Press Release
Source: Fully Altered Media
The Digital Primitives
The name sums it up? Digital Primitives are both modern and ancient, explorers and researchers, deeply grounded in the past while carving out a new path into the future. On their second CD, Hum Crackle & Pop, the trio dig deep to unearth the roots of American music, fusing a new sound from free jazz, blues, funk, folk, with accents from the music’s African antecedents.
While saxophonist Assif Tsahar, multi-instrumentalist and instrument builder Cooper-Moore, and drummer/percussionist Chad Taylor are all powerful individual performers, they’re quick to assert that Digital Primitives is a band?—?not three musicians jamming, definitely not a leader and sidemen.
“Most interactions in the jazz world are very professional,” Tsahar says. “You come, you play the music, you go. But we’re close friends; we hang out at each other’s houses, playing and recording. It makes this more like the interaction in a rock band. It’s very rare in the jazz world.”
That friendship began nearly a decade ago, when Tsahar and Cooper-Moore played together in bassist William Parker’s band In Order To Survive.
The two formed a bond that has since resulted in a pair of duo records, a trio disc, with percussionist Hamid Drake, and finally the two Digital Primitives releases, all on Tsahar’s Hopscotch Records imprint.
Under Parker’s leadership, Cooper-Moore was playing piano; in Digital Primitives, he doesn’t touch the instrument for which he’s best known. Instead, he employs an array of instruments, including mouth bow, diddley-bow, banjo, fife, and voice.
“Nobody plays the instruments he plays,” Tsahar adds, “let alone playing them like he plays them.”
The CD is also influenced by a journey Tsahar and Cooper-Moore made to Ethiopia for the “Festival of a Thousand Stars”, where more than 50 distinct local cultures presented their music. Tsahar is currently editing a documentary he made during the experience.
“That trip reinforced the fact that Digital Primitives have permission to be different,” Cooper-Moore says. “A perfect example is Chad Taylor’s “Walkabout,” the first track on Hum Crackle & Pop. It’s in, it’s out and it’s beautiful.”
All three members share an extensive background in the avant-garde?Cooper-Moore going back to the NYC Loft scene of the 1970s and his collective trio Apogee, co-founded with David S. Ware; the Israeli-born Tsahar’s resume includes Parker, Peter Kowald, Hamid Drake, Rashied Ali, as well as being a co-founder of the Vision Festival; and Taylor has been an integral part of both the NY and Chicago scenes for twenty years, playing with Fred Anderson, Marc Ribot, the Chicago underground and and others.
But, the goal for Digital Primitives was not to go farther out, but to harness the energy and emotional content of free jazz to power something far more direct and accessible.
“I’ve always thought that my responsibility – growing up as a child, as a young person, and now as an elder – has always been to serve whoever the audience is,” Cooper-Moore says. “The music is raw and emotional, and it comes from elements that are American. It’s blues-based, it’s often pop-based, and it should be simple, to the point and grab people.”
“It’s both very free and very structured,” Tsahar says. “In spirit, we look to have the energy and unpredictability of free jazz, but we also have the structure and groove.”
Nowhere do those goals come to fruition more than on “Love Truth”, which features a fretless banjo melody and a relaxed, toe-tapping beat as catchy as anything on the Top 40 charts, to which Tsahar responds with a solo that begins slow-dance casual but grows increasingly frenzied, eventually reaching ecstatic heights of upper-register keening.
Similar points could be made about the swampy blues of “Hum” or “No Holiday”?—?and what song has ever been as audience friendly as “Over the Rainbow”, which the trio gives an unnerving spin on “Somewhere.”
No matter what emotion the music explores, each tune possesses an underlying narrative. Digital Primitives’ job, Cooper-Moore says, is to tell the audience that story through the music alone.
“We need to take the audience where we are. I can help them, because I’ve been doing this research in sound and emotion. But we have to know where we’re taking people when they come in to hear us play. You don’t want to get on a plane and hear the pilot say, ‘Welcome aboard, we don’t know where we’re going, we hope we have a beautiful trip.’ I don’t want to wander around.
“As players who play out, you go to places where many people, who play in, don’t go. It’s dangerous out there because you’re going to fall down a lot and fail more than you succeed. But finally you get to the point where you’ve failed so much, and collected so many successes, that you have a map.”
On Hum Crackle & Pop, that map leads to any number of unexpected places that somehow still manage to seem comfortable and familiar.
For more information, contact Matt Merewitz (matt@fullyaltered.com / 215-629-6155)
Matt Merewitz
FULLY ALTERED MEDIA
(c) 215-629-6155
email: matt@fullyaltered.com
