Selcouth Quartet: This Is Gonna Be A Blast
photo: D. James Goodwin
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For a moment, it seemed like Joe Russo’s dream band might end up staying just that—a dream.
In 2022, the lauded drummer received an offer to open a pair of shows for Mickey Hart & Planet Drum at Port Chester, N.Y.’s famed Capitol Theatre. For one of the dates, Russo planned to play with The Bogie Band, the brass ensemble led by his old friend, saxophonist Stuart Bogie. But, for the other, he decided to try something a little different—despite the high-profile, big-stage booking—and put together an entirely new, completely free-form combo featuring Bogie, guitarist Jonathan Goldberger and bassist Jon Shaw.
“It was a grouping of musicians that I absolutely love playing with, who have never really played together,” Russo says of the project, which he dubbed the Selcouth Quartet. “I was excited to hear what they sounded like together and to be the lynch-pin in the center of that.”
However, the Planet Drum gigs ended up getting pulled and—especially given the musicians’ busy schedules—the Selcouth Quartet could have easily died on the vine. Yet, Russo was still excited about the prospect of bringing together three of his favorite improvisers. So he agreed to cash in on a longstanding offer from Newport Festivals producer Jay Sweet and started making plans to record the Selcouth Quartet at Flóki Studios—a beautiful but remote lodge-like space located in the far reaches of Iceland.
“We did one show at Studio 17, an art space in Hopewell, N.J., in December,” Russo says of Selcouth Quartet’s lone date before heading oversees. “It was super chill, very spacey, really meditative and beautiful. And, luckily, everyone was excited about birthing the project in the studio.”
The sessions for what would eventually become the nine-track Selcouth Quartet took place during a spirited few days this past January. From the get go, the four musicians aimed to capture the open-minded thinking and collective nature of the ‘90s Thrill Jockey label, New York’s ‘80s/‘90s Knitting Factory scene and the enduring jazz compass ECM Records. They also brought along D. James Goodwin, a producer and engineer who has worked closely with Russo and Bogie in recent years, including on a series of Craig Finn recordings.
“It was conceived in Joe’s mind with the booking at The Capitol, and then it was born there in Iceland,” Bogie adds. “D. James was very instrumental in that. He can get to the meat of a spontaneous experience and frame it in a really beautiful way.”
The musicians’ original concept was to head into Flóki Studios—which was designed under the guidance of The Decemberists’ Chris Funk—improvise “Teo Macero/Miles style” for four or five days and then have Goodwin help sculpt the sessions into some more refined compositions. However, once they started working, the nascent group quickly decided to shift course.
“I, personally, was a little nervous about maximizing the time we had,” Russo says. “I thought, ‘Is it gonna end up being this really long endeavor to go the route of not having any premeditated substance to this thing?’ So, almost as an exercise, I brought out some of my musical scraps. Every musician has these musical scraps they keep in their back pocket, and one of those things ended up being the chords for the first track on the record, ‘100 Words for Wind.’ It was this Tony Williams Lifetime-inspired riff. We used that to have a bullet point. My favorite thing about improvising is what happens in the cracks. I love it when you’re trying to get to a place and the whole thing feels like a mystery. You’re finding your way out of that maze. So it’s still heavily improvised, but there’s this mile marker.”
“We knew we were going to spend time just playing and seeing what we could come up with, but using those ideas that Joe came in with as starting points was invaluable. It got the ball rolling and gave us momentum right away,” Shaw says. “We didn’t have to stay committed to anything. But, more crucially, we had somewhere to begin and something to begin with. Parts and arrangements took shape around those mile markers, but we still included plenty of improvisation and some other compositions that were created to round out the record.”
The quartet truly used the studio as an instrument, freely swapping ideas and trying out different musical configurations. At times, Bogie put down his sax to add some piano, and he also brought along his first instrument, the clarinet, which he has been playing with increased frequency recently.
