carlo Rossi & The Organic Jam look like a prescient outfit. But in late 2005, just before the internet started to siphon off record industry profits, forming a band and announcing that you intended to write no tunes, have no rehearsals, and not make or sell any recordings struck many people as, well, a pretty dumb move. Something must have gone very right, though, because after a supposedly one-off gig five years ago, The Organic Jam have appeared in a list of top clubs & events, notching up a ridiculous amount of gigs (over 1000!)  with a client list that gets longer and more international by the year. 


Tonight, they'll be upping the ante as they'll be headlining the Royal Academy's biggest party of the year: Carlo Rossi will collaborate with Sarah Mallock, electric violinist of and strings arranger of Morcheeba and Adele www.sarahviolin.com, Trumpet virtuoso Andy Davies - resident and host of Wednesday eves at  Ronnie Scotts', Tello Morgado from Groove Armada, Faithless, Defected Records and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra's Anna Croad with her Blue Topaz Orchestra in an entirely spontaneous performance.


But how is a band that improvises two-hour sets of continuous dance music going to work with a DJ - not to mention an orchestra of additional brass, woodwind and string players? It comes down to technology. As The Organic Jam play, Rossi will respond by layering samples for the orchestra using a midi-controller and a computer program called Ableton. As the Organic Jam's percussionist Tello Morgado puts it, as a working method, it is "totally liberating. And scary as hell." 
"The important thing about the way we improvise," says DJ/ samples/effects player Carlo Rossi, "is that it's not 'free' in the sense of one guy doing a mad solo while the others step back. It is very groove-based, and group-voiced. We want a sense of structure and organization, but for none of the parts to be pre-prepared. We want to be the improvisor of the orchestra."

We got all this started with Carlo in 2005, says Mallock - a session violinist who has worked with big names including Madonna, Jay Z and Oasis - from a feeling that live skills were slipping down the list of priorities. "I just felt that a lot of the important values were being lost in the music business - principally that of people coming together and everyone bringing something to the table. This was very much prior to the recent resurgence in bands. It was about putting the sense of performance back in - and that wasn't happening in electronic music."

"The irony", says Rossi (who has released two monumental albums under Organic Records), is that now, "it's practically impossible to make a living from sales, so people are signing deals with the labels on the basis of projected revenue from live appearances. If you look at the whole history of music, the recorded medium is a little blip. It's the aberration. The bulk of it is musicians performing to people, whether for a community function, telling tales, religion or just pleasure. So in a sense we're traditionalists. It's not radical. Improvising lends itself to the step-by-step, loop-based world of dance music, and the band work at giving their sound the production values of dance records, rather than acoustic instruments copying electronic music forms. Lyndsay Evans, for instance, plays mostly electronic pads, and uses a tai-chi inspired technique that expends the smallest possible amount of energy - hence her ability to hold down hours of live club beats."


Rossi and Mallock also think of the music as disposable. There are free MP3s on the band website/blog page, but they are meant to be tasters, or souvenirs for people who have been at a particular night. Given that they are used to getting feedback in the form of dancing, doesn't the event space or major Art galleries, where people's expectations may be different to those of clubbers, daunt them?
"God, yeah," says Rossi, "when we first begun i couldn't distract them with moving their feet. This was so unusual for me as i'd spent 8 years performing at 6 in the morning to crazed dancers in the underground scene. Perhaps dancing is the equivalent, in comedy improvisation, of laughter, and we were teetering in the in between. But then something began to happen, my nervousness in terms of being scrutinized for an act that was more performance art and not dance floor disappeared as we began turning our events into dance floors without the audience ever expecting it, we knew that this was our breakthrough and kinda ran with it from there."

The musicians may be more used to the concert hall or festival stage, but live, high-speed improvising and arranging is surely a step outside their comfort zones. "There's an element of danger, that's for sure," says Davies. "It's scary, but I'm looking forward to it. I think what we do will affect how The Organic Jam play - maybe look to make fewer changes, use more loops on the fly,  let the musicians go in tangents, or perhaps evolve the music more gradually" 
"Who knows, oneday i thought of learning to play woodwind without anyone knowing - Halfway through, we'll swap." says Tamar Osborn www.myspace.com/tamaros, one of the guest musicians.


The Organic Jam players come from the top of their fields and from a a variety of backgrounds (jazz, classical, folk), and are determined to prove that being an orchestra, a jazzer and reading scores doesn't have to mean you are tied to a past of classical or jazz form.  Rossi, no stranger to conceptual thinking - he's a graduate of Central/St Martins School of Art explains "They can improvise as well as read the dots - so I'm hoping they will add their personality and ideas to the parts, for an electronic music lover and event organizer my friends and i were beginning to be so bored of live acts turning up with a laptop and pretending to be working it." Rossi says his main preparation has been to practice Ableton, so he can work the program fast enough.


