Tag: Pat Sansone

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Big Star Wows Crosstown Theater Audience

Big Star tribute featuring Andrew VanWyngarden on vocals (Photo: Alex Greene).

There was an unmistakable feeling of history being made at the Crosstown Theater on Saturday night, as the ultimate Big Star tribute band, featuring original drummer Jody Stephens, took to the stage and delivered a stunning set of power pop classics.

The quintet featured Stephens and latter-day Big Star alum Jon Auer, who performed extensively with Ken Stringfellow and Alex Chilton from 1993 until Chilton’s untimely death in 2010. Filling out the lineup were Pat Sansone (Wilco, Autumn Defense), Chris Stamey (the dB’s), and Mike Mills (R.E.M.). All players brought impressive vocal chops and multi-instrumental abilities to bear on recreating the band’s classic tracks from the 1970s, especially its debut, #1 Record. The show, presented by Mempho for community radio station WYXR’s Raised by Sound Fest, celebrated the 50th anniversary of that album, originally released in June of 1972.

As such, it marked an apotheosis of sorts for the band, which suffered from poor distribution in its heyday. While critics raved about their recorded output, the group never became the phenomenon that their debut’s title seemed to presage. Yet that was forgotten as the band played to a sold-out house last week, with the original arrangements lovingly recreated by the current quintet.

Auer’s Gibson SG launched the proceedings with the opening crunch of “Feel,” and with that, they were off. Sansone and Stamey often wielded Fender guitars, though both could frequently be seen manning the keyboards on stage right, which included a digital Mellotron. Mills, for his part, played bass on most of the tunes, though he relinquished that duty when he sang lead vocal, or, on “In the Street,” played cowbell.

Holding it all down was Stephens’ powerful drumming, true to his original parts nearly roll for roll, and bursting with the energy of a much younger man. Stephens has also come into his own as a singer, as made clear when he sang “Thirteen,” often associated with Chilton’s original vocal, with great delicacy.

Guest vocalists made brief appearances, with MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden taking the stratospheric lead on “Give Me Another Chance,” and Greg Cartwright of the Oblivians, Reigning Sound, and other bands, delivering “Try Again.”

After playing #1 Record in full, the group took a short break and returned with other songs from the band’s catalog, including Radio City standouts like “September Gurls,” “Back of a Car,” “You Get What You Deserve,” and “O My Soul.” After launching into the latter, the players seemed stymied in the middle of the song, and ground to a halt. With Auer quipping that they were playing “the single version,” Sansone struck up the band once again and they carried off the tune with aplomb.

Several Chris Bell songs were also featured, much to the crowd’s delight, including “You and Your Sister,” “There was a Light,” and “I Am the Cosmos.” Tracks from Third/Sister Lovers were also featured, including “Jesus Christ,” “Thank You Friends,” and an impassioned vocal on “Nighttime” by Stamey. Stephens and Auer also sang a song they co-wrote for the latter-day band’s In Space album, “February’s Quiet.” Generally, the band hit their marks expertly throughout the show: the guitars rocked or lilted, as needed, the vocal harmonies soared, and the grooves grooved.

The crowd was loath to let the band leave, standing for multiple encores. While many Memphis albums from 1972 are surely deserving of such an anniversary show, the fact that this one took place stands as a testament to the band’s panache and power, half a century later.

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Wilco’s Pat Sansone on Memphis, their WYXR Visit and Playing Mempho

Wilco (Credit: Annabel Mehran)

When Wilco take the stage at Mempho Fest on Sunday, they’ll be returning to a kind of spiritual center for the band. As the band’s multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone reflects, “How can you do what we do and not have a crush on Memphis? Whether you’re pulling from early rock and roll, or from Big Star, or Memphis soul and Stax — whatever it is, there’s gonna be a thread that leads back to Memphis, somehow. I mean the first Wilco record was done at Easley-McCain Studios!”

