Courtesy of Sex Mob





Knitting Factory

A FIRESIDE CHAT WITH STEVEN BERNSTEIN OF SEX MOB

When I think of interesting (and note) groups of today, I think Chicago Underground Trio (or Duo), Masada, Dave Holland's quintet, and Sex Mob. Steven Bernstein has one dandy collective. It would be a grave injustice for me to sit here and harp about them or tell you to go buy their records and that would give you a taste of what they do. The only thing that I can recommend is to see Sex Mob and Bernstein live and in person. Then you will truly understand the definition of what I mean when I say interesting. Hopefully, the following conversation will make you want to get off your ass and lay down some cash for one of their shows. If I can get one person, then my work is done here. Two and we have a crowd and five, well, that is a groundswell and I can die a happy camper. Enjoy it. It is good stuff and even better reading, all unedited and in his own words.

FRED JUNG: Let's start from the beginning.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: I started in fourth grade. I went to a slide show of all the different instruments. At that time, that is when Louis Armstrong had the hit, "Hello Dolly." I remember seeing him on TV a lot and thinking, you know when you are kid, you know what adults are bullshit, what adults are cool. Somehow I just kind of saw this guy, I mean we had music in my house, but not tons, we always had good records, but I said this guy has something that's real. I knew he played the trumpet, so when they said, "You want to play an instrument?" I said, "Yeah, I want to play the trumpet." That was in Boston and the next year, in fifth grade, we moved to Berkeley and that is where the famous jazz program that Peter Affelbaum, Rodney Franklin, Benny Green, Josh Redman, David Ellis, Craig Handy, Charlie Hunter, lots and lots of people, a lot of people that people don't even know about.

FJ: Good program.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Yeah, great program. He basically had improvising. He had jazz bands for fourth and fifth graders. If I was in fourth grade than I would have been in fourth grade, but I moved in when I was in fifth grade, so in fifth grade, I started improvising and playing jazz. I was into it. I remember even being in fifth grade and buying records and playing along, trying to figure out like Louis Armstrong songs. My dad had this Gerry Mulligan record called If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em. You know those Limelight records that used to open up? It had all these pages on the inside and so it was like a book. It was one of those and it was orange. It was called If You Can't Beat 'em, Join 'em. He did a bunch of pop tunes on it and one of the songs he did was "King of the Road." So I learned that song and I learned "Basin Street Blues" by Louis Armstrong. Peter Affelbaum, I started playing with him. I guess at the end of sixth grade, I played my first gig with him. We had a band that gigged and at seventh grade we were playing gigs and going to clubs and stuff. That was kind of a jazz-rock type of band. Then we heard the Art Ensemble and then we had a band that was more like an improvising style band. We used to rehearse, just improvising for hours. We had a band that just played improvisations in high school kind of based on the Art Ensemble.

FJ: What was it about the Art Ensemble?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Well, the thing about the Art Ensemble, Fred, was it affected a lot of people in my generation and a generation that was a little older that heard them live. It was so much about the time. It was so relevant to the time. It was a real time of change in America and they were this band that played all this wild music and it had a real sense of humor and real theatrical, but it felt like jazz. Even though a lot of those guys, not all of them, Lester, obviously was a super jazz guy, those guys, they weren't trained as a bebop or swing musician. They were trained to play new music, improvisation, a different style. It wasn't swing improvisation. It was a new kind of jazz like post-Coltrane, but it had that feeling of jazz when they played. It felt like the way it felt like to live. There were always elements of life in there with the African drums and these really abstract pieces that were played in unison, beautiful ballads, and these really swinging grooves. You can't really see why something really touches you. I totally remember the first time, being up in Peter's room and he played me Bap-tzium, the live record and I just remember hearing it. I can totally remember. I can remember hearing Lester and going, "Wow." It was so funny because all of my trumpet teachers and stuff, guys who were like straighter, a lot of them weren't really digging the Art Ensemble that much, but they all said that, "That guy Lester is great. He's a great trumpet player." Something that a lot of people from older generations, they couldn't get was the fact that those guys weren't swing saxophone players. They are great saxophone players. Roscoe Mitchell was a virtuoso, but he wasn't a swing saxophone player and the same with Joseph. They were really approaching it from a completely different standpoint than swing music.

