_A Musician Who Courts Uncertainty
published in the New York Times, Nov. 6, 1994
The photographs on Kip Hanrahan's record covers show him swallowed in shadow, at the edge of light, refusing an easy clarity. In concert, he appears no less a mystery---prowling around behind the band, leaning in to tell a soloist what is going to happen next.
Now he seems more restless than ever, totally consumed after months of sessions in the studio on his biggest adventure yet, an extended labyrinth of songs based on The Arabian Nights. The work just keeps growing, he doesn't know where it will end, and not until he brings in all seven vocalists---Ruben Blades, Jack Bruce, and Carmen Lundy, among them---can he finish the writing.
For 15 years as a composer and musician, Hanrahan has somehow kept fame at arm's length, yet many are the top musicians who admire his work. Long before most pop stars were dabbling in world music, he was making connections across genres that did not at the time seem obvious. Next Sunday, he will appear at Sounds of Brazil in Manhattan with a band made up of some of his frequent collaborators, including Don Pullen and Charles Neville.
There is nothing quite like Hanrahan's music---a steamy blend of rhythmic and melodic tensions, drawn from musicians of different traditions (Latin, jazz, rock), yet with something very much his own. The songs flow and intersect like a series of dances or scenes from a movie, fraught with surprises and intimacy.
The current project, A Thousand Nights and a Night, represents a departure, however; for once, his music is not directly personal, so the interior monologues of earlier songs give way to other forms. "I lose myself into something as far away from me as possible," he said over lunch recently at a Greenwich Village restaurant. But with his instinct for paradox, he added, "And still you see yourself in the magic of it."
The circumstances of his life have changed as well. A New Yorker to the bone, he is about to turn 40 and for the past year has been living a sort of exile: in suburban Reston, Virginia, after his wife, Nancy, accepted a teaching job at George Mason University as a specialist in the sociology of music. "I feel more like an expatriate there than in Paris," he said, unused to the quiet of a house and yard. Nonetheless, he is beginning to enjoy a renewed visibility: Rounder Records has been reissuing nearly the entire catalogue of American Clavé, the label Hanrahan founded in 1979 to produce his own and other people's music, much of it long unavailable in the United States.
"I'm selling myself into bankruptcy basically to make this record," he said of the new project. Still, he has been there before. His wife has reminded him that on the records he likes best---Desire Develops an Edge (1983), featuring Bruce as vocalist, and Tenderness (1990), which included Fernando Saunders and Sting---he worked "with his teeth showing towards money, defying the financial limits with a viciousness."
Hanrahan compares his role to that of a film director. He constructs the music like a narrative, in a process that he describes as striving to "make a sequence of passions audible." He develops his ideas in the recording studio, mixing densities and voicings, provoking the unknown in a search that seems almost metaphysical. "There's this emotion inside of you that needs to make itself heard," he said, "and you don't know exactly what it's supposed to be heard as, but you know the direction it's supposed to go."
The music reflects the struggle of its own creation: for his records he often includes not the perfect take, but the one "where the mistakes were perfect. On that take, the mistakes were showing what we were going for, and when we got it right, it was just reciting something that was composed before." Above all, the music must defy expectations, and he will not let anyone coast by relying on clichés.
Recalling his work on Exotica from 1992, Bruce describes "the archetypal Kip session. There'd be all these really well-written transcriptions of things from the '40s---Cuban arrangements, big-band arrangements, all neatly done. Then Kip would say, 'Okay, I don't want you to play anything like this.' And that was the direction. You looked at the music and didn't play anything like it. So a lot of guys were scratching their heads, and actually coming up with some pretty interesting stuff." Their records together have proved a unique showcase for the richness of Bruce's voice, close and revealing, right at the center of the music.
While Hanrahan's vision may be somewhat complex, he recognizes that he is not an easy person to work with. "I'm driven by this thing to make it audible. I'm going to knock down walls to get to it, and I don't care who's standing in front of it." That drive comes "out of anger and passion and sexuality." He has been known to scream at musicians, and once he even threw a microphone stand at someone. "You know the result you're aiming for, even if it doesn't have any definite angles, and you fight through the process to make it heard."
