Tag: Jonathan Kirkscey

Categories
Music Music Features

Mellotrons Redux: “Mellotron Variations” Spawns a Record and Film

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

Regular readers of these pages already know about a particular musical niche in which Memphis has lately played a pivotal role: the Mellotron revival, which has slowly been gathering steam over the last two decades.

Collector and enthusiast Winston Eggleston, son of famed photographer William Eggleston, has instigated concerts featuring the 1960s-era keyboard, which uses analog tape loops to eerily recreate the sounds of real instruments and even whole bands at the push of a key. So far, the culmination of this has been the stunning Mellotron Variations concert in April 2018 at Crosstown Arts, in which local players Robby Grant and Jonathan Kirkscey were joined by Pat Sansone (Wilco) and John Medeski (Medeski Martin & Wood), presenting semi-improvised original pieces that showed off the evocative range of multiple Mellotrons being played at once.

Jamie Harmon

l to r: Robby Grant, Jonathan Kirkscey, John Medeski, Pat Sansone

This Friday, that concert will be released as a live LP on Spaceflight Records, with a film of the concert on the way. I spoke with Grant about how this project just seems to grow more legs at every turn.

Memphis Flyer: It seems like with Mellotron Variations, you’re making more use of the rhythm fill features, the stock rhythm section recordings featured in the old Mellotrons.

Robby Grant: Yeah, they call those the rhythm and fills. It might be due to the way we were writing these for the show. We didn’t really compose these to be on a record. Because Pat and John weren’t there, Jonathan and I spent a lot of time working on these songs, and I think maybe it was a shorthand way of experimenting with sounds. Certainly Jonathan had a couple songs that were very composed, but this was another way to play around and see what felt right. We wanted the hour-long show to be kind of varied. All you really have to do is dial up those rhythm and fills and add different noises and loops. It’s kinda like when you first get any new keyboard. The most innocent and fun part is just going through and finding sounds.

And due to John and Pat being busy elsewhere, you guys only had a limited number of hours to prep for the show, correct?

It’s like a yin/yang kinda thing. Jonathan and I had a really long time. From January to April of 2018, we were working on it at least three to four times a week. Pat and John were only there on a limited basis. Pat came in maybe two weekends in that span of time, and John came in just one weekend in February. So that was when we really got together for three days and wrote the songs. We developed some ideas, and then Pat and John came back for three days before the actual show in April and we rehearsed.
Were there particular challenges in mixing down recordings of a live show?

We didn’t intend to make this a record, honestly. It was all built around the performance. And that came out so well, we were like, let’s try this. Jonathan probably spent 100 hours mixing and editing it. Since it was recorded using direct output from the Mellotrons, we never had crowd noise. So it is a live album, but it doesn’t sound live.

And soon you’ll be releasing a film of the show?

Yes, Justin Thompson led a four-camera shoot that night. And Daniel Lynn at Music+Arts Studio is doing a surround-sound mix for the movie. So this thing just keeps going. We did the show last April, then were invited to play the Solid Sound Festival, and I was like, ‘Okay, that’ll be a good ending.’ Then I got a call from OZ Arts in Nashville. We’ll play that and a Tiny Desk concert on NPR in December. If people want us to do it, we’ll do it!

Categories
Music Music Features

Rock Docs: The Story of Memphis’ Black & Wyatt Records

Why would two doctors want to start a record label? Ask Dennis Black and Robert Wyatt of Black & Wyatt Records, and they’ll tell you it’s because they love Memphis music.

Black is a pediatric gastroenterologist, and Wyatt is a pediatric nephrologist. They met through their work at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital and bonded over their love of music, particularly Memphis rock-and-roll.

Wyatt says even though he’s lived and practiced medicine in Memphis since the 1980s, for many years he was unaware of the city’s fertile underground music scene. “When I had a division to run, a research lab, and a family to raise, I missed out. My lab techs were going to the Antenna Club, but I never did.”

Dennis Black (left) and Robert Wyatt (right)

Black grew up in Covington and worked at the town’s radio station, WKBL, in high school, then for Memphis State’s WTGR “Music has kind of been my hobby all along,” he says. “Unfortunately, I can’t really play. But I like hearing live music, and I have a good record collection.”

