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Freddy Reiter (NYSJE)


Mike Rufhus - from the young and promising band The Articles - , interview for SkabadiP Freddy Reiter, from the great New York Ska-Jazz Ensemble . What come's out is a charming and hi-quality interview. That's Ska-jazz baby...
 


 

Basically my knowledge of the beginnings of NYSJE comes from the liner notes of the first record. They say that you and Rick Faulkner discovered a common desire to reimagine Ska through the context of American Jazz and that you brainstormed a dream-list of personnel and pretty much everybody on the list jumped right in. How does the real story of the genesis of NYSJE differ for the account? Is there anything else we need to know?

That’s the basic gist of it. I guess we also wanted another venue, another means to get our music out. I always had done instrumental music and once we’d seen the Skatalites we really felt we could take our own twist on this music. Obviously, having been playing with the Toasters for a few years by that point, we really felt we were ready to do our thing. And the other element of it was that we were so connected to Buck and Moon that I knew that there was a way to get the record out. And so at first it was just that we were doing this cause we felt like playing then once we did it once or twice we were like “Man, we should record this shit. It sounds great."

How long had you been playing the music before you came to the conclusion that you wanted to record it?

This was like a rehearsal or two.

So you knew you had something good.

Yeah, we got together and were like “This stuff is rockin’. Let’s record it."

The first thing that struck me personally was your name. It’s very straight forward and sums up everything at the expense of some pretty loaded words. Break down your name: New York Ska Jazz Ensemble. First of all, let’s start with “New York" New York is a big town full of big people with big ideas and egos. Outside of the Ska scene how has the city’s music culture reacted to your use of the city’s name?

It’s all good. We always seem to have a core group of fans in New York and we just played the Knitting Factory and we play Wetlands a lot. We had a show at The Manhattan center in front of a thousand or fifteen hundred people and that was our first show. So we’ve always done well here in New York and we’re reviewed well in The Voice and in some of different publications. So for the most part we have to say it’s very good. Long Island is maybe a different story, everybody takes good care of us, and Long Island takes good care of us, but there just aren’t that many venues we can play.


Do you have fans among the New York Jazz community?

I think that’s starting to happen more now, especially when we go to a place like The Knitting Factory because I think we definitely do have those types of fans; I don’t know if they’re directly New York. You were saying you got some really good press form Norman Weinstein [Weinstein, a prominent Jazz critic named Flip F’ral the number one reggae record of 1997]. We’ve had some really good press from him and some other noted Jazz critics. We’ve gotten reviewed very favorably, but I don’t know that I’d say specifically that “these guys in this scene…" we just have fans. It’s not as broken down. I’ll say that playing a place like the Knitting Factory we’ll more likely to get those Jazz-core people. Because sometimes with the shows for the kids where the scene gets kind of nuts, it’s great for us, but I not saying that the older crowds are really drawn to the Sunday Matinees at Wetlands, they’re more drawn to an older people sort of club.

The Articles have found that a lot of our fans have are musicians themselves. Do you find the same thing with your audiences?

Yes and no. We just have a lot of different people that dig the music. We have a lot of Ska kids that dig the music. And the thing that’s good about it too is they’ll say “My Mom like’s the music too". So, I’m sure there are a lot of musicians who do like us and respect it but I’m not super aware that that’s our crowd so to speak when we play live.

So you say you have a good following among the younger Ska scene, and that brings me back to the second question, the next loaded word in your name: “Ska." For better or for worse, the Ska scene is fairly receptive to new ideas. Jazz, though, has kind of a stigma. It kind of intimidates and alienates a lot of people. A lot of people will claim not to be Jazz fans. Does the Jazz nature of your music put off kids in the Ska scene?