Wilco’s Mempho appearance will kick off another round of two- to three-week jaunts the band has been making since spring, in an ongoing tour marked by its balance between large halls and smaller rock clubs. “Part of the band’s philosophy is to bring it to the people,” says Sansone. “Just recently we played Red Rocks, and then a week later we played a 1,300 seat rock club in Bozeman, Montana. And that little club show ended up being one of our favorite shows of the year. We try to make it approachable. It’s the nature of our band — we’ve got little pockets all over the place.”

These days, the band will be premiering songs from their latest album, Cruel Country, an album they backed into rather unexpectedly. “As we’ve been working on lots of tracks over the last couple of years, it seemed like we were making two records simultaneously,” Sansone explains. “One batch of songs had a country flavor and was more acoustic, and another batch was more the art pop side of Wilco. We were going to focus more on the art pop, but as we were getting close to our festival we do every two years in North Adams, Massachusetts, the Solid Sound Festival, it occurred to Jeff and to us that we had this country/folky body of work that was not far from being finished, so why not put the finishing touches on it, and offer it to our fans at the festival? Kind of as a gift for coming to the event. But as we started digging into these tracks and putting the finishing touches on them, it became apparent that, ‘Oh, this is our next album!’ This is a significant piece of work for us. So it wasn’t really planned to be the next official Wilco record until just weeks before it was released.”

And as for the live show, Sansone says “we’ve been playing a handful of the new songs in the set. And then a grab bag of stuff over the years. There’s a lot of material to choose from at this point! But we try to represent the different records of the band’s life.”

Pat Sansone (Credit: Sansonica, Inc.)

After their Mempho appearance, the band will make a slight detour: “We’re going to do an afternoon set at the festival,” says Sansone, “and then we’re gonna run over to Crosstown with some guitars and a snare drum and do two or three songs and have a chat on [community radio station] WYXR. I really want to show the rest of the guys what’s happening at Crosstown. I think they’ll be blown away.”

Beyond having his own program on WYXR, 91.7 FM, Sansone has seen Crosstown evolve and blossom since the earliest days of its renovation. “It all started with my friendship with [WYXR executive director] Robby Grant. I was involved in the Mellotron Variations project with him, and spending time at the Crosstown Concourse because of that. And I got to know Winston Eggleston. But I remember before Crosstown was even completed, we were in town for a Wilco show, and Robby picked me up to show me the building as they were developing it. And a couple years later, we performed the Mellotron Variations there. So Robby kept me in the loop as he was developing the ideas for WYXR, and when it became a reality, he asked me if I’d like to do a show, and I said I’d love to. There’s a radio station in Boston that I really love, WUMV, and I turned Robby onto it, and we’d trade other internet radio stuff. So we shared this love of radio as a medium.”

Having a radio show in the Bluff City brings things full circle for Sansone, who’s interest in Memphis far predates Wilco. “I grew up just hours away, in Meridian, Mississippi,” he says, “and I have an aunt and uncle and some cousins in Memphis, so it’s just always been a part of my life. Memphis was the big city. From a very early age, I felt the gravitational musical pull of Memphis. And when I was in my teens, and obsessed with the Beatles, I discovered Big Star and heard those half Southern/half English accents, and realized that this music had been made in Memphis, a place I had actually been to, I was hooked! There was no turning back.”

Wilco will appear at Mempho Fest on Sunday, October 2nd, 4:20 p.m., followed by a live appearance on WYXR 91.7 FM from 7-8 p.m.

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Wilco to Play Levitt Shell in First Fundraiser of the Year

Wilco

The band Wilco has longstanding ties to the Bluff City, reaching back to their 1994 debut, A.M., recorded at Easley-McCain Studio.

Even then, in their alt-country days, they displayed a reliable knack for both classic songwriting and sonic experimentation: a perfect fit with that renowned Memphis studio in its heyday. That such a spirit has remained and evolved with the band over the course of 10 subsequent studio albums is a testament to their collective restlessness with indie-pop conventions.

While the group has seen personnel changes over that time — a stable lineup featuring Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Glenn Kotche, Patrick Sansone, John Stirratt, and, of course, singer-songwriter Jeff Tweedy — it has endured since 2004. Now, in the wake of a marked ramping-up of Jeff Tweedy solo albums, they’re touring to support 2019’s Ode to Joy, which strikes a middle ground between the solo Tweedy’s more stripped-down approach and the wider sonic palette of previous Wilco albums.

