WILCO’S GLENN KOTCHE PAINTING THE SKY BLUE SKY

This past winter, the duality of rock drummer/ experimental percussionist Glenn Kotche’s eclectic career reached an all-time high as he juggled writing/recording sessions for Grammy award-winning rock bad Wilco’s latest release, Sky Blue Sky, and composing “Anomaly,” a seven-movement commission for world-renowned string ensemble The Kronos Quartet.  “There were times when I would spend five hours writing in the morning, track Sky Blue Sky with Wilco for eight hours, and then write for another hour,” Kotche recalls with a tinge of disbelief.  “It was very intense.”
            But this is nothing new for the Chicago-based rhythmic explorer.  In fact, much of Glenn’s career has revolved around this cross-pollination between the mainstream and the avant-garde.  “I’ve always balanced the academic and the rock-drummer sides of my playing, since when I first started taking lessons in fourth grade,” Kotche explains.  “I was active in school concert and marching bands, and I formed my first rock band at the same time.”
            When Kotche went off to study music ant the University of Kentucky, he received further affirmation from professor James Campbell that his multi-dimensional approach to percussion would ultimately open doors to a wide range of possibilities.  “Jim stressed to me the idea of thinking about the drum set as a multiple percussion instrument,” says Kotche.  “He believed that the ideas was going to make a big impact on the development of our instrument.”            
            After graduation, Glenn returned to Chicago and began to absorb the adventurous spirit of many of the city’s most prominent percussionists.  “When I moved back to Chicago, I saw how guys like Michael Zarang, Hamid Drake, and John Herndon and John McIntire of Tortoise were incorporating a lot of percussion into their music,” Kotche recalls.  “And then after I met Jim O’Rourke ad Darin Gray, they started playing me recording of various European improvising percussionists.  That really helped open my mind.”
            With this growing interest in a multi-percussion approach to drum set, Glenn began to expand his kit to include a variety of non-traditional instruments, like vibes, crotales, and assorted found percussion.  And then he made a bold decision to drop most of his weekly gigs to focus on more creative musical situations.  “After college, I was playing with a lot of singer/songwriters, and I was teaching in several high schools,” says Glenn.  “But it wasn’t satisfying anymore.  So I quit everything except for playing with Jim O’Rourke.  “That’s when I started my experimental due On Fillmore with Darin Gray,” Kotche continues, “and I made an improvised percussion record with Tim Barnes called Domo Domo.  This was also around the time that I decided to make my first solo record.”
            But how did these left-of-center rhythmic explorations ultimately lead to his current gig with Wilco? “ It all come back to Jim O’Rourke,” says Glen.  “I was doing a gig with Edith Frost in Chicago, where I was playing a metal sculpture and a cocktail kit.  Jim produced her first record, so he came down to the show.  He liked that I was open to new things, so he got my number and called me to work on his album Eureka.
            “Then when Jim collaborated with Jeff Tweedy for the Noise Pop Festival in Chicago,” Kotche continues, “ he brought me in.  That became the band Loose Fur.  We wrote a set’s worth of music, played one show, and then went into the studio to make the first record.
            “After that, Jeff invited me to go to New York with him to work on the soundtrack to he movie Chelsea Walls.  We hit off really well, so he asked me to play percussion on some of the Wilco tracks that they were working on.  Then they wanted to hear me play drums on a tune, which was ‘I Am Trying To Break Your Heart’ and it just went from there.”           
            Since joining Wilco in 2001, Glenn has appeared on the band’s highly controversial album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the Grammy award-winning A Ghost Is Born, a live double-disc Kicking Television, and their brand-new release, Sky Blue Sky.
            In the past year, Glenn also managed to squeeze in several solo percussion tours in support of his latest record, Mobile (which included a stop at the Modern Drummer Festival).   And he appeared on Loose Fur’s second album, Born Again In The USA.  We caught up with Glenn during a rare weed off to discuss the concepts behind his latest projects.

MD: Sky Blue Sky is a pretty straightforward, groove-based drumming record.  Was that a conscious decision going into it?
Glenn: I don’t think it was so much a conscious decision going in as it was a reflection of the way the album was written and recorded.  We basically went to our loft in Chicago, set up in a tight circle with everyone facing each other, and came up with the ideas.  Jeff Tweedy brought in a few complete tunes, like “Be Patient With Me” and “Sky Blue Sky.”  But a lot of the other ones started with someone throwing out a riff and then developing it from there.
But it’s fair to say that this is the least experimental of the Wilco studio records I’m on, which is perfect for me at this pint because my solo stuff and my other projects- Loose Fur and On Fillmore-are pretty experimental.  So it’s nice to be able to just concentrate on the groove.