I think to the extent that the Ska scene is somewhat frayed, I mean you’ve got the Ska-punk element and then you have the more traditionalist element I think the people that are just totally into the Punk sort of vibe might not appreciate us as much. Although this is a generalization because I think we have fans from across the board that might like Less Than Jake, they might like some of the harder bands and they might like us, you know. But I think, in general, the people who are really strict about what Ska is don’t like the Jazzier element. There have been some reviews here and there where they’ve been like “Oh no! We don’t like “Naima." Or something like that, actually I don’t know if that one’s been dissed, but you know how it goes. And it stands to reason that there will be certain elements. We’re putting on a more harmonized, melodic form of music. It’s a less thrashy sort of thing. People who love to thrash ain’t gonna get it from us.
When we first played California it was the first time anybody in the audience distinguished between The Articles playing Ska-Jazz and playing trad. In the midwest where we’re from, everything is very Punk-driven and we were perceived as a traditional band. And out west where Traditional is really a science and a religion, they didn’t notice the traditionalism. What I found interesting is that unwittingly, the midwest crowds had made a distinction and made the connection between Ska-Jazz and traditional Ska in what I’ve always felt that Traditional Ska WAS Ska-Jazz, dance music played by Ska musicians.
I think that’s where NYSJE really stretched it. Because when you think of more traditional stuff like The Skatalites, when you compare their tunes with our tunes, they never—at least on their albums, or as far I’m aware of—did a lot of standards. And not only are we doing standards, but we’re picking major composers, and not only are we picking major composers, but in our originals we’re using stretched harmonies that you never find in a lot of the older trad tunes. You just wouldn’t find sharped ninths, and altered chords and these kind of things in the tunes. And I think we often change playing fast tempos, you just wouldn’t get that with Ska with a much slower tempo.

Do you feel an impulse to keep it on the popular side of Jazz. Do you feel there’s a line you can cross when you really start to lose people?

I think there is that possibility. I really don’t concern myself it. I think of NYSJE as a dance band, and as long as the music is danceable it doesn’t really matter what you play. I think that’s evidenced by something like Haitian Fight song. I have little kids yelling “Play that song! Play that song!" Think about it, it’s Charles Mingus. It’s like wow, they’re screaming for this kind of avant garde Jazz hero. But the way it’s massed in the groove, it really doesn’t matter. So, I think you can kind of get away with anything you want to play as people can dance to it--as long as there’s a groove to it. But at the same time I think maybe if you get too esoteric you can lose people and I don’t know that we consciously steer away from that, but I know what interests me. And that links to the point of another kind of concept with NYSJE that I’ve really wanted to bring to the forefront, and I feel it’s made us as successful as we are, is the fact that Jazz music used to be the popular music of the time. Jazz music back in the 40’s was the popular music. That’s what they listened to, that’s what they heard on the radio, that’s what they went out and danced to. I always found that as the Jazz tradition kept going there were elements that snubbed the audience. The bop era was, in a sense, was like “we’re too cool," or “we’re too musically knowledgeable for our audience, this isn’t for the them". Whereas I’ve always felt that the music is for the people, you want to bring it to the people. So I feel NYSJE wants to bring Jazz back to a time when Jazz was fun.

Mingus’ music for me always began in the church.

The spiritual element.

Exactly, and Miles Davis’ music was always a much colder approach. That’s why I gravitate towards music like Mingus’ s that originated at a real grassroots level.

That brings up another relevant thing to me personally. People say, “what music do you like, what’s your favorite" and one of the things I tend to say is I like music that’s heartfelt, I like music with soul. It even gets past your question of does Jazz put people off, is this commercial or not. To a real basic level, we play music, I care what you call it, we happen to use the words “Ska" and “Jazz" in the name. The reality is that we play music that we love, that we feel in our hearts. And thank God people seem to appreciate it. Ultimately it’s gotta be that way. It’s not like “we think we’re going to play this because we think they’ll dig it. You know what I mean. What I’m saying is somewhat analogous to what you’re saying is that you pick a Mingus Tune that you think is totally in the groove, it’s got the church vibe, whatever, it’s got that feeling, you want to do it, whether it’s Charles Mingus or whoever the composer may be.