Mellotron Variations at the Solid Sound Festival, 2019 (L-R, Pat Sansone, Robby Grant, Jonathan Kirkscey)

The band’s spirit of sonic exploration has lately infused the most recent Memphis/Wilco cross-pollination, in the form of the Mellotron Variations group, an ensemble of Mellotron players founded here by Robby Grant and Jonathan Kirkscey, which has grown to include John Medeski and Wilco’s Pat Sansone. The group’s concerts and rehearsals have made Sansone a more regular visitor from his home in Nashville, and when they played Wilco’s Solid Sound Festival in Massachusetts last year, the sympatico between Wilco and Memphis’ flair for the unconventional was sealed.

Thus, Wilco’s upcoming performance at the Levitt Shell on April 14th (just announced Tuesday) has a certain resonance with the Memphis music scene. Part of the Shell Yeah! Benefit Concert Series held at the iconic outdoor stage every year, this will precede the Shell’s regular Summer Orion Free Music Concert Series as a rare ticketed event — one of four this year — designed to raise funds for the many free concerts staged by the Levitt Shell.

Shell Yeah! Presents Wilco, Levitt Shell, Tuesday, April 14. 8:00 pm. Tickets on pre-sale February 5, public sale February 7.

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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!

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Pat Sansone: Making Memphis Mello Again

CREDIT: Sansonica, INC

Sansonica, INC

Pat Sansone

“It’s gonna be a mellow acoustic set,” Pat Sansone says of his moment in the sun, down at the Harbor Town Amphitheater on Sunday, April 28th. His forecast matches that for the afternoon’s weather. It will be an ideal setting for that rare chance to hear Sansone’s songs, no doubt played with his usual musical dexterity. Better known as a multi-instrumentalist member of Wilco for the past 15 years, Sansone was a Wilco fan and a songwriter in his own right long before that.

He’ll be selecting from twenty years’ worth of songs he’s contributed to the band Autumn Defense, founded with Sansone’s friend John Stirratt in New Orleans. And even before that venture, Sansone was writing. “I was living in New Orleans for the back half of the 90s. At the studio where I worked in New Orleans, even before the Autumn Defense got going, I was working on a batch of solo material. I’m revisiting that stuff now to finally mix it properly and hopefully release it sometime later this year. It definitely has a kinship with Autumn Defense — very much influenced by the Zombies, the Beatles, the Kinks. English Psychedelic Pop.”

To these ears, there are also plenty of echoes of American renegades like Todd Rundgren or Emitt Rhodes. “Big Star and all sorts of other things were influences too. Shoegaze. A weird mish-mash of stuff, which is not very New Orleans-y. As much as I love New Orleans, and I love it dearly, and certainly John loves it as well, I think one of the reasons we connected so strongly was we both felt a little bit outside of what was happening musically in New Orleans. There just wasn’t much of an audience or interest for the kind of music we were making. I learned a lot in New Orleans, and I absorbed a lot of amazing music, but I didn’t necessarily feel like I was part of it, other than being a fan. That’s one of the reasons I left. I knew that the music that I was going to make and what I had to offer musically wasn’t something that New Orleans really needed or wanted,” he laughs.

Selections from the above mish-mash are what Sansone will be conjuring up Sunday, albeit in minimalist form. One of Autumn Defense’s strengths is their harmonies. Though Sansone and Stirratt are not kin, they sing harmonies like they are. On record, it can be difficult to distinguish their voices, especially when layered together on songs like the early gem “The Sun In California.”

“Working on that song was really a milestone in the realization of what we were about as a band,” Sansone recalls. That number from their second album was by Stirratt; naturally Sansone focuses on his own songs when playing solo. “I know I’ll be playing ‘The August Song,’ from our album Fifth, and I’ll play ‘Feel You Now’ from our self-titled album on piano.”

For Wilco fans who haven’t yet explored the Autumn Defense’s discography, the work holds up beautifully, and may be a kind of skeleton key into Wilco’s poppier moments.