“About the time $5 Cover came out, I started paying attention to Memphis bands and meeting Memphis musicians,” Wyatt says.

After he got to know several Memphis musicians through the cleaning company, Two Chicks and a Broom (“Valerie June cleaned our house for a fairly long period of time.”), he started hiring bands to play for yard parties at his home in 2012. The Harbert Avenue Porch Show has since attracted Jack Oblivian, the River City Tanlines, Snowglobe, and James and the Ultrasounds, to name a few.

“He’s his own little institution, with the porch shows,” says filmmaker Mike McCarthy, a Memphis punk pioneer whose daughter Hanna Star was also featured in a porch show.
“Mike approached me about wanting to put the Fingers Like Saturn album out,” says Wyatt. Fingers Like Saturn was a band McCarthy formed to feature Cori Dials (now Cori Mattice), a singer and actress he met while working at Sun Studios in 2006. He saw Mattice sing with her band the Splints. “They were good, but she looked like a Chrissie Hynde/Debbie Harry figure — lost in time, full of charisma.”

McCarthy wrote a bunch of songs and gathered keyboardist Shelby Bryant, sax player Suzi Hendrix, cellist Jonathan Kirkscey, and guitarist George Takeda. Then he put guitar wizard Steve Selvidge on drums, which, amazingly, works just fine.

Dan Ball

Fingers Like Saturn

“I introduced Cori to this group of talented eccentrics,” says McCarthy. “She jumped right into it.”

The band recorded at Sun Studios and at Selvidge’s home studio. “I’ve always played in punk bands, but I wanted this band to be a well-produced glam-rock band,” says McCarthy.

Filled with Memphis heavy hitters and held together with Mattice’s powerful alto, the glam influence is palpable, especially in songs like the Bowie-worshipping “Glam Lies.” But, since it’s Memphis, the sounds are more eccentric. “Satin (Pine Box Lullaby)” dabbles in Mexicalia by way of Johnny Cash. “Black Ray of Sunshine,” a ballad about the Black Dahlia, is an early example of the string-arranging skills that have made Kirkscey a sought-after soundtrack composer.

Before the eponymous record could find a label, Mattice’s career took her out of Memphis, and the band drifted apart. Ten years later, McCarthy played the recordings for Black and Wyatt. “We listened to the recordings, and they were really good!” says Black. “It was just a conspiracy of events that it didn’t get a wide release at the time. If we were going to do it, we decided to make it a really nice record.”

Fingers Like Saturn will reunite at DKDC on October 24th for Black &
Wyatt’s first record release party. But the label-mates are already looking forward to their next release: a single by the Heathens, a Memphis high school garage band that recorded at Sun Studios in 1956. Black and Wyatt plan to continue releasing a mixture of contemporary Memphis acts and lost gems from the 60-year history of Memphis rock.

“We’re not in it to become millionaires,” says Black. “We have our day jobs. We want to get the music out there.”

Categories
Music Music Features

Jonathan Kirkscey: Memphis Music’s Renaissance Man

The world of classical music evolved dramatically by the end of the 20th century, to a point where now, well into the 21st, traditional notions of proper music and genre boundaries have all but dissolved. No one in Memphis exemplifies the shift better than musician and composer Jonathan Kirkscey.

For years, music fans have known him as the city’s go-to cellist for bands and performers that want to expand their sonic palates. Aside from his regular work with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, Kirkscey has recorded with everyone from soul giants like Al Green and Solomon Burke to indie-rock artists like Cat Power and the late Jay Reatard. And he’s honed his composition skills on soundtracks as diverse as Mike McCarthy’s Cigarette Girl, Robert Gordon’s and Morgan Neville’s Best of Enemies, and Neville’s recent Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, a new documentary on PBS icon Fred Rogers.