The term Ska-Jazz was affixed to The Articles after we started playing and it’s widely used to describe bands that explore Ska from a Jazz platform. Were you aware of an actual term “Ska-Jazz" prior to your formation?

We coined that term.

So you did, in fact coin the term Ska-Jazz?

Yep.

So how do you feel about coining a term that’s in such wide use, at least in this scene?

I think it’s great, I think on a certain level we really were the first in a way. Certainly there was The Skatalites and Jamaican Jazz, but I think to the extent that it has been Americanized, we were the first.

Do you think carrying the name of an entire movement puts you under a higher level of scrutiny? Do you feel a little more pressure?

Sometimes, I want to say yes. In a lot of ways though, we’re really aware of it and our fans are really aware of it, but I don’t think the whole culture is aware of it, so basically we’re still going out there—and like what we got to do at the Bob Marley Reggae festival, I don’t think many of those people know who Laurel Aitken was. So we’re still going out there as unknowns, relatively speaking. We have our core audiences. In another way, we’re known all over the world. But I think, in terms of the general public, people still aren’t aware of Ska-Jazz. They’re not even aware of Ska. So I think the pressure just comes from within anyway. You go out, you want to perform, you want to do as best you can. I think it only goes that far. I don’t think we’re under any more pressure than you [The Articles] are when you do one of you gigs. You just want to kick it.

I hate to get back to your name again, but NYSJE has experienced a certain amount of success outside of the United States. Do you think having a name that has those really powerful words in it-- “New York", “Jazz" –does that send a real loud call to people in Europe who historically tend to be drawn to things American and Jazz? Has that helped you having that name as opposed to a less representational name like “Eastern Standard Time" or even “The Articles"?

I think that it has, I definitely think it has. You know, there a couple of things I want to bring up in regards to the whole European phenomenon. I do think when you start playing little towns in East Germany and Poland, just being from New York is like “wow". They’ve heard of the biggest city in the world and they think it’s cool. I think that comes along with being from New York. Definitely it’s an attitude, hopefully not too much of an ego, but I think stylistically, musically, I’ve always felt like it gave me an edge and the band an edge just because to be successful in New York it takes a lot of grit. That’s the element in the band and in the music that I really like; it’s got an edgy vibe. That, and Europeans are very open to new music. Europeans have traditionally, or as you said, always historically supported Jazz musicians. So I always had dreams, whether it was before I was involved in Ska-Jazz or whatever, of going to Europe and playing the festivals because I thought, and it was known, that American musicians were given a little more respect than here at home. Coupling that alongside the fact that all of us had been in fairly well-known named bands such as Skatalites, Scofflaws, Toasters—Victor [Rice] had played with Desmond Dekker, Cary [Brown] had played with Eek A Mouse, I’ve been to Europe now like 14 times—Ska-Jazz alone has done four tours. So we knew a lot of people, we knew the clubs, we knew the scene, we knew what the other bands were playing, and what was getting over. Putting that all together that’s what enabled us to get over there to begin with. If I hadn’t been over there with the Toasters, I never would have met some of the different people who I thought might help get us there. The fact that we had these other “name" bands on our backs helped to draw out some of the initial crowds. But then, of course, you want to lose that—I don’t want to be know as an ex-Toaster, although I’m proud of it, but we want to stand on our own, which I believe we do. And that takes us to the arena of “Do you kick ass?," “Is your material good?," “Are you good?," “Do people like you?" it really has nothing to do with where you come from. I think you’ll find when you [The Articles] go to Europe you’ll find that just being from the states in and of itself helps. You know, it’s different. It’s like a different culture. It’s interesting.

Talking about the bands where you came from -The Toasters in particular—I find it especially interesting that there are inklings of NYSJE throughout The Toasters discography. Even early on, on the first Toasters record I had, Thrill Me Up, they were exploring Gershwin with a version of Rhapsody in Blue. Whether or not that was a successful exploration, by Dub 56 you were doing A Night in Tunisia by Dizzy Gillespie, Do this speak to a larger sense that even the poppiest Ska band has those Jazz currents?

