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New Orleans, LA, USA - This Reporter continues in one bad habit: I show up early. Nothing happens in New Orleans on time. The schedule for The Spotted Cat says the Hot Club of New Orleans plays at 10:00 p.m. on this Thursday night under the full moon. ("Blue Moon" the women in Taxco e-mail me.) This will be the first time I've heard the band, though I interviewed its informal "leader", Christopher Kohl, earlier in the day.I don't usually venture out on a Thursday night. I did this past Thursday, to hear the "get" band. These are the Dog Days, after all. Late August when most people in New Orleans leave this town. Including members of bands. One of the two guitars in the Hot Club is in Spain, the other is visiting Out East. I get to hear what's called "Hot Club 2".
The "official" Hot Club of New Orleans is Matt Rhody on violin and vocals, Peter Harris on bass, David Mooney on guitar and vocals, Todd Duke on guitar and Christopher Kohl on clarinet.
"Tight" is the right word for Hot Club of New Orleans. You hear this by the second song of their set. There's no winging it involved, no undisciplined riffing. It's arranged and almost orchestral in its precision. This band does syncopation like nobody's business, it's the kind of sound you'd expect emanating from a hip club on the upper West side of New York. Christopher Kohl's clarinet, an often overlooked and unappreciated instrument among too many jazz afficionados, reminds you what a sweet, wailing sound a good clarinet can make. Phenomenally, this is a band without a drummer. The bottom is completely laid down by Dave Harris's deft standup bass work. The dynamic of pairing the clarinet with violin, Matt Rhody's forte, makes for a unique sound that does indeed "gleam".You can buy their CD, we learn, from Tower Records in Japan, on indy music Web site CDBaby.com or from the Louisiana Music Factory site.
I met Christopher Kohl on Thursday afternoon at Monaghan's Molly's On The Market to talk about the special magic that's Hot Club of New Orleans. Right away he took off like a shot, verbally riffing about the origins of the band and the concepts that make it cohere.
G21: "Hot Club of New Orleans"; what's that about? How did you choose that name and what does it tell us about how you guys got started.
CHRISTOPHER KOHL: Well, we started out as a group of players who worked with other bands [who would get together when we were offf] having Saturday afternoon sessions in the kitchen. The name is owed to Django Rheinhart and his influence on some of our sound. Our violinist, Matt Rhody, is very influenced by the kinds of '30's Paris Swing that players like Django developed while playing at the Hot Club of Paris back then. It was something we all loved and wanted to pay homage to. It was our sayin', "Yeah! We'll play Django kind of stuff. Nobody's doing this here in New Orleans. You've got a lot of trad' going on, and the whole brass band scene, etc., etc., already . So we'll be different from the unusual New Orleans jazz stuff but go back to an older kind of playing with the kind of instrumentation and arranging you don't usually hear!"
When you listen to Rhody play, of course, you'll hear that Stephan Grapelli is another big influence on the Hot Club sound. We focus a lot more on the instrumentation involved than a lot of bands. And, I think what makes our sound unique is that we're two guitars, a violin, a bass and a clarinet -- no drums. You don't really see bebop bands play violin in front and have no drums. But Rhody's unique in that way He's done salsa on violin with players like Freddy Omar, Tres Amigos. Dave Mooney's a great guitarist who's worked with lots of other bands in this town. So I don't want to give the impression that we play just Django music, that's just a place we get started, part of the sound. The guys in this band have played with old New Orleans soul players, the jazz circuit, Latin. But we basically play bebop. Some people have criticized us about that, saying they expected to hear a real Gypsy jazz band. They say they feel "gypped" -- pardon my pun -- by our variety of music. But hey! You can't just play Django and act like the last fifty years of music never happened! You're influenced by all the sounds that have come out in that fifty years and you can't pretend that you're not. But we try to bring that same gypsy jazz spirit to what Hot Club is all about.
G21: Okay, I just got off the plane from Dusseldorf, what can I expect to hear if I show up at The Spotted Cat on Frenchmen Street on Thursday night to hear Hot Club?
CHRISTOPHER KOHL: Good question! One could say, I guess, that you'll hear hot, swinging jazz meant to remind you of the hot, fun sound produced by players like Eddie Condon, Django Rheinhart, Stephan Grapelli and Dizzie Gillespie. We try to bring some of the modern jazz sound in, but not the kind that you have to worship or be afraid of, but the kind that swings. We want our audiences to have fun with the music just like we do.
But keep in mind that with the exception of the clarinet, this band is all wood instruments, wood and strings. So that makes for a special kind of natural sound, especially in an intimate setting like the cat. Not that I have anything against amplification, when we play a large festival venue like JazzFest say we have to use it. But you get a completely different sound on acoustic instrumentation like ours when you can do it without amplification in a smaller room like The Spotted Cat. It sounds different, it resonates, if you know what I mean. And Hot Club just puts this kind of hot music in front you, even sneaking in the modern jazz.