“John and I had been doing the Autumn Defense for about five years before I got absorbed into the Wilco organism. It was a natural thing. I think the type of music that John and I connected over, was very much the same reason John and Jeff [Tweedy] connected. I remember hearing [Wilco album] Summerteeth. I guess it came out around the same time that John and I were working on the first Autumn Defense record. And there’s a similar heartbeat going on, between those two records.”

While the albums are available for the ages, a performance by Autumn Defense is a rare thing. “I don’t think we’re gonna do anything this year, except for a performance at Solid Sound.” That would be the Wilco-launched Solid Sound Festival, June 28th-31st in North Adams, Massachusetts. That festival will also notably play host to the Memphis-based ensemble behind last year’s Mellotron Variations, in which Sansone was a key player, along with Robby Grant, Jonathan Kirkscey, and John Medeski. (More on their new album and Solid Sound performance in the near future).

The Mellotron Variations project was clearly dear to Sansone’s heart. “I was really transported by it. And I have to say the Mellotron has been very helpful to me as far as arranging goes, because you have all those colors, and those instruments at your fingertips. It’s allowed me to do things I never would have been able to do without it.”

Indeed, that experience will feed right back into the Autumn Defense’s appearance at Solid Sound. “It will be fun,” Sansone says, “because it’s gonna be an acoustic performance with a string quartet. I wrote string arrangements for a handful of songs and I’m gonna be cranking out a few more. So, hopefully we can do an entire set with strings. That’s the only Autumn Defense performance on the books this year.”

As the band’s song “Things On My Mind” goes, “Let’s go, let’s get in the sun.” That, and the rarity of hearing those songs live, could well be an exhortation to attend Sunday’s gathering by the river.

Pat Sansone and Crystal Shrine will appear at The River Series at the Harbor Town Amphitheatre, Sunday, April 28, 3:00 pm. $5 admission.

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Gonerfest 15: Saturday & Sunday

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

For this time-worn punter, nearly 12 hours of straight rocking out can seem intimidating, but in hindsight my Goner-rific day zipped by without a hitch. The daytime action, of course, is at Murphy’s Bar. Typically, I make straight for the outdoor stage, but the eerie pop sounds of Pscience stopped me in my tracks. Blending what could be classic big beat sixties tunes with odd harmonics and noise, this group, who only just had their first show earlier this month, has certainly hit upon a good psonic compound in their New Orleans-based laboratory.
Alex Greene

Negro Terror

Then Negro Terror appeared outside, and we heard a whole other kind of eerie. Their chords of doom revving up, the trio was perhaps the most cathartic band of the festival, as they directly addressed the ugly elephants in the room: recent stress over the the rise of fascist groups, and violence in the city. Singer Omar Higgins started with a dedication to Phil Trenary, the beloved president of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce who was recently murdered. “Phil came to our shows. He understood the message,” said Higgins, before launching into raging hardcore riffage. He also reflected the general rage over the recent shooting of Martavious Banks by Memphis police officers, with the anthem, “All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB).” Higgins then dedicated their cover of Detain’s “Capital Punishment” to rapists, and quoted General Patton on the importance of killing Nazis. “Nazis!” Higgins called out, his hand raised in salute, until it became a thumbs-down. “Raus!!”

Michael Donahue

Exek

One longtime Gonerfest-goer commented later, “It’s been good to hear so many political songs at this Gonerfest. They usually have such apolitical punk, and the apathy always bugged me.”

But those in search of escape rather than confrontation didn’t have to wait long, for soon Australia’s Exek took the stage with a subtler sound. They betrayed no emotion as they earnestly led the crowd down a hypnotic spiral, sounding like the love child of Stereolab and early Wire. Propelling it all was a powerful bass and drums that at times recalled Sly and Robbie, sans any hint of white reggae. A fascinating blend.

Alex Greene

Exek

Then, even the most sedentary fans piled in to the bar’s smokey interior for one of the festival’s most anticipated shows, A Weirdo From Memphis (AWFM), backed up by the Unapologetic crew. DJ’d platters and a live band meshed seamlessly as AWFM proved his freestyle mettle, laced with satisfying expletives that caught the mood perfectly.