I think it does! Especially it might say something about New York, or about horn bands. But I think that that stuff is evidence. Me, Rick Faulkner and Sledge, we’re Jazz guys. And there a lot of Jazz guys in New York. And when you have a horn section in New York, whatever they’re playing, there’s certainly an good chance, and in our case, that we’re all pretty much entrenched in the Jazz tradition. So obviously that’s going to come out.


Do you think this subtle exposure to Jazz through The Toasters kind of softened up the younger kids for what was going to happen when NYSJE came together? Do you thing in some ways you were preparing them by sneaking in these very hard Jazz messages?

Certainly not consciously, but maybe unconsciously. Really, the impetus for us was that we wanted to play some other kinds of tunes.

I think one of the sweetest things you as the Toasters horns did was at the end of one of the newer, poppier Toasters songs, you used to quote the melody line form Cool Blues by Charlie Parker. I quote that all the time when I play, and I thought that was just a great little secret message to the other horn players in the crowd when you played it.

Well, you know what it’s like: horn players have their own sort of language. So that’s going to come out. We all played the horn parts in The Toasters horn section, but when it came time to solo, and when it came time to write our own tunes, our influences were going to come out. And our influences are not only Jazz, but certainly it’s a strong one.

It is certainly the vocabulary of all horn players. Let me jump to the big question. Based on his early fusions of latin, swing and bop with Ska, many contend that Joey Altruda is really the father of Ska-Jazz. Where you aware of his work when NYSJE was conceived?

Was I aware of Joey’s work at that time, I think, yes, I was. Yes, because I had heard the California Skaquake and he had a track on that. I think Joey’s stuff is more latin influenced than ours. And he also has that swingy thing going on. I mean, the idea of who started whatever—we definitely coined the term — however you have to credit The Skatalites or the original Jazz Jamaicans for playing the style. I just think in our time and in our geography, we started our thing here in New York. Joey might have done his thing in California. If you listen to NYSJE and then listen to Jump With Joey, and there are definitely similarities, but they’re also very different.

There definitely is a West Coast sound, and as you mentioned, Joey’s music is very latin influenced.

Yes.

Conversely, would you say there’s an East Coast sound?

Right. And it has a lot of the element I was talking about earlier; more stretched harmonies, at times much faster tempos, and certainly at times a real edge. I mean, certainly, on our first record, one of the songs I wrote - Nasty By Nature - has a real edge to it that I don’t think you’d get from a California band. I don’t know, this might be a far-reaching analogy, but it’s sort of like Cool Jazz versus Bebop. I’m not saying they’re soft, but I am saying there is a difference.

I think, as you said, there is a harder edge in general. When The Articles started touring we started to identify with some of the harder edged music that came out of Detroit. I don’t if it’s something as simple as the climate, that we’re cooped up for six months out of the year and we’re angry for it or what.

Certainly you’re going to get that stuff in New York. I mean you’ve got all these people, there’s a million musicians, you can’t get a gig, you gotta practice your ass off, you’re trying to make it work, you gotta kick ass, just to get the guys to rehearse you gotta call a million people, you’ve got to pay for the rehearsal, I mean, all this shit is going to come out in your music. Not that we’re sour or bitter, certainly we don’t want that to came out, but I think that “Edge" is the word.

There’s a lot of critical mass to the East Coast sceneand in the Moon camp and the Version City camp, and in lot of ways the Long Island scene, you’ve got a tremendous interplay between players. On NYSJE’s records alone you’ve got guest players from Checkered cabs from DC or The Pietasters from DC, not to mention all the band mates of your respective bands of origin. Do you think that intermixing of players has an impact on having a distinct East Coast sound coalesce?

Certainly for creating an East Coast sound it’s been great. Me, personally, as a side man was the first one who started getting it all together, like I started playing with the Scofflaws, just playing with a lot of different bands. I think not only does it help you musically as a musician because you have to learn all these different songs, but I think obviously when you play with a band for a certain amount of time, you learn something from them from their sound, and I think if you do that with enough of the bands there’s going to be certain kinds of overlaps.