But surviving that struggle brings its rewards. "When the musician's depth and complexity matches yours, you both change the tone of the emotion you're going for, and something else comes out of it which is even richer and more complex, and darker and with more shades, and you realize, this is a lifetime friend."
Hanrahan did not always think he would be a musician, let alone a producer. Though he was already playing percussion in Latin bands as a teenager growing up in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, he saw himself rather as a soccer player. He had learned the sport to gain approval from his maternal grandfather, who had helped his mother raise him: his grandfather was a big man among the Russian émigrés, a Jew from Samarkand who came to the southwest Bronx early in the century with Leon Trotsky. But Hanrahan left the Bronx when he won a fellowship to Cooper Union in Manhattan. There he studied under the German-born conceptual artist Hans Haacke, who introduced him to "a method of critically thinking that was able to turn the restlessness into a forward motion."
He took the opportunity to travel and study abroad---India, Haiti, Morocco---and during those years he also discovered the Jazz Composers Orchestra, the avant-garde musicians' collective founded in the late 1960s by the pianist Carla Bley and the trumpeter Michael Mantler. Drawn by the music, he took a job in the collective's production office, where he learned about setting up a record company and independent distribution.
The project that launched American Clavé, though it did not bear fruit until years later, began as a collaboration with the writer Ishmael Reed back in the late '70s. Hanrahan was going to direct a film based on Reed's script to the music of Cecil Taylor and the dancing of Mikhail Baryshnikov, but it grew out of his control and fizzled away. Meanwhile, the label released Ya Yo Me Curé as its first title, by an old friend, the trumpeter and percussionist Jerry Gonzalez; both Gonzalez and his brother Andy, a bassist, have been recurring contributors to Hanrahan's music. As a result of that experience, he decided to make his own first record, Coup de Tête (1981), which he describes as his "Alice in Wonderland," where he tried out every idea he was unable to use on the Gonzalez session.
After recording Desire Develops an Edge, which received rave reviews, he formed the band Conjure, asking various musicians to write music to Reed's poems. The group's first album, Conjure (1985), featured Taj Mahal, the pianist Allen Toussaint, the bassist Steve Swallow, and the saxophonist David Murray. Hanrahan remains the band's musical director and occasional writer, with Bobby Womack or Jimmy Scott as the principal singer.
As a producer, Hanrahan has had his biggest success with The Late Masterpieces, three records by his "artistic father," the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. The experience was "an intoxicating release from responsibility," he recalled, free of the doubt in his own work. "It's great to subordinate yourself to somebody else's esthetic in which you have such an absolute loving faith, to take his esthetic further." These sessions were Piazzolla's favorite, and among his last. The first of them, Tango: Zero Hour (1986), was the label's best seller by nearly double, at 72,000 copies sold worldwide.
Lately, American Clavé has produced another release long in the making, the two-CD collection Darn It! (1994), a rich array of musical settings for poems by Paul Haines, another of Hanrahan's mentors (Haines was the co-writer of Bley's landmark album Escalator Over the Hill [1971], which also featured Bruce). For now, however, Hanrahan has turned fully back to his own music. In addition to A Thousand Nights and a Night, he is completing an album built around live performances of his band in Europe, All Roads Are Made of the Flesh.
Though he takes his cues from a wide field of interests, Bley appreciates the originality of Hanrahan's music. "He's just a genius at getting the right people together," she says. "Everybody wants to work for him because then they get a chance to work with someone they've always admired." Indeed, he has been calling musicians from all over the map for what may yet grow into a three-CD opus. Every week or two he travels to New York to direct more sessions and to try out new ideas, relentless in his desire to hear what he had not imagined.