FJ: When did you pick up roots from Berkeley and venture into New York?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: I moved there basically as soon as high school was done. Actually, we went on a tour with our group. It was a four-piece group and the alto player quit in the middle of the tour. He didn't want to be a musician. He wanted to go to college. I can't remember if he left after a few gigs or before the tour, but I know that we ended as a trio. We played in like Woodstock in New York and we were like eighteen years old, playing all this music based on the Art Ensemble. I came home to music camp for a couple of months and went to college. I was going to Columbia. I moved there in '79, but I already knew a bunch of people in New York. Man, from the very get go, I was already, that summer when I had been in New York, I met Joe Bowie and those guys and I was going to Sun Ra every weekend. I was really into the loft jazz scene. By that point, the lofts weren't really happening, but the theater was happening on 23rd Street and the public theater was doing great shows. You could see Joe Henderson one week. You could hear Sam Rivers play with his electric band. I heard Don Cherry. There were some great gigs there.

FJ: As a rule, everyone is a product of their environment. Growing up in the big band and swing era makes it logical for Miles Davis to be playing bebop. For people in our generation who grew up on a steady feeding of rock, it seems inconceivable to expect a musician of our time to be playing bebop or a spin-off like post-bop or hard bop.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Oh, yeah. Of course. The thing was, Fred, I was never really loft guy. I had listened to jazz since I was a kid, but what did you hear, all those songs that I played. I read reviews and some people think I am doing them tongue and cheek, but, no, I am doing them because they are great melodies. Every song I play is a great melody and that is why I play it. If you look at the history of the music, all people ever played were songs with great melodies. And they weren't jazz songs until they made jazz songs out of them. When Louis Armstrong played "Big Butter and Egg Man," "Big Butter and Egg Man" was a Vaudeville song. Every song that Lester Young played was like a Tin Pan Alley song. "I Cover the Waterfront," that was not a jazz song.

FJ: Miles Davis with show tunes.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Yeah, and like have you heard the original "All the Things You Are?" It is like the corniest song you have ever heard in your life. The thing is because, Miles like playing "Surrey with the Fringe on Top." When I first started listening to music, I didn't know. I figured they were all jazz tunes. I thought "Surrey with the Fringe on Top" was a Miles Davis tune. Was it from Oklahoma or something like that?

FJ: Right, Oklahoma.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: I had no idea. I just thought it was like a Miles Davis tune. I was in tenth grade the first time that I heard that record and so I had no idea. I figured it was Miles and Coltrane, "Surrey with the Fringe on Top." I remember this lady one time was like, "That song is from Oklahoma." And I was like, "What are you talking about, that song is from Oklahoma? That song is Miles Davis." "No, it's from Oklahoma." And the thing is, Fred, if you play music like that, that people know, that's why it's jazz because you use it as a launching point and people have a reference point, so as you play your jazz extractions on it, they have a reference point. I think what happened was that people started doing more and more original compositions, they started to lose people because people come in and they don't even know what they are listening to. I kind of realize that when I meet all these young people who love music. I mean, I'm talking about fanatics and a lot of them go, "Oh, I don't really like jazz." I go, "Why?" And they're like, "Well, it is one melody then everyone takes a solo and they play the melody again. It's boring." If you hear, like on the first record (Din of Inequity), no song goes melody, solo, solo, melody. I really purposefully like tried to maybe start a song with a solo and you start a song with an intro or the second solo is in a different tempo. People always go, "Oh, Sex Mob is just wild. It's a bunch of drunken guys having fun." Well, there is that to it, but I don't try to present the music as an intellectual exercise. There is a lot of fun there. The difference between Sex Mob and lots of other bands is that most people prefect their music in a rehearsal and then they present it to an audience. We've never had a rehearsal. We always had weekly gigs and so you just play in front of an audience and they will let you know if this works or it doesn't work.

FJ: Instant feedback.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Right, and so you know, oh, this happens here and this draws people in and if this doesn't happen here, you lose people and it is not as simple as a bass solo will lose people. Well, what is happening in that bass solo? Does it have a background to it? Does it have a tempo change? Is there a change in timbre? Anything can draw people in. There just needs to be something there to draw people in.

FJ: You have to give it up for that kind of ballsy approach to hang it in the wind like that?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: The thing is too, Fred, having it down doesn't mean, someone said to me, "Oh, that arrangement was great. Are you going to do it like that again?" I was like, "I don't know. We might try to do it like that again and it might not work." Last night was just wild and all these things happened that never happened. That audience made those things happen because they were so psyched and you could just hit a certain groove and you would watch their movements move. It was like a choreographed dance with hundreds of people.