On that note, I find interesting somebody like Jeff Baker aka King Django who has enough interplay with enough musicians that he can essentially write songs with different combinations of musicians in mind. He can write a song and throw it in the Skinnerbox pile. He can write a song and throw it in the Stubborn All-Stars pile. Not to mention all the various permutations of the Version City musicians that he has direct or indirect creative influence over. This seems like a uniquely New York phenomenon, and something you’d not likely see in California.

That’s right. A lot of bands think like “This is my band and you’re not a part of it." An insular thing. That doesn’t play really well into the New York mentality. Because if you’ve got really good players in your band they’re going to have another gigs once in a while—you’re going to have to get a sub every now and again. I don’t know; maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad; you never would’ve subbed for one of the Beatles. I don’t know if it’s good or it’s bad. I think it’s good in the sense that it does create a sound. Every band has it’s own identity, but I think it’s cool that there’s this pool of musicians. Unfortunately now with NYSJE, the pool is not that big. Because to find guys that are well-versed in Ska AND Jazz, guys that know the sensibilities, the numbers are not that great, and this is New York. I can’t imagine when one of The Articles can’t perform.

Well, it’s become interesting. We’ve become a pretty tightly compacted unit here. We’re a six-piece now so every player counts. We’ve really become a magnet for good musicians, and there are some really good musicians in the band now, making it even tougher to find folks to fill in at a moments’ notice. But back to you, here’s an artfully phrased question; If the first wave of Ska was brought about by Jazz musicians, and the second wave, 2-tone, brought about by the punks, during the much more pluralistic third wave, with the punks and Jazz men side by side, what has NYSJE taught the punks, and what have the punks taught you?

Well, my whole view of he waves is somewhat different sometimes; sometimes I look at what we’re doing as a fourth wave in a sense. But I’ll just go along with your question there to begin with: what have I learned from the punks? I would say just edge. Vibe. Energy. Show. Those are the main things. I could start to get facetious: it’s okay to eat your vomit. I have seen that—I really don’t appreciate that. Those are the main things I’ve learned. I’ve also learned simplicity; that sometimes less is more. I’ve learned that we don’t always have to be this highly intellectual experience. That we can just feel the music, you know?

So what have you taught the punks?

What have I hopefully taught them? That good music is good music. Just because it says Jazz doesn’t mean it’s a bad word. Great composers are great composers. They WILL live forever. Just because we play the Jazzy-influence music doesn’t mean we don’t have the edge, and we CAN kick your ass.

Exactly! You started to get at the fourth wave, and we could do a whole series of interviews about the waves and what and who defines the waves and what defines those waves. Assuming this was the third wave, and NYSJE existed in that wave, if there was another revival in another 10 years or so, what role do you think NYSJE will play in this wave? What do you think you’ll be doing?

Well, I hope that we’ll be growing, I hope that we’ll be evolving. Basically for the band and for me I want the band to play in front as many people as we can. I want the band to still be as creative as possible, writing new songs, coming up with new shit, adding to what we’ve done, and moving forward. It’s sort of outside of the wave concept in a way. Just because that’s what musicians do: they just want to play. They want to grow. They want to become better players. They want to become a better band. They want to do better recordings. They want to be heard by more people.

Still assuming this is the third wave, who do you think will still be around for the next?

Tough question.

Do you think The Toasters will be around?

I think The Toasters might still be around. For me The Toasters are a new band now. It’s very possible they’ll still be around.

Do you think The Specials will perhaps take on that sort of Patron Sainthood the Skatalites took on? Or do you think they got a little caught up in the mire and morass of the more commercial aspect of this wave?

It’s really hard to say. I did hear one of their new records and I really didn’t like it that much. I didn’t think it was anything new. It just like more cover tunes and it just seemed to be the same old recycled thing. And not even recorded all that well. But then, when we had a night off in Portland, I saw them live and they were phenomenal, So, if they can keep up those kind of live shows, then yeah, they will, because they were great. And they have the name and the history to keep it going.


