Tom Maxwell blows hot

But he's not just full of air

by Jon Garelick

Practically before we've started our phone conversation, and before we've even begun to discuss his new solo album or his imminent arrival at the Met Cafe, Tom Maxwell wants to know whether I'd like to talk about "this body I'm dragging along behind me." Does he mean his old band, the Squirrel Nut Zippers? No, it's the "so-called swing movement."

So-called swing, you'll recall, was propelled in large part by Maxwell's breakthrough hit for the Zippers, "Hell," from their 1996 album Hot (Mammoth). It was a big-beat calypso tune driven by the band's horns and topped with Maxwell's over-the-top baritone vocal ponderings on the afterlife. And it launched a thousand calypsos and, for a while it seemed, a thousand "swing" bands, though those in the know knew it wasn't swing at all. Besides, if it was swing, that made it jazz, and why was jazz suddenly getting played on "modern rock" stations?

"Swing, it's a dirty word, it's tough," sighs Maxwell. "I'll tell you why: like anything else it has many layers, and the surface layer, which was the most examined, was imposed upon the Zippers. It had more to do with the associated iconography of martinis and cigars and zoot suits, which clearly has nothing to do with music . . . and then, musically, it seemed to be a fairly one-dimensional expression of, like, maybe Kansas City jump blues with a Gene Krupa floor-tom beat."

Most jazzheads associated swing with the 4/4 ching-chinga-ding beat of Benny Goodman and the big bands, but Maxwell and his crowd were going further back -- to the 1920s of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven bands, to Fats Waller, Django Reinhardt, and Sidney Bechet, but also to all manner of ancient American popular music, what Maxwell prefers to call "American vernacular music."

Part of the wonder of Maxwell's new Samsara (Samsara Ltd.) is that it serves up so many mixed scents of music you think you know before disappearing into something else entirely. The piercing, spooky wail of a Chinese bamboo-reed horn opens the disc ("Indicatif"), but there's also touches of Chinese opera ("Some Born Singing"), some smooth Charles Brown balladeering via T-Bone Walker ("Don't Give Me the Runaround"), Fats Waller pipe-organ jazz ("You Always Get What's Coming"), a country male-female vocal duet supported by pedal steel (George Jones's "Flame in My Heart"), a few gospel-quartet vocal numbers, and a reiteration of Duke Ellington's Cotton Club classic "The Mooche." By the time the album drifts off on the cloud of saxophones and clarinets that conclude the title tune (beautifully sung by Maxwell's opposite-gender vocal counterpart, Holly Harding Baddour), you've got not scattershot eclecticism or "novelty" appeal but a fully conceived emotional statement. It's Maxwell's imagined lost world, which somehow seems very much a part of this one.

Maxwell -- a 34-year-old multi-instrumentalist who was for years a rock-and-roll drummer before joining the Zippers in 1994 -- talks in an all-out run of words tempered by a soft Chapel Hill twang and punctuated with mid-sentence, chest-racking bursts of laughter. "You're talking not necessarily about mimicry," he says of the best tendencies of the, uh, "vernacular bands," "but a continuation of what some of the greatest artists did -- like Armstrong and Waller and Ellington and Henderson. Just huge talents. So if you build your house on a strong foundation aesthetically, it can't be beat."

Maxwell's musical references take in vast landscapes of pop, though he also admits to huge gaps. What that means for his music is that his hot-jazz sensibility can also be informed at any point by '60s pop, like the bit of Syd Barrett-inspired backwards tape that emerges as a break in the middle of the hot-jazz "Caveat Emptor."

As for "hot" itself, you'll find jazz fans themselves debating just what that is. Originally it distinguished the syncopated rhythms and expressive timbres of early jazz from the "sweet" society-band sound of the time. But for Maxwell, it's as much a subjective emotional description as a generic technical definition, one that was later supplanted by "swing" as being synonymous with jazz. "When some guy was really going for it, they would say that he was playing hot or that he swung. . . . I very much think that what Armstrong was doing with the Hot Five was pretty quintessential, what Duke was doing with the Cotton Club Orchestra and the Washingtonians in Harlem, what Fats was doing on the pipe organ in Camden in '26, Fletcher Henderson's band with Coleman Hawkins -- these were hot bands. Hot as in fire bands. And then swing became sort of a smoother, dotted-eighth-note [that ching-chinga-ding], white-guys-got-into-it sorta thing. It was largely propelled by Benny Goodman, who always had phenomenal bands. And then to a greater extent in terms of the trend but to a lesser extent artistically, Paul Whiteman, who had the good sense to surround himself with great players but whose music was invariably watered down and candy-ass. Even though he had" -- Maxwell gropes for the name -- "fucking dingbat, that trumpet player in his band, that white boy who could really play, Bix Beiderbecke! But he didn't use Bix [one of Maxwell's phlegmy laughs ignites], he just had Bix play some kind of socially acceptable dance music."