FJ: Do you prefer that, playing outside what is commonly perceived as a jazz club?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: I never play jazz clubs. I've never actually played a jazz club, really. I have played for years and I have actually never ever played in a jazz club. I've never played Vanguard. I've never played Basil. And I make a good living. I own a house and have two cars and all that stuff. I've never played a jazz club. I'd like to play a jazz club, but I've never really had the opportunity to. I do play clubs sometimes where people are sitting down, but there are even rock clubs where people are sitting down. The thing is, if people are standing, then they can move. Also, it depends on what night of the week it is. Maybe Tuesday night, people shouldn't be standing. They've been working all day and they want to sit down on a Tuesday. So it really depends on the environment. We did this concert at this art center in Columbia, South Carolina and it was this beautiful building, like a loft or a warehouse, where they had redone it. Man, it was a sit down concert. There were some young punker kids dancing in the back, but it was this really cool mixed audience of young, old, black, white, and it was a great concert. We had been playing all rock clubs before then and we could do all these really subtle things and people could hear them. There are certain timbres and certain devices that only work in either situation. They both have really good things happening with them.

FJ: You have been in New York since Michael Dorf opened the Knitting Factory, gage the impact that the venue's had.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: First of all, it gave people a place to play. Michael Dorf is my age and he was a guy you could talk to. To be honest, there has always been a lot of controversy about Michael and it is sort of a big story at this point, but Michael was the first person that offered me a gig as a leader. He offered me. He asked me. He was like, "Steve, you have been playing here all the time with different projects. What do you want to do? Tell me what you want to do and I will book it." He was that kind of guy. There are many sides to him, but that is one side to him. How many people are going to be like that? Come up to you and say, "Figure out what you want to do. You should do a gig as a leader." It was very different because at traditional jazz clubs, people played for a week. At Knit, you didn't even have a night. You had one set because they were presenting two shows a night and so you had to figure out something that really worked for like one hours worth of music, or an hour and fifteen minutes of music. You had to figure out different ways to present music and it gave everyone a place to come. Especially in the early days, it was really a community type of thing. We were all younger too. None of us had, well, most of us, Frisell already had a daughter, but he was more established, but most of us didn't have kids. You got done with a recording session and afterwards you would come to the Knitting Factory and have a drink with friends and hang out. Then they started their record label and they started their European tours and it really helped spread things a lot. They've been a real champion of the music.

FJ: As much as Dorf and the music have been maligned - avant-garde, free, or downtown - there is no denying that it has brought a very young and enthusiastic, almost fanatically loyal following of college age devotee to the music.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Exactly, and plus, the Knitting Factory gives people like me a place to come hear a jazz show and feel comfortable. I've never even felt that comfortable going to jazz clubs because of the way I dress and the way I look. I'm kind of like a freak, well, not a freak, but compared to like those guys who are just so straight there.

FJ: Well, most New York clubs are frequented by tourists or businessmen impressing clients.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Exactly, it's tourists and pretty conservative people there. When you are in your twenties and you are just experimenting with life, of course, the edge is a little bit. You may have been up for two days or something. You are unshaven. I would just never feel comfortable going to a jazz club. My clothes weren't ever good enough. The thing is too, those clubs are so expensive and for one set of music. I remember one time, I had to see Cyrus (Cyrus Chestnut) because we were doing something with Kansas City and I had to go down. I was on the list and went down and I was thinking, "God, if I paid to see this, I would have ended up paying thirty-five bucks to hear Cyrus play like an hours worth of music." I dig Cyrus, but.

FJ: Well, shit, thirty-five bucks for a starving student is financially out of the question.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: I know. Oh, yeah. Like at Tonic, we charge five bucks. And we just raised the price to five dollars. We used to charge four dollars. My whole thing was four dollars, you have a five, you get change. Have ten bucks and you could buy a beer and maybe even two beers and have enough to buy a beer on the way home. And the thing is, hopefully, young people come and hear us and they get exposed to other music and be more interested and say, "Maybe, I will check out Duke Ellington and check out Sun Ra."

FJ: That trickle down theory really plays out nicely. People go to hear Sex Mob or Medeski Martin and Wood and then make their way to Sun Ra and perhaps Mingus or some late Coltrane and before you know it, they are digging on Miles or Monk.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Yeah, that is hopefully what happens. Like on Medeski Martin and Wood's new record, they have Hamiet Bluiett and Marshall Allen.

FJ: The follow up to the recently released Tonic recording that should be out in the fall.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Right, not the acoustic one. I think that this is so great that all these Medeski Martin and Wood fans are going to own records with Hamiet and Marshall on it and maybe they will go buy a World Saxophone Quartet record after that.