And to the Skatalites discredit and credit, they have some lousy recordings too but they really play beyond them when you see them live.

Right.

And I think this speaks to the importance and necessity of live music, which I hope won’t be lost. Bands now, more than any other era, are commodified by the music industry, and I think that’s why the third wave crashed so hard. I think Ska-Jazz will survive because Jazz has always existed beyond the context of the capitalist success model. Do you think that a lot of bands that were in it for the commercial aspect of the third wave - the bands with a much more pop-oriented tack - will fade into yesterday’s big thing obscurity, and do you think the bands that took it from a Jazz approach will slough off that stigma of commercial failure.

Back to the thing about the fourth wave--at the very least, NYSJE and bands like The Articles, we’re an extension. If you want to call us a back-tail end extension of the third wave, or our own thing, but it’s an extension; we moved the music forward in a sense. In regards to commercialism and what happens, there are stil a lot of kid Ska bands, I think that’s great. I think a lot of those who didn’t come up with the success they wanted, they’ll bag it. I know from people in our band, I consider myself a lifer as a musician. Whether I play with The Toasters or Ska-Jazz, or Stanley Jordan or whoever, I’m going to keep playing the saxophone and the flute until I drop. You do have to be creative about how you make a living. I would love to sell tons and tons of records. Quite honestly I’m very happy about how our records have sold to this point. I know we’ve sold more than most Jazz records in and of themselves, so that in itself is great, and the forums we’ve gotten to play for have been great. I will keep playing this music and I will keep trying to make this band exist. You know, the commercial element is always a very difficult one. I didn’t go into music to try to become rich - I did it because I love it. The money end and the business end, though I tend to do a lot of it in this band, is a means to an end, the end being that I get to play my saxophone. Making money is a pain in the ass. We’re going to record a Reggae track and do a video, so maybe we’ll get a hit like that. Basically I’d love to not have to worry about the money. And getting back to what you were talking about earlier, the market wasn’t set up right in a sense. First there were no Ska bands: you’d have a show once a month and all the kids would come out. Then it was once a week, and then all of the sudden it was like three a week and bands were competing. So there was no togetherness of the scene. And then the big record companies started seeing that Ska was happening, they said let’s pick a few bands, sop them up, and take the money and run. That’s seemingly what happened. For a band like us, I always felt we were out of that loop anyway. In a way that’s good, because even if the Ska world isn’t doing so good, it doesn’t completely affect us in a way. We’re still doing good. I mean, we just played the biggest show of our lives (The Bob Marley Reggae Festival). It does suck that the scene isn’t booming like it once was. But on the other hand, if you’re a good band, and it’s good music, it doesn’t matter what you call yourselves, people will come out to see you and they’ll buy your records.

So where is NYSJE heading creatively. Anywhere that would surprise us?

With each successive record we’ve tried something new. We’ve tried to stretch the boundaries. I’ve thought about doing an all-horn arrangement—we could even get you in on that…

Sure.

I’ve been talking about that for a while. Rick Faulkner has a latin influence and we’ve talked about a couple ideas, so I think we will go a little different. If you noticed, our third record (Get This) we really stretched the bounds of what we did a little more certainly than the first two.

I felt a looser, yet at the same time, a more pop sensibility to the record in the sense that there were some really infectious melodies. I think of the song Tilt-a-Whirl. It’s a very complicated chord progression.

It is, man! And it’s a really great tune to get to blow on.

At the same time it’s very catchy and very appealing.

That’s Cary Brown. He’s a really great writer; he wrote Blue Lunar Ska which is one of my favorites.

That’s my favorite tune off the second record [Low Blow].

Yeah, I don’t know whether people come up with those catchy melodies consciously. I know with mine, I knew that Cary and Victor would write somewhat darker stuff, I come to the table with something different. I know I could write those songs and have the whole record be dark and thick.