MD: Did the additional band members in Wilco also influence you to play more groove-based?
Glenn: Yeah. When Wilco was a four-piece, there was a lot more room for overdubs and different layers of percussion.  But now that we’re a six-piece, there are enough hands on deck to cover whatever parts were needed to make the songs come across.  So I don’t have to fill in ideas on vibes or crotales.

MD: A lot of the grooves have an old-school swagger to them.
Glenn: That’s something that I love listening to in other drummers.  Guys like Levon Helm and John Bonham are perfect examples.  And a lot of the Motown and Stax guys had that swing.  Those guys were jazz drummers. So when they straightened their grooves out there was still this inherent swing in the playing.  That gave the music incredible buoyancy. I wanted to explore that type of vibe on Sky Blue Sky.

MD: What did you listen to for inspiration?
Glenn:  The first tune on the album, “Either Way,” draws a lot from Bill Withers’ “Ain’t No Sunshine,” with James Gadson.  I also saw Jim Keltner with T-Bone Burnett while we were making the record.  And that made a big impact on how I approached the feel of these tunes.

MD: When your recorded the songs, did you keep the setup the same, with everyone facing each other in a circle?
Glenn: Yes.  Everything was recorded at once so you get the sound of a band playing together.  My drums are bleeding into all the other instruments mics, and vice versa.  For most of the tracks, I didn’t even use headphones.  And only half of one song, “Impossible Germany,” used a click track. We [avoided the click] so we wouldn’t feel locked into one specific tempo.

MD: Since you tracked the record with everyone in a tight circle, did you have to play softer than you normally would?
Glenn: Yeah.  There are some more aggressive moments.  But when the drums are bleeding into everybody’s mics, balance is really important.  So we were very careful abut how our parts blended within the whole.

MD: How did you build your drum patterns?
Glenn:  I build drum parts a lot of different ways, depending on what kind of song it is and how I feel the drums should fit into it.  Sometimes the drum parts have to help in the evolution of the song, sometimes they provide contrast, and sometimes they’re there to illustrate the lyrics.
            Lyrically, this is a very direct, honest, and raw record.  So I felt that providing a great groove would be the best way to help the songs come across.  “Either Way” has really hopeful lyrics, so that’s why I played 16ths on the hi-hat to provide an upbeat, driving element to it.  On “You Are My Face,” I played cross-stick to set up a simple, out-of-the-way groove.  That way, when the middle section comes in there’s a big contrast.

MD: What made you decide to play all of the fills in the middle part of that song?
Glenn: That was actually the band’s idea, to use the drums as a transition to get back into the more meditative part.  The fills are there to keep it rolling and flowing.  It wasn’t a place to just throw in licks.  It was more about trying to play musical fills that would set up the next section.

MD: In “Impossible Germany,” there are almost no fills until the end.  Did you decide during the writing process that this was going to be a slowly evolving song?
Glenn: That tine is a showcase for the guitars, and Nels Cline is playing some beautiful commentary throughout.  To me, those are the fills.  So the best way for the drums to serve that song was to supply a bouncy feel and keep it moving forward.

MD: On “Shake It Off,” there’s a middle section where you play a big, heavy-sounding groove that doesn’t use the hi-hat.  What made you decide to do that?
Glenn: I was thinking about Kenny Buttrey’s playing on the Niel Young album Harvest.  On that record, there are parts where he’s not hitting the hi-hat.  Then when he does play it, the groove kicks up a notch.  I wanted the same thing to happen in “Shake It Off.”

MD: Did you do anything special to keep the groove going when you weren’t playing the ride pattern?
Glenn: I pulsed my hand on my thigh.  And I also always bounce on the ball of my left foot to keep time, whether I’m actually opening the hi-hat or not.

MD: “Hate It Here” starts with an Al Jackson-type soul feel, and then moves to a busier part with a lot of fills.  There’s quite a contrast between the two sections.
Glenn: I played those fills because that’s when the character in the story lets out his angst.  He’s complaining the whole time, and then he erupts at the chorus.  The fills are the frustration coming out.

MD: Do you often think narratively when putting drum patterns together?
Glenn: Sometimes it can help to think that way to get a certain point across.  But if you do it too much it can be disruptive and a little cheesy.