FJ: Let's touch on the release on Columbia, Din of Inequity, bold move for a Sex Mob record to come out on the same label that carries such hype machines as Mariah Carey and Ricky Martin.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Actually, it was a typical corporate thing where a guy, whose name, I won't use any of the names, but there was a guy at Columbia jazz who was pretty forward thinking and he had cut a deal with the Knitting Factory. It was kind of a brilliant deal. Columbia jazz loses tons of money. Columbia sells nothing.

FJ: They do next to no promotion behind it, in comparison to Blue Note or Verve, so how can you expect to sell records when no one knows about the damn artist.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Well, not only that, but they pay millions of dollars to people like Wynton and Branford and those guys don't sell records. I hate to say it because they're both great figures and they're both great musicians, but the same way that I would say if it was my record, it's like, let's put it this way, Fred. Jeff Watts, they spent ten thousand dollars on his photo shoot.

FJ: Fuck.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: And Jeff Watts probably sold two thousand records. God only knows how much they spent on the record. They spent ten thousand on the photo shoot. OK, so anyway, here's the deal, so this guy who is working for Columbia decides to get together a deal with Michael and that is that they would have a shared label, which means that if Columbia had something that they wanted to sign, but they felt like wasn't ready for Columbia, the Knitting Factory would be like a farm label for them and if the Knitting Factory found something really, really good and they felt like it was ready for the world, they could put it out on Columbia. This deal got signed and of course Michael Dorf's lawyers are brilliant. They signed a deal that, people are horrified by this deal. No one can believe that Michael suckered Columbia like this. He got so much money out of Columbia. Well, that guy gets fired.

FJ: Wonder why.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Right, a new guy comes in and this guy looks at the Knitting Factory deal and he goes, "This is bullshit. Michael Dorf just totally fucked Columbia. I don't want anything to do with this." But legally, he's got to put out one record, so they basically, I knew this was going to happen, even if they didn't like the music on the Sex Mob record, it is the only one that sounded like a professional recording because Knitting Factory records have a tiny budget and most of them sound like they were recorded in someone's bathroom on their tape recorder. I just knew that the fact that you could put the CD on and it sounded like a professionally made CD, that alone would get us in there. So basically, that is what happened. It was really weird. It was embarrassing. The deal was really hush hush. This guy hated Michael and he hated the whole deal. They gave the promo money to the Knitting Factory and Columbia would give us no tour support, no nothing. And Knitting Factory wouldn't give us tour support because it wasn't their record. It was Columbia's record. It is slowly selling some numbers. At this point, it has sold as many records as a Blue Note record that gets good publicity. Because we've like toured and got the music out there, it is starting to sell copies.

FJ: And the new record, which is actually on the Knitting Factory label, Solid Sender.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: A lot of bands tour behind a record and they are playing the same music all the time. We just started playing different music immediately. We have so much music that hasn't been recorded that we were really lucky. There is tons of songs on this. There are probably too many songs on it anyway, but I just felt like all the people who have been coming to see us for two years, they should have those songs they've been hearing and also, I wanted to record them so I could stop doing them and do new songs. I think the record came out great. All the guys in the band were like, "Oh, it's not going to be as good as the first record." But I was like, "Don't worry. You don't realize how good this is." The first record was kind of an intense record.

FJ: What tends to piss me off is that there are critics out there, who shall remain nameless, who blow it off simply because of every possible kind preconceived stigma or bias they may have.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: That is exactly it, Fred. We were talking about the fact that even when people liked it, they never really talked about the actual playing. Like, they don't talk about the playing like they would on a jazz record, but meanwhile, I got like the best players in the world in my band. You could just talk about the level of playing, but you know what, it is like they don't know how to hear it yet. Those older guys, and I don't mean just in age, I mean older in the way they think about things, they don't know how to listen to this kind of music yet. It is still foreign to them. Maybe when another generation of musicians start to play more music, they will figure out how to listen to it. But they don't know how to get the music. They are so like shocked by it still and they think that it is supposed to be shock value or it is supposed to be tongue and cheek. It is not done to shock anyone. This is the way we play music. This is the way my generation plays music. Us, honestly playing our instruments the way we feel like it, just like the way Lester Young played it the way he did. Bird played it the way he did. I don't compare myself to them as instrumentalists, but I compare myself to them as someone who makes music. People who do it their own way, like Bird, people didn't like Bird at first. People didn't like Lester Young. People didn't like Dizzy Gillespie.