With the Arctic Circle visible on a clear day, the setting was surreal, to say the least. Iceland can be dark for 20 hours at a time in January and the weather was both frigid and dreamlike. On the way back to the hotel one night, a plow ended up having to drive in front of the four musicians—who all live in New York or New Jersey—to get them back safely.
“It was breathtaking and haunting,” Russo says. “It felt like we were the only people on the planet.”
“When I was in college, I had a group called Transmission,” Bogie says of the experimental outlet he focused on at the University of Michigan with future indie-rock mainstay Colin Stetson, Eric Perney and Andrew Kitchen. “I’ve spent the last 30 years missing that—until this group. But there is also the significance of us all being in our 40s. This group feels like the next chapter of those experiences that I had, that I longed for so much. I longed to get into these mathematical but still emotionally ecstatic places with the music and to make music that wasn’t harmonically dependent. You can still feel everyone on their instruments. No one’s hanging on—we’re all driving this thing, charging forward. It has something to do with listening to Led Zeppelin records while we were growing up.”
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In many ways, the Selcouth Quartet is a return to form for Russo, who first made inroads on the national touring circuit while playing with the acid-jazz combo Fat Mama in the ‘90s and really made his name as a core member of New York’s downtown jazz and experimental music communities around the turn of the millenium. The project is also something of a Venn diagram of the various artistic worlds Russo has trafficked in since those halcyon days.
He met Goldberger after relocating from his native New Jersey to Colorado, joining Fat Mama when he was 18.
“It was my second or third year at the University of Colorado, around ‘96,” Goldberger says, recalling his introduction to Russo. “Fat Mama had been going for about a year or so and we had just lost our first drummer. We were asking around about drummers that could both improvise and rock—somehow, we were directed to this new kid in town who turned out to be Joe. He was incredible even then—a powerhouse, yet super musical—and could brilliantly play any time signature we threw at him. We had an instant chemistry as a group, and the band’s sound transformed in a very profound way. The only thing we asked him to change was to ditch his fancy, modern-fusion drum kit and get a stripped-down vintage Ludwig and some old cymbals. We were trying so hard to emulate that sound coming from these ‘70s Miles and Herbie records.”
“I’ve always heralded that band—Jonathan and all the guys completely changed my musical trajectory,” Russo says. “I was a different person after learning from them. They kicked my ass and older brothered the shit out of me in the best way. Playing with Jonathan is a callback to my earlier musical passions. It’s almost a love letter to that time. So he was the only choice for that kind of feeling. It’s like, ‘I’m gonna go home now. And I remember that guy from the neighborhood.’”
Along with several other members of Fat Mama, Russo eventually relocated back to the New York area, where he became a local fixture.
“Fat Mama was a super close and quite dysfunctional family,” says Goldberger, who has spent the past two decades working with top-shelf innovators like John Zorn, Jim Black, Red Baraat and Todd Sickafoose, among others. “We were all sponges at that age—everybody brought something different to listen to in the tour van. I remember buying Zorn’s Naked City while I was in high school as well as any CD with Bill Frisell that I could get my hands on. Those two artists are the godfathers of the New York downtown scene, which was just modern improvised music that didn’t have to be labeled as traditional jazz. Zorn and Frisell led me to the old Knitting Factory, which was both a club and record label and, basically, anyone playing there was worth checking out. When Fat Mama started playing in New York, we would alternate between playing there and Wetlands. We were in heaven, ultimately collaborating with Steven Bernstein, James ‘Blood’ Ulmer and artists like that. That’s why most of the band ended up eventually moving to New York after college.”
Russo first crossed paths with Bogie while working that scene in the early 2000s. For a moment, The Duo—the drummer’s influential post-jam project with Marco Benevento—and Afrobeat favorites Antibalas, Bogie’s primary focus at the time, were signed to Ropeadope records. Yet, they truly became friends during The Complete Last Waltz shows they played about a decade later, where they took part in a large ensemble interpreting The Band’s famed final show.