MD: “Walken” has a greasy roots-rock feel with a lot of swing to it.  And there’s a lot of push and pull going on, especially in the ending vamp where the piano is really on the r            edge.
Glenn: yea, I was actually surprised to hear that so much in the mix. [laughs] But this was one of the harder songs for us to capture.  We’d been playing it live for so long that it was becoming too polished.  When we originally demoed it we were still learning the parts, so it sounded exiting.  The later takes didn’t have that.  So we had to forget about playing our parts perfectly to make it feels fresh again.

MD: How may takes do you guys normally do for each song?
Glenn: There were a lot of takes on this record because it wasn’t  a matter of just getting a good drum take.  I might have my best take early on, but maybe the guitar was a little out of tune or something.  So we ended up doing more takes because we were going for a full-band performance, and we weren’t fixing things in Pro Tools.

MD: Did you feel pressured to be going for a “keeper” take on every pass?
Glenn: Yeah. It’s easy to get lazy when you’re using clicks and when you’re just going for a basic take, because you can go back and fix individual notes in Pro Tools.  That wasn’t an option here.  I had to be at the top of my game for every take.
But at the same time, I couldn’t get too attached to the idea of having a flawless drum record.  You end up making bad decisions whenever you start thinking that way.  We wanted this to be a great band record with great music.

MD: This album has a very consistent drum sound throughout.  Were you using the same kit on everything?
Glenn: Yeah. It was a mix-matched from pieces that I had at the loft, because my road gear wasn’t accessible.  I ended up using an old 16” Sonor floor tom with an Evans EC2 coated head, and old WFL bass drum wi8th an EvasEQ3 batter, a 13” WFL rack tom, and a 14” power tom from a Tama kit that I got in eighth grade.  The 13” and 14” drums had calf heads on them.  The snare was a Sonor acrylic with an Evans Reverse Dot head on it.

MD: The snare sound is very dry and fat. And it sounds like it’s tuned pretty loose.
Glenn: I tune it loose because I want it to have a blending sound.  Because Sky Blue Sky is more of a soulful low-key record, there was no need for a high-pitched, cutting sound.  And I tape my wedding hanky on it for muffling.

MD: Have you always gone for a really dry sound?
Glenn: When I first joined Wilco, I wanted the drums to be super dead, like that ‘70s sound when everyone was using single-headed concert toms with Evans Hydraulic heads.  I’ve opened them up a little more as time has gone on.  But I use coated Gls on the bottom and coated EC2s on top to keep them sounding warm.

MD: What’s your general tuning approach?
Glenn: For this record, I just got the drums to a point where they were ringing and had a nice, warm tone.  But live I go for a major triad from the second floor tom up to the snare.

MD: Did you use the same cymbals throughout, too?
Glenn: The hi-hats are the same on all the tracks; they’re a pair of old 14” Zildjian As.  But I switched the rides out on every track.  I used a lot of K Constantinoples, including a couple of flat rides.  The only crash I used was an 18” K Custom Special Dry.  Since we were so close together in the studio, if I’d used a cymbal with a lot of sustain, it would’ve wiped out many or the frequencies that were being filled by the other guys in the band.

GOIN’ IT ALONE

MD: What made you decide to make your first solo record?
Glenn: There were some rhythmic questions that I wanted answered, but they were personal enough that I wasn’t going to be able to explore them in the context of a group.  So I started recording ideas for my own purposes.  Those recordings eventually became Introducing.

MD: What ideas were you exploring?
Glenn:  The idea was coincidental rhythm,  which is a fancy way of saying unintentional polyrhythm.  I came across the term after reading the John Cage book Silence.  But before I knew that it was called, I would always notice how rhythms in everyday life interacted in unusual ways, like how my turn signal interacts with the turn signal of the car in front of me,  or how the rhythm of the wipers compares to what’s playing on the radio.  They’re not typical polyrhythms, like seven-against-four or five-against-three.  It’s a much longer cycle.  I wanted to explore that idea, so I started recording ideas and they would flow in and out of each other at different rates.

MD: What was the concept behind your second record, Next?
Glenn: I wanted that one to be completely improvised, using what I call accidental rhythm.  I wanted to explore the idea of truly improvising.  I wanted to take all of my training out of the equation.  So I built various mallets-like these threaded rods with springs and ball bearings on the ends- that didn’t allow me to play anything traditional.  That way if I unintentionally played paradiddle-diddles, they wouldn’t sound like it.
I also put a lot of preparation on the drums.  I had chains lying across the drumheads, the cymbal were resting on the drums and each other, and I put beads and rice on the heads so that everything was interacting from the sympathetic vibrations.