* * *
published in Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (New York) 60 (Spring 2000)
Ever bountiful in ideas, Kip Hanrahan is the prime force behind the exhilarating, mostly percussion and voice ensemble Deep Rumba. On This Night Becomes A Rumba (American Clavé), the raw, authentic, soul-stirring sources are there, and so are a wealth of departures: Ruben Blades’ delivery of a lyric by Vallejo, surprising renditions of Charles Trenet and of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” The power of the spirit found here, its smart, cohesive and intense play, also inform the latest installments of Hanrahan’s musical passion and obsession, A Thousand Nights And A Night. On Shadow Nights-1 and Shadow Nights-2, the miraculous adventure continues, full of new angles, new shifts in the light.
* * *
published in Shuffle Boil (Berkeley) 5/6 (2006)
Silvana Deluigi, ¡Yo! (2002); Kip Hanrahan, Original Music For PIÑERO (2002); American Clavé, I was born but... (2001) (American Clavé)
The newest releases of Hanrahan’s label deftly reconfirm his protean talents as musician, producer, and passionate poetic mensch. The special way he puts together a record, investing his all, has long been a hallmark of every project---like an emerging language articulated not just as cinematic or emotional sequence, like so many stations of the cross, but as investigations, excavations of the human heart. Deluigi has sung on other Hanrahan records, but her stellar debut under his direction marks a new era in his romance with Argentina while rooted fruitfully in his past work with Piazzolla; indeed, it is lovely to hear her native musical culture bend and extend its colors through Hanrahan’s treatments. His soundtrack for the Leon Ichaso film Piñero (a project that prefigures his upcoming record of another NuYorican poet, Pirri Thomas) makes the film sound seductive, cool, burning, driven, though from what I’ve heard about the movie I don’t know. More importantly, the date gives him occasion to reassemble many of his most steadfast collaborators over the past two decades, and that is more than reason enough to celebrate. The label’s anthology of new work, I was born but..., offers a rich menu with pieces from Deluigi’s record as well as recent dates by Hanrahan stalwarts, percussionists El Negro Horacio Hernandez and Robby Ameen (Robby and Negro at the Third World War) and violinist Alfredo Triff (21 Broken Melodies at Once), as well as tracks from the Pirri Thomas sessions and a most startling find, the sound collage symphony by early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, Enthusiasm (Complete Soundtrack). What worlds.
published in the New York Times, Nov. 6, 1994
The photographs on Kip Hanrahan's record covers show him swallowed in shadow, at the edge of light, refusing an easy clarity. In concert, he appears no less a mystery---prowling around behind the band, leaning in to tell a soloist what is going to happen next.
Now he seems more restless than ever, totally consumed after months of sessions in the studio on his biggest adventure yet, an extended labyrinth of songs based on The Arabian Nights. The work just keeps growing, he doesn't know where it will end, and not until he brings in all seven vocalists---Ruben Blades, Jack Bruce, and Carmen Lundy, among them---can he finish the writing.
For 15 years as a composer and musician, Hanrahan has somehow kept fame at arm's length, yet many are the top musicians who admire his work. Long before most pop stars were dabbling in world music, he was making connections across genres that did not at the time seem obvious. Next Sunday, he will appear at Sounds of Brazil in Manhattan with a band made up of some of his frequent collaborators, including Don Pullen and Charles Neville.
There is nothing quite like Hanrahan's music---a steamy blend of rhythmic and melodic tensions, drawn from musicians of different traditions (Latin, jazz, rock), yet with something very much his own. The songs flow and intersect like a series of dances or scenes from a movie, fraught with surprises and intimacy.
The current project, A Thousand Nights and a Night, represents a departure, however; for once, his music is not directly personal, so the interior monologues of earlier songs give way to other forms. "I lose myself into something as far away from me as possible," he said over lunch recently at a Greenwich Village restaurant. But with his instinct for paradox, he added, "And still you see yourself in the magic of it."
The circumstances of his life have changed as well. A New Yorker to the bone, he is about to turn 40 and for the past year has been living a sort of exile: in suburban Reston, Virginia, after his wife, Nancy, accepted a teaching job at George Mason University as a specialist in the sociology of music. "I feel more like an expatriate there than in Paris," he said, unused to the quiet of a house and yard. Nonetheless, he is beginning to enjoy a renewed visibility: Rounder Records has been reissuing nearly the entire catalogue of American Clavé, the label Hanrahan founded in 1979 to produce his own and other people's music, much of it long unavailable in the United States.