IMDB

Jonathan Kirkscey

While his work for the Emmy-winning Best of Enemies in 2015 garnered him the International Documentary Association’s award for best music in a documentary, Kirkscey’s latest score for Neville marks a new expressiveness in his work that may win him even more acclaim. Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the soundtrack, is already available on streaming services and soon will be released as a vinyl LP. Add the critically acclaimed series of Mellotron performances he’s helped stage locally, as well as his frequent work with the new music-oriented Blueshift Ensemble, and you have all the trappings of a true Renaissance man of Memphis music.

Kirkscey’s well suited to genre-hopping. After taking up cello at age 6, he also dabbled in piano. “We had a piano at home when I was growing up,” he recalls. “Although I didn’t take piano lessons, I’d play it for fun.”

In his teens, Kirkscey played guitar. “I was into Metallica and Slayer and Helmet. Angry teenager music! Actually, I played in my first-ever band in high school with Hemant Gupta, who I still play with in Mouserocket. It’s not what people usually want me to do when they have me compose a score, but if they want me to write a song that sounds like Ministry or Metallica, I can do that!”

While that particular skill set wasn’t required for his Mr. Rogers project (though one can dream), the film did take him into new territory as a composer.

“Best of Enemies definitely had more of that Philip Glass or Steve Reich influence. But with Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, there’s a lot of emotional turns. So it wouldn’t work as well having a minimalist, repetitive thing going on underneath it. It needed to reflect those emotional shifts,” he says. “So there ended up being more twists and turns in the music. Morgan Neville pushed me to get more complex, harmonically. There’s definitely more chromaticism in this one. More modulating to different keys and exploring different harmonic areas.”

In layman’s terms, it translates into some truly poignant passages that reveal the inner, darker moods of television’s favorite toddler-positive persona.

Such success seemed unlikely when Kirkscey got his first soundtrack job. “Cigarette Girl was the first film I scored. I wasn’t really a composer at that point, but I played in a band with Mike McCarthy, the director, called Fingers Like Saturn. He mistakenly thought that I was a composer, because I had done some arranging for string quartets. I really didn’t know what I was doing, but I just said yes and hoped I would figure out how to do it. It was very stressful, but as hard as it was, it made me want to do it more. It really inspired me.”

Kirkscey is staying busy. There are more soundtracks to tend to, mixes of his live Mellotron recordings with Robby Grant, Pat Sansone, and John Medeski to supervise, and performances of music by John Cage and others to rehearse for this weekend’s Continuum Music Festival. (Hear Kirkscey discuss the festival in the video clip below).

Jonathan Kirkscey: Memphis Music’s Renaissance Man

The festival, enthuses Kirkscey, is indicative of a nationwide sea change in musical tastes. “There’s a different attitude among the younger generation of classical musicians. They’re a lot more open to playing music from other genres, and there’s been an explosion of new music ensembles in the U.S. in the last 20 years. If you want to breathe life into a genre, you gotta perform new music.”

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Nam June Paik at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

It’s been two years since Luis van Seixas, preparator for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, put out a call to musicians and composers asking for contributions to a special soundtrack project. Nam June Paik’s Vide-O-belisk, the tower of cabinet televisions, video loops, and neon that dominates the Brooks’ rotunda, is adorned with images of musical notes and musical imagery, but it is entirely silent. “The Paik Sessions, Volume One,” gathered the first 10 pieces of music created in response to Paik’s site-specific sculpture, which was installed at the Brooks by the artist in 2002. On Thursday, July 24th, the Brooks celebrates what would have been the visionary artist’s 82nd birthday with the release of “The Paik Sessions, Volume Two.” The Korean-born artist passed away in 2006.

Celebrating Nam June Paik

This week’s Art & A Movie night at the Brooks doubles as a party in Paik’s honor and features local cellist Jonathan Kirkscey, performing music created for the Vide-O-belisk. The musical performance is followed by screenings of three of Paik’s films paying tribute to a range of composers and artists including John Cage, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Charlotte Moorman, Joseph Beuys, Keith Haring, and Philip Glass. The Paik films include Global Groove (1973, 28 minutes), Bye Bye Kipling (1986, 30 minutes), and MAJORCA-fantasia (1989, 5 minutes).

Participants will also be able to design their own Vide-O-belisk-inspired artwork using a retro TV photo frame, wire, and a photographic image created onsite by Amurica.