Maxwell can even trace the Chinese elements of his current album to the taste for exotica in '20s Harlem. "Indicatif," his brief overdubbed sona solo, is an eerie album opener. "It has that sound," he says of the instrument, "it's portentous. It really sounds like something is about to happen, and they sound great when you've got a few of them playing together . . . And it's really phenomenally difficult to play [another explosion of laughter], it's just fucking horribly hard to play, because it's not like a saxophone, which pretty much has a set pitch and key for fingerings; on the sona you can change the tone of a fingering like a step and a half -- it's freakish. What you have on my record is a rank amateur trying to get something halfway decent out of it, literally. But you know, any instrument is going to tell you how it wants to be played, instruments kind of write their own songs, and clearly this thing just wrote its own song. I was just trying to keep up with it and be an appropriate mouthpiece. I knew I wanted `Indicatif' as an introductory piece, and I think that unless you're really good, I think anything more than a minute will make people's toes curl. I didn't necessarily want to subject someone to an extended improvisation on this thing."

Maxwell's little disquisition on that one-minute piece is a pretty good key to his aesthetic -- a musician with high-school-band training and rock-band experience, going by ear and intuition, and a sense of what will or won't connect with an audience. "There's trained guys who can play the shit out of their instruments who are technically much more advanced than I am but who also seem, by extension, to not really have a mind for, you know, full-on improvisation, they seem to be really uncomfortable in that mode. And then there are guys like Ken [Mosher, former Zipper, now in Maxwell's band] and to a lesser degree myself who just sort of go, `Shit, yeah, I can play a Chinese horn, nobody else is going to do it!' Most people have more sense than to do that, but I think there's a real sort of freedom, there's no wrong notes, you play what sounds good and you're reinventing the wheel, constantly, you didn't understand that people already know what a flat five is, you just sort of come upon it yourself and go, `Wow, that's really really cool.' "

That would explain the circuitous process of creating "Some Born Singing," in which Baddour sings haiku-like verses to a vaguely Asian backing of delicate strings and flutes. A tune from a traditional Chinese folk opera, it was lifted from a tape given to Maxwell by the same friend who gave him the vintage Chinese firecracker labels that served as the inspiration for the CD cover of the Zippers' Hot. "I did some digging and found that the original opera was called According to One's Heart Desire, and it's about betting on horses, it's about horse racing!" Without having any idea of the English translation of the song, Maxwell, fascinated by the "linear, non-Western" sound of the piece, began to write lyrics. "I tried just writing my own lyric for it, and it just flat didn't work, the meter and the phrasing were so odd, and the rhyme pattern was something that I wanted to preserve. So I just listened to the original and wrote down what it sounded like the woman was singing in English, and I knew that a theme would arise out of it and it did." The lyric, which begins "Death can be noiseless," is as haunting and evocative as the music, and it loosely connects to the album's title, a Buddhist term for, in Maxwell's words, life's "endless cycle of desire and dissatisfaction."

These exotic musical and thematic touches don't undermine the old-fashioned "American" roots of the album -- in their mongrel, handmade nature, they make the link with America's past even stronger: Maxwell's specially recruited Remember vocal quartet, meant to conjure the venerable Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet; or the Waller of "You Always Get What's Coming" ("That's Fatsy-Watsy all right," confirms Maxwell. "Who else did hot-jazz pipe organ?!").

The title tune, sung by Baddour, is a sublime album closer, beginning with just voice and harp and then carried out on reeds. It could be the one truly "original" piece on the CD, in that its sources are unlocatable. "I knew I wanted the song to be played on harp, because it's a little more delicate and versatile than guitar, and if you play those changes on piano it might start to sound like a Queen song. I knew I wanted a swelling, moving horn line at the end; it very well could have been strings, but we had gotten a Selmer endorsement and I basically robbed them of every conceivable horn, so I thought wouldn't it be cool if you take all the woodwinds that we have, all the saxophones and clarinets, and start on the lowest of the low instruments and end on the highest of the high instruments, which would basically be bookended by a bass saxophone and a B-flat clarinet, and then gradually have it ascend to get across the idea that one -- perhaps the singer of the song, or even the listener, has started to rise above this unhappy condition. And we fooled around with that for a while and figured out what the proper voicings should be. I knew what I wanted and we just messed with it until we got something that was right. It was basically me and Kenny just switching off horns: okay, I'll play the bass, and you play the baritone and I'll do the tenor, and whatever. We knocked it out."

Tom Maxwell plays the Met Cafe this Friday, June 9. Call 861-2142.