HT: Switching gears to Medeski Martin and Wood, it seems like you guys have reached a comfort zone now where you are touring as MMW less than you used to, but because of where you are in your careers, that makes sense. Accurate?
BM: Yeah, I think. We’re trying to preserve the quality of the music and to do that you grow together and separately. It’s always been our accepting rule to play with other people and let those things envelop us, so that when we play together, we have stronger outside influences, too. We also know that there’s a burnout factor of working too much together. We’re in our twenty-first year together, and we’re being very careful not to overbook ourselves.
Chris is devoting a lot of time to his brother [Oliver] and the Wood Brothers, and I think because we’ve always talked about doing other things and how important that is, he finally did decide, yes, I want to do this other project. So we’re all forced to stand behind what we’ve been saying for years [laughs] and take more space, partially because he is so busy now with the Wood Brothers. But John and I have other things. John is at work on a solo record and working with Cindy Blackman and Spectrum Road. I’ve got Wil, and Wicked Knee, and I’m scoring a film right now — my first film score — and I do a lot of visual arts.
All of it feeds back into MMW. We’re in this family, we’re brothers who get together and sort of come back refreshed after going out to visit other people and doing other things. We’re preserving that, and I feel that over the past year or two, the performances have been stronger because they’ve been fresh. We’ll do two weeks, and then maybe we won’t see each other for a month or two.
This fall, we’re going to do an acoustic piano tour and release a record from when we [last] did an acoustic piano tour — we’re just compiling it now. We’ll release that in October and there’ll be tunes people know and some that they kind of won’t.
[EDITOR’S NOTE – The fall acoustic tour has just been announced]
HT: Excellent. I know a lot of fans have been wondering if you guys will do that kind of acoustic run again.
BM: Good to hear. I’m excited.
HT: I wanted to ask you about one recent gig in particular, and that was the May show you guys did during the Undead Festival at Brooklyn’s Masonic Temple with all the special guests. Seems like it went really well and could have been chaotic and messy, too. Was it fun?
BM: Oh yeah. It was a new idea. The promoter had seen a gig that John and I had done with Trevor Dunn at this John Zorn marathon at Lincoln Center. They had asked us if we could do it and Chris couldn’t make it, so we said what about Medeski Martin and Dunn? He jumped right on that, doing music that MMW had zone and also some things from Tzadik releases.
It wasn’t a bad idea: we could try something new, and was also a way to celebrate with our friends. So we get together with musicians we want to play with and it ended up being a celebration with some of our favorite people both replacing us and sitting it as guests. I thought it was great, and it was a great turnout.
HT: You do see these types of shows from time to time that also serve as cool reminders of what the downtown scene was like, all that collaboration. Curious to your thoughts about what happened to that scene — whether it went away or just shifted? Seems like a lot of the important people are still around even if the venues aren’t.
BM: That’s a good question. Some of the icons of the scene are still around, and still in New York, and still doing it. We’re all getting a little older, but there also doesn’t seem to be a shortage of people coming in from all corners of the planet who want to join and play in a scene like that. I don’t know if it went anywhere, or whether it expanded, or how much of if it still maintains some New York influence.
I’ll tell you it’s actually a question I want to explore a little more, and I’m looking at writing and making a film about the downtown scene, in part reflecting on my experiences and also getting my friends together to do the same — who we played with and what we did in the 80s and 90s. I don’t know what it’s going to be, I can’t say.
For [venues], I know The Stone, and we had the Tonic celebration recently where a lot of us who were part of the scene got up and played. We’re generally all still here, but New York has changed. And some people moved to Brooklyn, and New Jersey, and the west coast, and other countries. It’s always been more of a feel than an exact thing. I don’t live in New York, I live in New Jersey, and I never did live in the East Village. I lived in Dumbo [Brooklyn] in the late 80s and early 90s and I’d come into the East Village and do gigs. John and Chris lived on Avenue A, and we’d do the Knitting Factory, CBGB Gallery, everyone would be playing and you’d run into everyone. I’m not sure where that’s happening now — I know there are venues like Nublu [on Avenue C] where you get some of that — but I’m not as much plugged into that.
HT: But you’d agree it’s under-documented, that downtown scene from when you guys were coming up?
BM: Oh, I think it’s a historical period — really important, and I think as time goes on, we’ll look back at all these composers and music and art and how much stuff came out of that. You can take it all the way back to [’60s era avant-garde artists’ collective] Fluxus and Yoko Ono, and the birth of the downtown scene, and John Cage, and all the painters, and Warhol, and Ornette Coleman loft gigs and CBGB, Talking Heads, all that stuff seeped in and out.
The downtown scene by the time we were there in the 80s was a combination of all these different communities and genres, still, with punk rockers, songwriters, folk musicians, jazz musicians, and we were all combing stuff together, making a new thing. Everyone is still doing it now they’re own way, but that was still very special. And yes, it’s under-documented. There are books and stories that need to get out there.