"I'm selling myself into bankruptcy basically to make this record," he said of the new project. Still, he has been there before. His wife has reminded him that on the records he likes best---Desire Develops an Edge (1983), featuring Bruce as vocalist, and Tenderness (1990), which included Fernando Saunders and Sting---he worked "with his teeth showing towards money, defying the financial limits with a viciousness."
Hanrahan compares his role to that of a film director. He constructs the music like a narrative, in a process that he describes as striving to "make a sequence of passions audible." He develops his ideas in the recording studio, mixing densities and voicings, provoking the unknown in a search that seems almost metaphysical. "There's this emotion inside of you that needs to make itself heard," he said, "and you don't know exactly what it's supposed to be heard as, but you know the direction it's supposed to go."
The music reflects the struggle of its own creation: for his records he often includes not the perfect take, but the one "where the mistakes were perfect. On that take, the mistakes were showing what we were going for, and when we got it right, it was just reciting something that was composed before." Above all, the music must defy expectations, and he will not let anyone coast by relying on clichés.
Recalling his work on Exotica from 1992, Bruce describes "the archetypal Kip session. There'd be all these really well-written transcriptions of things from the '40s---Cuban arrangements, big-band arrangements, all neatly done. Then Kip would say, 'Okay, I don't want you to play anything like this.' And that was the direction. You looked at the music and didn't play anything like it. So a lot of guys were scratching their heads, and actually coming up with some pretty interesting stuff." Their records together have proved a unique showcase for the richness of Bruce's voice, close and revealing, right at the center of the music.
While Hanrahan's vision may be somewhat complex, he recognizes that he is not an easy person to work with. "I'm driven by this thing to make it audible. I'm going to knock down walls to get to it, and I don't care who's standing in front of it." That drive comes "out of anger and passion and sexuality." He has been known to scream at musicians, and once he even threw a microphone stand at someone. "You know the result you're aiming for, even if it doesn't have any definite angles, and you fight through the process to make it heard."
But surviving that struggle brings its rewards. "When the musician's depth and complexity matches yours, you both change the tone of the emotion you're going for, and something else comes out of it which is even richer and more complex, and darker and with more shades, and you realize, this is a lifetime friend."
Hanrahan did not always think he would be a musician, let alone a producer. Though he was already playing percussion in Latin bands as a teenager growing up in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx, he saw himself rather as a soccer player. He had learned the sport to gain approval from his maternal grandfather, who had helped his mother raise him: his grandfather was a big man among the Russian émigrés, a Jew from Samarkand who came to the southwest Bronx early in the century with Leon Trotsky. But Hanrahan left the Bronx when he won a fellowship to Cooper Union in Manhattan. There he studied under the German-born conceptual artist Hans Haacke, who introduced him to "a method of critically thinking that was able to turn the restlessness into a forward motion."
He took the opportunity to travel and study abroad---India, Haiti, Morocco---and during those years he also discovered the Jazz Composers Orchestra, the avant-garde musicians' collective founded in the late 1960s by the pianist Carla Bley and the trumpeter Michael Mantler. Drawn by the music, he took a job in the collective's production office, where he learned about setting up a record company and independent distribution.
The project that launched American Clavé, though it did not bear fruit until years later, began as a collaboration with the writer Ishmael Reed back in the late '70s. Hanrahan was going to direct a film based on Reed's script to the music of Cecil Taylor and the dancing of Mikhail Baryshnikov, but it grew out of his control and fizzled away. Meanwhile, the label released Ya Yo Me Curé as its first title, by an old friend, the trumpeter and percussionist Jerry Gonzalez; both Gonzalez and his brother Andy, a bassist, have been recurring contributors to Hanrahan's music. As a result of that experience, he decided to make his own first record, Coup de Tête (1981), which he describes as his "Alice in Wonderland," where he tried out every idea he was unable to use on the Gonzalez session.