FJ: People hated Coltrane.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: People hated Coltrane! The thing is, eventually, people get used to it. Now, you hear Dizzy and it's like, "Oh, yeah, Dizzy." But in the beginning, it is like, "Why is the guy playing the trumpet like that? Why can't he just play quarter notes?"

FJ: You used DJ Logic, whom I consider a musician.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: He is not just a musician. He's a great musician. He is really intuitive. He is one of those people who knows how to give you the right support. He supports the music around him. He doesn't grandstand. He is listening and supporting things.

FJ: Sex Mob and this resurgence in the progressive movement, it has brought the college age crowd back to jazz.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: That is the whole point. Aside from the fact that I think those are the people who are out there exploring themselves and exploring the world. The reality is that those are the people who listen to music. People in their thirties and forties, they stay at home or they go to fancy dinners and buy one Josh Redman record a year. I'm talking about people who buy every Bjork record, every Tricky record. Every time a new deejay comes out, someone they have never heard of, they are going to buy that. Those are the people I'm interested in. That's the way I am. I'm a music fan. The thing is to me, that is what it's about. It is about being passionate about the music. It is one thing to be passionate about jazz, but personally, I feel a little bit uncomfortable of people who are passionate about jazz and not passionate about music. It is like jazz or nothing else. It's like music is music. And what do you mean by jazz? Now, it is different because Wynton has made it really popular to play in an older style, but it used to be people played and older style and they would say, "Oh, man, what are you doing? You play like an old man." They would play like Freddie Hubbard did with Art Blakey as if that was hip. That is hip, except that music is forty years old. Freddie was playing like that in 1960. If Freddie in 1960 was playing a style forty years in the past, he would have been playing like Freddie Keppard (cornet player in the Twenties). So if you think playing bebop is hip dude, there would have never been a hard bop because those guys would have still been playing like Freddie Keppard. They weren't. They were pushing it somewhere else.

FJ: Is that was motivate you, to push the music forward?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Yeah, of course, because that is the whole thing. The whole thing about music is communication. It is not about me. It is about communication. It is about how you guys feeling this. It is not about how slick am I playing. Anyone can stay at home and play slick. It is like, does this mean anything to anybody?

FJ: Sex Mob, like Medeski Martin and Wood, is such a touring band.

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Fred, we played in Oklahoma City.

FJ: Who plays there?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: No one. A guy came up to me and said, "I've got to be honest, nobody plays here." We played in San Antonio, Texas. It was so intense. And all the people are people who find out about us through the internet because you can't get records like we make there. They don't carry it at the stores. You have to be on the internet looking for new music. I always wondered why they put those things on CDs, if you like this then you will like this. Well, for all those people who don't like in urban centers, that is how they are going to find out about music.

FJ: So the internet is a tool that jazz should embrace?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Yeah, without a doubt. It is spreading the music. I am not one of those people who feels like, "Oh, they are stealing it from the record companies." The record companies are stealing it from us. To be honest, everyone is really upset about the whole jazz scene because no one is selling any records right now. You know what? That is cool with me because I sell as much records as a young star on Verve or Blue Note. I feel like it is a level playing field. Now, it is not what record company is pumping money into you. It is like, what are you delivering to people and do they like it? A lot of times, I hear people say like, "Man, that audience just wasn't swinging." Well, maybe you weren't swinging.

FJ: What is on the table for Sex Mob?

STEVEN BERNSTEIN: Well, we already have another hours worth of music that we recorded in December and January. Twenty minutes of music for a play, a Mae West play called Sex and it is like Sex Mob playing in a Twenties style. It is really cool. It totally sounds like Sex Mob, but this play was written in 1926 and they needed something because they didn't want it to sound like Twenties music because it is a modern production. It has got this really great flavor. And then we recorded about forty minutes of music for the Donald Byrd Dance Company with Duke Ellington music. Oh, dude, Donald Byrd is a great choreographer and he actually is doing a show with Max Roach, Vernon Reid, and Geri Allen. They are doing that live, but this was recorded music. It was in three parts. The first part was solo piano. The second part was Sex Mob and the third part was the Duke Ellington Orchestra. That stuff came out outrageous and so I think what we are going to do is we are going to put out either through the Knitting Factory or through ourselves. It will be a release of this music. And we will make the next record in whenever. We will get this one out and we'll see what's happening.

Fred Jung is Jazz Weekly's Editor-In-Chief and member of the elite Navy SEALS. Comments?  Email Fred.