Michael Donahue

AWFM with fellow Unapologetics and Crockett Hall (far left).

Then it was back outside to hear the afternoon’s closer, Robyn Hitchcock. Given that all of his previous Memphis appearances, going back to 1990, were solo, this show, featuring a crack East Nashville band that included Wilco’s Pat Sansone on bass, arrived with heightened expectations. And they delivered, as the combo never missed a beat amid the jangling 6- and 12-string guitars, vocal harmonies, and driving Brit-pop beats. As with his old bands, the Soft Boys and the Egyptians, Hitchcock’s surreal lyrics cruised effortlessly above the delicate, yet pulsing, rock sounds.

Recalling his first Memphis show, 28 years ago, Hitchcock then tried to imagine what the world would be that many years hence. “No doubt they’ll be releasing the iPhone 21 around then. I may be gone, but I’ll live on in an app, so my ego can have the last laugh. You’ll be able to have the app compose songs exactly as I would. Or you’ll be able to mix and match songwriters, so it’ll compose in the style of, say, me, Tom Petty, and Joni Mitchell.”

The fading day echoed with many such flights of verbal fancy, in a wide-ranging set that included the Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” and the Egyptians’ “Element of LIght” and “Listening to the Higsons.” They echoed up and down Madison Avenue as darkness fell, and all the little Goners readied themselves for the night.

Alex Greene

Robyn Hitchcock

Goner

NOTS as portrayed on Gonerfest 15 poster.

Not being quite ready for a long night myself, and being a teetotalling tea head, I supped some strong brew and victuals, missing out on Oh Boland and Amyl & the Sniffers, alas. Arriving at the Hi Tone as the NOTS played, I took some considerable hometown pride in the audience’s rave reaction to what the Goner program guide calls the city’s “synth/guitar squiggle punkers.” They did not disappoint, though it was tough to wedge into the packed room.

And then came a blast from the past, the fabulous Neckbones, once rightly hailed as rock’s saviors some 20 years ago. Newly reunited, they were in true form as they pummeled the crowd with what can only be called maximum R&B, old school rock-and-roll grooves amped up to 11, attacked with genuine ferocity by the Oxford, MS, quartet. Tyler Keith channeled a Southern preacher with his between-song rants, and drummer Forrest Hewes yelled out his gratitude for the audience’s frenzy in flurries of swear words.

Alex Greene

Neckbones

After that, Melbourne’s Deaf Wish, in the unenviable position of following the Neckbones, rose to the occasion with their thorny post-rock rock. There was plenty of noise and wiry, dissonant guitar, but the driving rhythms rocked hard, befitting a band just wrapping up a month long tour. They seemed elated to be ending their U.S. venture on such a Goner note. 
Alex Greene

Carbonas

And so the night’s endgame began, as the Carbonas, who gained much love in their prime over a decade ago, took the stage in their one-night-only, Goner-fueled reunion. Time seemed meaningless as they immediately regained all the chemistry that dissipated when they broke up. Though drummer Dave Rahn’s shirt implored us to “Kill the Carbonas For Rock and Roll,” it was the group that killed it on this night. A friend and neighbor confessed between songs that “this group helped me survive grad school,” and even this fan from back in the day was not disappointed. Nor was the still-packed house, all sporting happy faces as they filed out. 

R.L. Boyce

For some, the night raged on, of course. Eric Oblivian, not content to co-manage the festival, play with the Oblivians, and oversee the Murphy’s show with a child on his back, played Saturday night’s/Sunday morning’s after party with his old outfit, the AAAA New Memphis Legs. And then came Sunday at the Cooper-Young gazebo, featuring R.L. Boyce and Lightnin’ Malcom, as festival-goers bid adieu to their comrades until next year (?), or made plans to convene at Bar DKDC that night, to the groovy, basement-dredged sounds of Memphis’ own Hot Tub Eric. Farewell, Gonerfest 15, and many happy returns!