MD: How did you divide the improvisation into tracks?
Glenn: It was all done live to two-track. I just improvised snippets using a different installation for each one.  So I’d play for a while with one set of mallets, then I’d play with branches or I’d blow randomly into the tubes in my floor tom.

MD: Your latest solo record, Mobile, covers a variety of rhythmic concepts.  What were you exploring in the opening track, “clapping Music Variations”?
Glenn: That track is about negative rhythm discovered the idea as I was experimenting with the Steve Reich piece “Clapping Music.”  I love how that piece progresses, with two unisons rhythms slowly going out of phase with each other.  I wanted to learn it as a duet, but I didn’t have the score.  So I just wrote it out with the second part shifting back an 8th note each time.  After I wrote it out, I noticed that there were a lot more notes than rests.  So I thought, Let me play the right-hand part as is and then play the other part’s rests with the left hand. Then I tried things like playing one of the rhythms in reverse or in half time.  Then I started assigning the parts to different instruments and to a series of pitches.  Then I added the 3/ 4 and 4/4 pulses to keep it ambiguous and cyclical, like African music.

MD: Some of the sounds in this track are very unusual. What were you using to play the variations?
Glenn: I used drums, vibes, crotales, and Pro-Mark Webs.  At the beginning, I played the piece with the Webs on my legs.  There’s also a variation where I’m only hitting the shaft of the Webs on my legs.  So you’re hearing them flex and react in the air, which creates another form of negative rhythm.

MD: Your writing process reminds me of some of the compositional approaches in serial music.
Glenn: It’s a process-driven record.  Having a specific process helped to give me direction since there are so many concepts behind each piece.

MD: How did you put together “Mobile Parts 1, 2, and 3”?
Glenn: When Wilco was recording A Ghost Is Born in New York, I had a thumb piano with me to mess around with in my hotel room.  I ended up writing a melody with a couple of accompanying parts.  As I was experimenting with the three parts, I discovered a correlation between how they interacted with one another and the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder.  His mobiles may consist of just three suspended plates, but they’re always moving.  So it’s constantly becoming a new sculpture.  I liked that idea-of different pieces being in a constant state of flux with one other.  So that’s how I wanted to approach these three basic thumb piano parts.  In the first part, I incorporated negative rhythm by gradually replacing the rests I the melodies with a drone of the same note.  Tin in “Part 2,” I played the original three rhythms on drums, using different variations of  stick dampening by pressing one stick into the head.  For the third part, I transferred the rhythms to cymbals, two hi-hats, two snare drums, and different distorted sounds.  Then I played the “Monkey Chant” melody over the top on crotales, which introduced the idea of having a mobile theme that reoccurs throughout the record.

MD: What’s going on in “Projections of (What) Might…”?
Glenn: For that track, I had two sources: Afro-beat pioneer Tony Allen and jazz drummer Ed Blackwell. I wrote down some patterns that they played and then expanded them.  Tony does a lo of double between the snare and bass.  I made it my own by moving the doubles around the kit. Then I took some of the rhythms of the guitar parts from his records and put them on a set of Swiss cowbells called almglocken.  I ended up with a bunch of variations so I decided to make a tune out of them.

MD: What process did you use to put the tune together?
Glenn:  I used one of my Tony Allen modifications as the basic form of the piece.  Then I assigned a different Tony Allen/ Ed Blackwell variation to each of the seven voices in the original pattern.  So whenever the snare drum was hit in the master groove, I might play groove number one four times.  Then whenever the bass drum played a note, I’d play groove number two.  And whenever tow voices played at the same time, I stacked the two grooves on top of each other. I also enhanced the drum sound with electronics to give the track a different flavor.  I did that by combining or replacing the drums with sounds from an Access Virus keyboard.  Then at the end of the tracks, I slowly mixed in the acoustic drums.