As The Articles have evolved, a lot of our new stuff, in fact all of it, is charted. It’s great for time-constraints and getting the most out of our rehearsals. Our process early on was very collaborative and uncharted, but I would imagine you guys have been using charts from the very beginning. Is this true or did a lot of your material start from jam-sessions as ours did?

Mostly each composer comes in with his chart.

Is there ever a point where you just lay down the charts and jam and just work backwards from there?

Yeah, definitely.

Name a tune that happened that way.

"Yeah Yeah, " that tune [from Get This], that was actually from the Kablam! recording sessions [Kablam! is an American children’s program for which Bucket and The Toasters composed the music], and that was just a jam.

There are a lot of songs in The Articles repretoire that I like, but the ones that I like the best are the ones we all wrote together.

Yeah, in NYSJE we don’t seem to do that too much. Basically someone will come up with an original, or we’ll choose a standard. For example when we did Mood Indigo, that was sort of unanimous. Everybody liked it. Somebody started playing it at a rehearsal, and before you knew it, everybody joined in and everybody liked it and we were like okay, lets play it. Everybody had their own little vibe on how that song would go. There’s definitely collaboration, but a lot of times the individual composers come in with the basic idea.

I think that’s how most bands operate. I know with The Articles, with the evolution of our songwriting, we’ve grown as musicians from just being a bunch of yahoos in the basement making racket into being a more sophisticated group of songwriters. Using written charts is just a part of that evolution. Speaking of evoluton, you have a new bassist; Victor Rice is no longer with the group. Who’s the new bassist?

Sheldon Gregg.

Is he bringing new songs to the table or do you feel he’s still in the side man mode where he doesn’t really feel comfortable with that yet?

Basically we haven’t really done new recordings yet. He’s certainly welcome to. I don’t want to have him in the side man mode. I don’t want anyone who’s in the band to feel that. He comes to the band with a Reggae sensibility, which in a way might suit the band better than Victor’s, I don’t know. He’s certainly grooving with the drummer really well, so the band sounds better than ever. When we were playing with Laurel Aitken he was like “Why don’t we play ‘Summertime in the Ghetto’," and he has his own sets of like and dislikes, and they’re certainly listened to. I really want to avoid the side man mentality as much as I can. One of the things I was just talking to Rick Faulkner about today was that sometimes in The Toasters it was like we were the second coming for that band, and we always felt like we weren’t one of the original core guys. Therefore on some level The Toasters were never ours. I want everybody who’s in NYSJE to be in it because they are in it. The bass player is in a very important position.

The most important position, as far as I’m concerned.

Right, you know how important it is. But the reality is any position is. And people are not easily replaced and I would rather not replace anybody if I can help it.

Finally - and I’m not fishing for a compliment for here - what bands that have come about in the wake of NYSJE do you really admire for pushing Ska-Jazz forward and outward; advancing the music; or whatever criteria you have for a band that you admire.

Oh yeah, definitely The Articles, definitely Eastern Standard Time, those are the two that come to mind. I think Jazz Jamaica is good but they don’t blow me away. I like Jump With Joey.

Have you heard Gangster Politics from Montreal? Victor produced their record right after The Articles [Flip F’real].

No I haven’t.

You should really get your hands on it. It was put out by Stomp Records, a label which Moon has an association. There’s some really smart stuff on it. I think you’d really dig it.

What’s the name of it?

Self-titled, Gangster Politics.

I’ll check it out.

Thanks so much Freddie. It’s been a gas talking with you. Finally, any shout-outs to the folks in Europe?

Definitely, if this is going to Alessandro, I want to say in particular to Italy and the Italian fans that NYSJE really loves playing in Italy. The fans have really taken us as their own. We feel really at home there. We’ve played for a lot of people and we’ve played some great shows. They always feed us really well and take good care of us, and we look forward to playing there again, very possibly this summer. We really love the Italian fans.
 



NYSJE Web Site: www.nysje.com
The Articles Web Site: www.thearticles.com

1999-2000

by Mike Rehfus




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