After recording Desire Develops an Edge, which received rave reviews, he formed the band Conjure, asking various musicians to write music to Reed's poems. The group's first album, Conjure (1985), featured Taj Mahal, the pianist Allen Toussaint, the bassist Steve Swallow, and the saxophonist David Murray. Hanrahan remains the band's musical director and occasional writer, with Bobby Womack or Jimmy Scott as the principal singer.
As a producer, Hanrahan has had his biggest success with The Late Masterpieces, three records by his "artistic father," the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla. The experience was "an intoxicating release from responsibility," he recalled, free of the doubt in his own work. "It's great to subordinate yourself to somebody else's esthetic in which you have such an absolute loving faith, to take his esthetic further." These sessions were Piazzolla's favorite, and among his last. The first of them, Tango: Zero Hour (1986), was the label's best seller by nearly double, at 72,000 copies sold worldwide.
Lately, American Clavé has produced another release long in the making, the two-CD collection Darn It! (1994), a rich array of musical settings for poems by Paul Haines, another of Hanrahan's mentors (Haines was the co-writer of Bley's landmark album Escalator Over the Hill [1971], which also featured Bruce). For now, however, Hanrahan has turned fully back to his own music. In addition to A Thousand Nights and a Night, he is completing an album built around live performances of his band in Europe, All Roads Are Made of the Flesh.
Though he takes his cues from a wide field of interests, Bley appreciates the originality of Hanrahan's music. "He's just a genius at getting the right people together," she says. "Everybody wants to work for him because then they get a chance to work with someone they've always admired." Indeed, he has been calling musicians from all over the map for what may yet grow into a three-CD opus. Every week or two he travels to New York to direct more sessions and to try out new ideas, relentless in his desire to hear what he had not imagined.
* * *
published in Review: Latin American Literature and Arts (New York) 60 (Spring 2000)
Ever bountiful in ideas, Kip Hanrahan is the prime force behind the exhilarating, mostly percussion and voice ensemble Deep Rumba. On This Night Becomes A Rumba (American Clavé), the raw, authentic, soul-stirring sources are there, and so are a wealth of departures: Ruben Blades’ delivery of a lyric by Vallejo, surprising renditions of Charles Trenet and of Cream’s “Sunshine of Your Love.” The power of the spirit found here, its smart, cohesive and intense play, also inform the latest installments of Hanrahan’s musical passion and obsession, A Thousand Nights And A Night. On Shadow Nights-1 and Shadow Nights-2, the miraculous adventure continues, full of new angles, new shifts in the light.
* * *
published in Shuffle Boil (Berkeley) 5/6 (2006)
Silvana Deluigi, ¡Yo! (2002); Kip Hanrahan, Original Music For PIÑERO (2002); American Clavé, I was born but... (2001) (American Clavé)
The newest releases of Hanrahan’s label deftly reconfirm his protean talents as musician, producer, and passionate poetic mensch. The special way he puts together a record, investing his all, has long been a hallmark of every project---like an emerging language articulated not just as cinematic or emotional sequence, like so many stations of the cross, but as investigations, excavations of the human heart. Deluigi has sung on other Hanrahan records, but her stellar debut under his direction marks a new era in his romance with Argentina while rooted fruitfully in his past work with Piazzolla; indeed, it is lovely to hear her native musical culture bend and extend its colors through Hanrahan’s treatments. His soundtrack for the Leon Ichaso film Piñero (a project that prefigures his upcoming record of another NuYorican poet, Pirri Thomas) makes the film sound seductive, cool, burning, driven, though from what I’ve heard about the movie I don’t know. More importantly, the date gives him occasion to reassemble many of his most steadfast collaborators over the past two decades, and that is more than reason enough to celebrate. The label’s anthology of new work, I was born but..., offers a rich menu with pieces from Deluigi’s record as well as recent dates by Hanrahan stalwarts, percussionists El Negro Horacio Hernandez and Robby Ameen (Robby and Negro at the Third World War) and violinist Alfredo Triff (21 Broken Melodies at Once), as well as tracks from the Pirri Thomas sessions and a most startling find, the sound collage symphony by early Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, Enthusiasm (Complete Soundtrack). What worlds.