“The music Joe and Marco were making was immediately arresting,” Bogie says. “Antibalas’ third album, Who Is This America? was when I started writing and soloing a lot more. This was the John Kerry/George W. Bush era. ‘Indictment’ was a song on that album that I wrote. But we became friends working on The Last Waltz. It felt like this world outside the music industry; that’s also where I met [producer and guitarist] Josh Kaufman, who introduced us to D. James.”
Russo found a new audience in 2009, when he became a founding member of the Grateful Dead offshoot Furthur, and he has gradually turned into a festival headliner of his own since forming Joe Russo’s Almost Dead—a supergroup that started as a loose idea similar to the Selcouth Quartet—in 2013. However, between his other commitments, Russo continued to hone his jazzy, improvisational chops with a mix of gigs at New York venues like Nublu and Threes Brewing. And, the drummer, who has described the Antibalas horns as among his favorite brass sections, started calling Bogie for projects; the saxophonist eventually became something of the unofficial sixth member of JRAD, though he was not a Deadhead at the time.
“That was my intro to that music, besides their greatest hits and Workingman’s Dead,” says Bogie, who has spent time touring with Arcade Fire and TV On The Radio and is now an in-demand session musician. “People would tell me about the magical power that music has. It fell on deaf ears until I had to learn a bunch of this music for JRAD. I came in as an improviser, but I learned that there is an emotional juice from a certain approach to harmony. My partner Karyn is also a Deadhead, so now you can put on something and I can go, ‘Oh, Portland ‘72.’”
Likewise, Russo and Shaw were already friends before they started playing together. They first met through their now wives; Shaw is married to singer Steph Sanders, who came of age playing with the members of RANA in the Princeton, N.J. music scene and formed the group the Saras. (She also has a bit of Phish cred, appearing on the original studio version of the song “Nothing,” which was recorded by Tom Marshall’s band Amfibian.)
“He’s this secret agent who’s just an absolutely incredible musician,” Russo says of Shaw. “I knew him for maybe two years before even knowing he was a musician. The first time I saw him play was on one of [RANA singer/keyboardist] Matt Trowbridge’s recordings, so I thought he was a trumpet player. Then, I saw him play keys in Sean Bones’ band and then I saw him play guitar in someone’s band. Turns out, he’s a bass player. He is a genius musician. He’s subtle but a badass and so fucking tasteful. He’s one of my greatest musical allies.”
“I knew a bit about The Duo but would learn a whole lot more after going to see them at Spiegeltent, a venue that used to be over by the South Street Seaport,” Shaw says. “He and Marco have an unearthly connection. I loved Joe’s drumming, but it was another few years before we did any kind of performing together.”
One of their first collaborations was something of a left turn for both players.
“Joe asked me how I felt about psytrance music and I—pleasantly unaware of what I was getting myself into—ended up agreeing to secure a 5-string bass, paint my face and do the first Shpongle live band shows in the U.S. with him,” Shaw says. “To say that was about as far as possible from what I was used to would be a massive understatement. It ended up being an incredible experience that I’m still only mildly convinced actually happened, and it proved to be a unique start to what has been years of inspiring collaborations with Joe.”
Shaw—whose résumé also includes work with Sharon Van Etten, Shakey Graves and WOLF!—also started playing with Russo in Cass McCombs’ band and the drummer often recruits him to play in JRAD when bassist Dave Dreiwitz’s commitments to Ween prevent him from making a gig.
“He’s our other bass player, basically,” Russo says. “I won’t even call him a sub. He’s done so many shows now.”
“I’ve always been interested in improvisation,” Shaw adds. “I started going to bluegrass festivals with my parents when I was 3 years old. Once I was old enough—and tall enough—to hold the upright and join in, I learned a lot about listening and interacting musically, along with the concept of learning songs as you are playing them. The jams at our campsites—with whoever happened to walk up from the festival—were where I started to figure out how to play with other people. The melody always has clues about where you should be going— you should just try to get it by the time the second verse comes around. It was a forgiving environment to learn in and the perfect foundation to build on.”