That's why our arrangements are so important. Hot Club is not the kind of band where you do the trad' thing of just playing a tune everybody knows and make the melodies subordinate to the soloists. We don't do those kind of long, unrehearsed solos. We do music that's tightly arranged and rehearsed for the kind of effect we're after. That's what's important. We rehearse our music, which a lot of pickup bands or jam bands really do not that much. But for the Hot Club sound to work, it has to be meticulously rehearsed. So you'll hear that when you come out to hear Hot Club of New Orleans, too.
G21: Okay, you played JazzFest this year. Lots of people say that's the event to catch in New Orleans, despite the hype about Mardi Gras. Tell us what the JazzFest experience was like for Hot Club.
CHRISTOPHER KOHL: Well, first of all it's a festival setting. That makes it different from playing even a big room like say Tip's. [Tipitina's, a well-known New Orleans music venue.] Then there's the fact that when JazzFest came along, and we got the opportunity to play there, we'd been together about six months as Hot Club of New Orleans. So that made it exciting, yes. So the fact that we'd put that time and effort into arranging our music, and rehearsing it, meant that we could bring articulation and dynamics and melodies back in the front of our sound and our JazzFest performance.
That's important: getting back to the melodies of these songs is what Hot Club is all about. Instead of having the song subservient to the soloists, we make the soloists subservient to the song again. That makes for a tight sound that comes across with a nice gleam. It's difficult with some of these pieces not having a drummer but the rewards are dynamic. Peter Harris, our bass player, puts down the beat and basically leads where our arrangements go. Meanwhile one guitar takes over the traditional bass function while the other acts like a piano. That way the concentration and focus become on the group effort and the group sound as opposed to the individual efforts of the soloists.
So, getting back to your question, what was the JazzFest experience? Well, it's a festival. One of the bigger ones I know of, in fact. So you have to have amplification. Like most festivals, that means the first couple of songs don't come out with the clean sound you'd like to have. In our case, the first song of our set all you could hear was the bass. Everything's so rushed in a festival kind of setting. But by about the third song, the sound techs had made the adjustment we needed and we tried to give the audience a good show. It just one of the hazards of being a musician. It's all rushed and you're trying to show people a good time! A great time! So it went fine for us. Once we got going there were no train wrecks --- as far as I know. [Laughs.] It was a sunny day, there was beer and "a good time was had by all."
G21: Okay, let's go from a mammoth venue like JazzFest to a cozier setting like The Spotted Cat. You play there every week, so I have to assume you like it. What's it like playing at The Spotted Cat? Why does Hot Club do it?
CHRISTOPHER KOHL: We like it. We like smaller venues. Ideally, we prefer to play without amplification at all and The Spotted Cat lets us do that. Places like The Spotted Cat and dba [another Frenchmen Street club] are good acoustic places to play. The glass windows in front of The Cat, where our bass player normally stands? They act like a diaphragm and project the sound.
And The Cat's about the right size... a little small, but that makes it more intimate. What's more important for us is the quality versus the quantity. Sure we can make a lot more money in larger places, but the reward for us is having twenty or fifty people who are really listening as opposed to a crowd of 300 people milliing around yakking. We get to play within a dynamic range where our instrumentation resonates and reaches that "sweet spot." It's intriguing to notice the drastic difference in our sound when we don't have to use amplification. It's just more natural and The Spotted Cat is perfect for that.
It's also a hang. You see all your friends, other musicians wander in who might be playing at another one of the clubs on Frenchmen, or who just might be around. So there's that social function about playing the place, too, versus what happens in a concert performance. You get to see all your friends.
[Laughs.] The truth is every Thursday morning I say, "I'm going to go home early tonight. When we finish playing, one or one-thirty, I'm going home." Five a.m. rolls around that night and I'm still talking and hanging out! You take a break and you see other people, or slip down the street for ten minutes to hear what your friends are playing --- the next thing you know it's five in the morning!
You see Frenchmen Street is the New Orleans venue of 2002. You've got the top jazz club on that block. You've got three or four other places playing everything from jazz to latin to reggae, a little blues. You've got real change going on in that little 2-4 block strip there. I wouldn't say that it's 52nd Street like that one guy in your last article because nothing can compare to that scene. It's legendary and I wouldn't be so arrogant as to compare ourselves to those legends. But there's definitely something going on there on Frenchmen right now. It's got a diversity and quality that makes it a great place for musicians to hang out right now.
G21: Well, Chris, thanks for your time and sharing it with The World's Magazine.
Next time in Nouvelle New Orleans JAMIE MENUTIS interviews New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin.
© 2002, GENERATOR 21.
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