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Ghost Music: Mellotrons Return to Crosstown Arts

CREDIT: Jamie Harmon

“When I’m playing a real Mellotron, it’s like I’m playing ghosts,” says Pat Sansone, multi-instrumentalist for Wilco, who’s in town for a series of concerts this week. It’s not a comment you would hear about many instruments, but the Mellotron is unique. Its immediate precursor was the Chamberlin, in which strips of audio tape triggered by a keyboard could mimic various orchestral instruments. When a Chamberlin employee absconded to England with two of the machines in 1962, he created his own consumer-oriented model, and the Mellotron was born. The new instrument, using lower fidelity recordings, tended to color the sound of the instruments with its own warble and woof. Before long, it was appearing on records by the Beatles, the Kinks, and others.

It’s that slightly corrupted sound that makes the Mellotron a sought-after keyboard to this day, and it’s what brought Sansone to Memphis to collaborate with three other musicians in shows using multiple Mellotrons simultaneously.

Jamie Harmon

Pat Sansone contemplates the next note

“The way the old Mellotron tapes were recorded, with the amount of degeneration that happened before they got to the machines themselves, they’re just instantly evocative,” Sansone explains. “There’s already a sense of passed time built into those sounds. It’s like a faded photograph, where you see somebody in the corner. There’s a humanity creeping around inside those sounds.”

It was that mechanically tweaked humanity that appealed to Winston Eggleston (the son of photographer William Eggleston) when he plunged into the world of Mellotron schematics to make his own. Eggleston, ended up building and collecting a few of them, leading his friend, musician Robby Grant (Big Ass Truck,  >manualcontrol<, Mouserocket), to ask, “What now?”

As Grant describes the process, “I reached out to cellist Jonathan Kirkscey and we created new music using only Mellotrons. Neither of us was a keyboard player.” But technical virtuosity was not the point. All of Memphis was abuzz with the results: two sold-out shows in 2016, dubbed Duets for Mellotron. The show was enhanced by projections designed by Winston Eggleston and John Markham. 

Jason Schepman

with Jonathan Kirskcey and Robby Grant .

Following the success of the duets, “a person from Crosstown mentioned an interdisciplinary NEA grant — that we eventually were awarded. What we did was make it a lot bigger,” Grant says. “We’re gonna put on multiple shows. The first piece will be Robert Patterson. He’s a composer with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, and he’s gonna be contrasting the Mellotron with real flutes and real cellos in his chamber music pieces. Then, we have the New Ballet Ensemble (NBE) working with Ross Rice,” the erstwhile Memphian, producer and keyboard wizard.

The capstone of this year’s project, known as Mellotron Variations, will be a performance (again featuring the projections of Eggleston and Markham) by a quartet of Mellotron players including Grant, Kirkscey, Sansone, and jazz/funk keyboardist John Medeski, of the trio Medeski, Martin & Wood. Sansone says he’s excited to be playing with Medeski. “He is such a deep musician, and bringing a whole new level of musicianship to it. He’s a fearless player.”

Jamie Harmon

John Medeski

For Medeski, fearlessness is key. “How do you push the limits of an instrument? That’s what Hendrix and so many great musicians did. This instrument can be both a sampler and, by messing with the speed of the wheel inside it, you can be a DJ. It’s really an expressive thing.”

“I heard a recording of Captain Beefheart doing this incredible Mellotron solo,” Medeski goes on, “that really blew it open for me and made me realize it’s so much more than just fake strings with a weird sound. That inspired me in terms of not being afraid. It’s an expressive instrument unto itself. Imitating something for the sake of imitating it is stupid. Why not just get violin players? But the Mellotron has a total sound of its own.”

Grant and Kirkscey were committed to pushing the instrument’s boundaries as well, in part by recording new sounds, previously unheard in vintage Mellotron iterations, including eerie cello and flute harmonics, backwards guitar, and children reciting spoken word pieces. Together, the four have created semi-improvised works that they’ll premier this week. Medeski notes, “Improvisation is composition; it’s just immediate. You make a sound, and what note you choose next, where you put it in time, is like composing, except you’re doing it really fast. And the other guys are all that kind of musician. It’s such a cool project. I’m just excited to be part of it, and I’m honored.” 

For an exhaustive listing of albums and songs featuring the Mellotron, see Planet Mellotron.