MD: How did you transform the theatrical narrative of the monkey chant into solo drum music?
Glenn: Around the time I started to develop the “Monkey Chant,” I was listening to a lot of improvised percussion records, specifically ones by Paul Lytton and Paul Lovens.  Those records helped me get away from thinking of the drums as only a timekeeper, but also as a source of color and texture.
That’s what inspired me to incorporate different kinds of instruments, like crotales or a gong sheet, into the drumset.  And that’s when I came up with the idea for the prepared snare.  I wanted to replicate some of the lion’s-roar sounds on those Lytton and Lovens records, so I strung fishing line and some electrical wire through the vent holes in and Evans SD Dry drumhead.  After I discovered how great that sounded, I attached friction sticks, different sized springs, and all these sounds that utilize the drum as a resonator. 
             As I was experimenting with the prepared snare, I heard the monkey chant for the first time and was knocked out by the power of al these men chanting in rhythm.  So one day when I was sitting behind the drums, I discovered that I could imitate one of the sounds from it- that constant chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga rhythm- with the right hand and foot on the cocktail floor tom.  Then I figured out how to imitate some of the higher tones using the almglocken, and I could duplicate the reoccurring rhythmic statement that happens at the beginning of each section.  So it progressed from there. 
But there was a point when I felt that something was still missing.  So I went back an read the portion of the Ramayana that the monkey chant is based on.  From that, I realized that there are basically five or six principle characters in the story.  So I assigned the sounds on the prepared snare to the characters and mapped out a way to approximate the essential events and interactions in the story.

MD: In addition to the prepared snare, aren’t you also incorporating electronics into the piece?
Glenn: Yes. I sue a Line 6 delay pedal to loop various characters-like the introduction of the large springs- so they’ll carry through when I go into the next part.  That way, I can interact with it using other sounds.
            I also use the delay to crate a drone when I hit the metal fruit basket.  I fade that out with the volume pedal as I play the melody on crotales and thumb piano.

MD: How did you discover that the fruit basket would work in you percussion setup?
Glenn: I incessantly tap on everything to try to find some useful sounds.  The fruit basket was a wedding gift, but it didn’t sound good when I first tapped it.  But when I added a contact mic, it had a deep tone.  So I cranked the bass on my mixer to make it sound like a gong.

MD: How are you adapting these pieces to be performed live?
Glenn: “The Monkey Chant” and “Fantasy On A Shona Theme” are performed completely live.  But for “Mobile Parts 1, 2, & 3,” I play half the parts live and the rest is on tape.  And I turned “Projections” into a trio, so I’m playing live a part over the two parts that appear on the record.

THE KRONOS COMMISSION

MD:  How did you get commissioned to compose a piece for the Kronos Quartet?
Glenn: David Harrington, the leader of Kronos, liked Mobile, so he asked me to writhe a piece for them.  I’d never done something like this before.  But I was a fan of theirs, and thought it would be a great challenge.  So I decided to go for it.

MD: How did you approach writing the piece?
Glenn: After I way them perform in New York, I began thinking about how the four players in a string quartet relate to a drummer’s four limbs, and how cool it would be if your left foot could be the violinist.  So that became the basic concept behind the piece.
            The first movement is textural; it introduced different sounds and establishes some of the themes.  The second and the third movements were written on drumset, and then orchestrated for the strings.

MD: How did you do that?
Glenn: I came up with some rhythmic ideas as I was sitting behind the kit.  Then I broke those down into the rhythms that are played on each drum and assigned them to pitches.

MD: What are some of those rhythmic ideas?
Glenn: One section is an unraveling of a broken-triplet idea between tow toms and the kick drum.  Other movements are based on different polyrhythms.  And the seventh movement is based on orchestrating rudimental figures- like flam accents- in different ways across the quartet.

MD: Did you write “Anomaly” entirely form the kit?
Glenn: I originally started at the vibes.  But I got stumped with only one main theme san some other basic ideas.  So I moved over to the drums, and the first three movements came to me within a day.  From there, I went back to the vibes to put the rest of it together.

MD: How is your active solo career impacting what you do with Wilco and you other drumming projects?
Glenn: They all inform each other.  When I was developing “Monkey Chant,” I was thinking about the drumset as an ensemble: What role is my floor tom playing here, what role is this spring or thumb piano playing here? Or how do these parts relate to the evolution of the piece as a whole?  These are the kids of things that I learned from making records with Wilco.
            My solo projects also make me appreciate my situation in Wilco.  When I’m in the context of Wilco, I can concentrate of being part of the ensemble and supporting Jeff Tweedy’s lyrics.  And because I have my solo thing to explore these loftier rhythmic concepts, I’m a lot more in-tune with that idea.  I’m not playing all over the place just to get my licks in.  So having both outlets helps keep me balanced.