From the moment the Selcouth Quartet took the stage in New Jersey, Russo felt excited about the players’ chemistry. “Jonathan coming from a more avant-garde place, Jon being this subtle player keeping it all together and Stuart folding into both of those worlds—it was thrilling to think about how that combination would interact,” Russo says. “We’ve really developed an excitement, a brotherhood and a trust. I’m the lucky asshole who gets to just smack around on top of it.”
Bogie agrees, noting that, for many years, they were living parallel lives, just a few miles or even blocks apart. “The interesting thing is that, even though we’re all of this similar demographic and our musical worlds have some similar overlap, we’ve all be active in different areas and are coming at this from different angles,” he says. “Though, I have to say, we look pretty similar when you see a picture of us all bearded in Iceland with our coats on.”
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On Oct. 20 the Selcouth Quartet released their self-titled effort. The instrumental album swings from the mystical beauty of “Smaller Horses” to the minimalist space of “The Hidden People,” the driving ascent of “Dragon, Bull, Vulture, Giant,” the meditative march of “Unlimited Light” and the climatic release of “Before We’re Sunken.”
“In the studio, it was all so magical but, to be honest, the group really gelled when we performed this material live earlier this summer,” Goldberger says of some choice June dates.
“What we ended up with was a catalog—we’re a ‘band’ band, which surprised us,” Russo says with a laugh. “The whole thing is an improvisation—even the idea of this band. But this is what I want to set my sights on outside of JRAD and really make a thing, where we make more records and see what it can become while still having improv be a huge cornerstone of what we do. Once we get comfortable with playing the material, we can get a little bit more playful. We’re still in such an infantile part of this band’s lifecycle. But learning this material was really fun and exciting.”
The drummer has also started to dip back into his avant-garde roots with a series of regular gigs at the Sultan Room, a Brooklyn club located in the back of a Turkish restaurant. This fall alone he has played a benefit with John Medeski and Marc Ribot and kicked off his formal “This Is Gonna Be A Blast” residency with a jam session featuring Benevento, Andrew Barr and Brad Barr. He also had plans to regroup his Boyfriends band—which boasts Bogie, Kaufman and percussionist Ben Perowsky—for a gig in December, which became a Friends of Boyfriends gig after Kaufman took ill. (Further blurring the lines between genres, Russo, Bogie and Kaufman all also appear on recent Taylor Swift recordings.)
“All I did in New York for years was get together with a bunch of people and make shit up—getting back to that feeling is the goal of this series,” he says. “It has the energy of the Knitting Factory Tap Bar, where Marco and I first started. We would just set up and see what happens.”
Bogie underscores how excited he is to have the clarinet at his disposal with the Selcouth Quartet. He also recently released a solo clarinet record on DFA, Morningside, featuring music crafted with the help of the label’s founder, LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy. “In the first week of the lockdown, I began playing daily improvisational pieces, which we put on Instagram,” Bogie says of the project’s origins. “We’d pray. We’d meditate. And we’d do that. We did it for 150 days straight. And I began collaborating with all kinds of different musicians. They would send me drones and I would play on top of them. It came at a time when I had given up so many ambitions—the lockdown was about releasing a lot of our worldly ambitions. ‘What does it all mean?’ was a constant question. So I let go of all kinds of dreams. But then this happened, and I had my own little celebration. I’m an LCD Soundsystem fan; I actually took notes on those records. He is one of my favorite musicians alive.”
As Shaw sees it, musicians who come through the ranks together share a common language. So while Selcouth Quartet may only be a few gigs in, their journey is actually several decades long. “I’ve played in rock bands with friends all my life and spent years studying jazz—all efforts to continue to develop a vocabulary that enables me to have an open-ended musical conversation,” he says. “You spend all that time doing the preparation and learning all the rules so, eventually, you can throw them out and just play. What makes improv so enjoyable to me is when you get to play with people that you really want to have that conversation with. You find yourself doing things and responding in ways you couldn’t have possibly imagined were it not for their input.”