The Organic Jam have two simple principles to get this kind of music to work. One is to always do less, rather than keep adding. "It's a confidence thing, to learn to step away from it. Literally, just drop out, and it will sound better," says Rossi. "The most important thing is not to be afraid to bin something if it is not working. After all, that's a luxury that most bands don't have on the spur of the moment." 

But how important is it for the audience to know the music is spontaneous? 
"I've always been in love with improvised film and music... it's a bit like watching an Elia Kazan or a Mike Leigh film, or even the TV show Curb Your Enthusiasm," says Rossi. "There is a huge amount of improvisation in there, but I didn't realize it at first. After knowing that, somehow it makes it special and much more interesting."

"Yeah, but you want them to like it because it sounds good," says Mallock. "You don't want charity for the process, people saying: 'Hmm, this unlistenable rubbish is great because it is improvised.'"
Most importantly, "it's about putting ourselves on the line," says Rossi. "It's about chaos." 
"You certainly never get bored doing this," adds Mallock. "Remember the time we pitched up in Dubai for a gig? Who'd have thought we'd be playing on the beach, rebounding the sound from our instruments off the glass walls of the hotel to hear what each other was playing, and end up playing in the sea."


People they would rather share a bill with include Underworld, Trentemoller and Radiohead - but it certainly looks like they have not such a bad winter ahead as they plan to be playing in an inflatable white cube for 6 weeks next to the Serpentine Gallery with visuals by Soitchi Matsumoto, who is the video artist behind Talvin Singh. Perhaps they could do a bespoke performance to match each band they appear with. "Yes, we could be like the Marlon Brando of bands," says Rossi, "fitting the contours of every age!"

TERENCE CONRAN'S QUAGLINO’S IN CONVERSATION...

To get the Autumn season of Q Cocktail Club on Thursday nights off to a bang; The Organic Jam will be our resident act for Thursday nights starting from Thursday 11th August to get us warmed up for the start of the new season. We caught up with the man behind The Organic Jam - Carlo Rossi to tell us a bit more about Thursday nights at Quaglino's.

Q: Carlo, you have played at many wonderful parties and events over the years from the China White tent at the Cartier Polo to London Fashion Week . How did you come up with the concept of The Organic Jam?

C: I've always had a love for improvising when it comes to music, art and film. Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time deeply immersed in DJing in the electronic music scene; I became disenchanted with seeing so many live acts perform with one man and a laptop pressing a key once every few minutes and it made me really push my ideas of how live electronic music could be performed while being spontaneous and entertaining at the same time.

I grew up in a jazz club which my parents owned in a sleepy town by the beach and every once in a while one of the greats of jazz would pop through the door and it was here where I fell in love for the first time with musicians creating something totally unique for that one moment in time. Hence the start of The Organic Jam.

Q: Who and what inspires you to create your fun and electric vibe of music?

C: My biggest inspirations come from hearing two or more genres colliding with each other where the music becomes something new. Bands like Noze, Matias Aguayo, Dop, Audiojack and labels Circus Company and Get Physical Music are doing something really special at the moment as they mix Balkan, Brazilian, African and disco melodies and instrumentation over intricate house rhythms. However I’ve always admired Herbie Hancock,  Thelonious Monk,  Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, Sarah Vaughn and especially Miles Davis as he always made jazz exciting and new. He lead jazz through so many different periods and made albums that really connected with people all over the world.

Q: What attracted you to want to be Quaglino’s resident DJ for Thursday nights?

C: Quaglino's has always had a history of great jazz being played by many of the best jazz players in the UK, numerous being guest musicians from the legendary Ronnie Scotts. Having such a rich history in music as well as being an iconic Terence Conran venue, when I was approached with the concept that they wanted me to take jazz and reinterpret it into a future form I couldn't resist... how could I say 'no'!

Q: What can we expect from The Organic Jam at Quaglino's for the Autumn Season?

C: One of the biggest aspects of what makes The Organic Jam really work is in the quality of the musicians that I’ve been so fortunate to play with. I always wanted to make The Organic Jam a talent pool for the best up and coming jazzers as well as the most prolific musicians working in the UK. This upcoming season at Quaglino's, every week we'll have special guest musicians, many from some of the biggest jazz/electronic bands touring the UK. I look forward to seeing you all there!

The Organic Jam is headed up by established DJ/producer/music director Carlo Rossi, who plans to work with an impressive selection of guest artists over the coming weeks. Already confirmed to appear are trumpet player Ben Edwards (Mark Ronson, Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada), electro-violinist Sarah Mallock (Adele, Madonna, Jay Z, Oasis) and Annie Davies, host and co-ordinator of the legendary Wednesday nights at Ronnie Scott's.

The bar is open until 1am on Monday - Thursday evenings and until 3am on Friday and Saturdays making it the ideal place for a late night drink. For more information on The Organic Jam at Quaglino’s on Thursday nights please contact Georgia on 020 7484 2005 or email georgiaa@dandlondon.com