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BY
RICHARD MARTIN Amon Tobin, Mix Master Morris, Jonah Sharp, Jesse James, Fathomless Tour Zoot Suite, 13 NW 13th Ave., 827-4148 9 pm Saturday, Sept. 19 $10
Traditionally, musicians who attempt to bridge genres are met with hostility, denouncement and virtual exile. Bob Dylan experienced a venomous reaction for plugging in and rockin' out at the Newport Folk Festival in '65. Miles Davis attracted epithets from the jazz community for his forays into rock and funk in the early '70s. George Gershwin drew fire from jazz purists for "Rhapsody in Blue" in the '20s. These pioneers sought to rattle the status quo but also to spark a progression, and they did so at their peril. Crosspollination is decidedly safer for musicians today. Hip-hop DJs mine the soul and funk catalogs to create an updated street music, and artists armed with samplers borrow from all types of past recordings to craft modern soundscapes. One of electronic music's hopefuls, Amon Tobin, is even revivifying the increasingly limp genre of jazz with his highly percussive blasts of drum'n'bass and seductive jungle, taking bits from old albums and tweaking them into non-vocal music that's suggestive of everything from '50s film noir soundtracks to ultra-'90s dance-floor hits. "If you look at the way music has developed over the ages, it's always been about stealing elements from existing music, reinterpreting it and mixing it to make new music," Tobin says from his home in Brighton, England. "If you go back to blues, it moves into rock and then into punk or heavy metal or whatever. It all develops and it all permutates." Fittingly, Tobin titled his third and most recent record Permutation (Ninja Tune) in recognition of his efforts to put bop jazz's loping acoustic bass lines, ramshackle drumming and luminescent horn runs into a contemporary context. Like his previous suggestively titled album, Bricolage, Permutation is a cut-and-paste collection of samples orchestrated to sound like a live band, albeit one that's been infused with a surging electronic undercurrent. In compositions such as "Toys," "Switch" and "Nightlife," Tobin manipulates classic jazzy grooves, nudging them further and further toward his futuristic vision with escalating beats and intricately layered percussion. One minute it seems as if Buddy Rich is happily pounding away on his kit; the next it's as if a 12-armed robot has seized control. "Bridge," the near-revolutionary highlight of Permutation, recreates the indelible shuffle of the Dave Brubeck Quartet's "Take Five" but overlays mournful sitar snippets and electronic squalls to offset the relentless drum putsch. Tobin isn't alone in referencing American jazz masters at a time when the once-popular genre has settled into a tame niche. His countrymates in Endemic Void pay indirect homage to Thelonious Monk in their piano-driven drum'n'bass, and Roni Size's Reprazent channeled Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Why display such reverence to a now-marginalized type of music? "Whether [it's] relevant or not in the United States, it's instilled in the ideas we've gotten through television and films, the ideas we have about what's cool," says Tobin. "These are the sounds that really intrigue me. The percussion alone--you've got so many different kinds of percussion. Using funk as a comparison, you get the break, but in jazz there's big, rolling kettle drums, huge crashes and tiny cymbals." Brazilian by birth, Tobin and his family moved frequently throughout his youth. (His mother's marriage to an Irishman provided his surname.) He continued to travel as he reached adulthood. During a sojourn in Portugal, Tobin dabbled in the blues, playing guitar in bands before returning to England and settling into the electronic framework. After releasing a debut on a blip of a British label called Ninebar, Tobin hooked up with the innovative Montreal imprint Ninja Tune, home to other notable modernists such as Coldcut and DJ Vadim. To varying degrees, these artists believe in the "rock is dead" credo, though they're evidently more concerned with forging the future of music as it pertains to popular culture than with challenging rock's hegemony. "I always messed around with instruments," Tobin says. "I generally enjoy playing as a recreational activity, but now that I'm releasing music, I feel it's a responsibility to try and push boundaries." Outside the studio and his stable of samplers, mixers and turntables, the business of charting music's ever-changing course gets tricky. On the road, Tobin eschews the sequencers and elaborate light shows favored by many of his peers and simply spins records--ones that have influenced him as well as his own--to serve as live performance. He says he's still struggling to chisel out a role for himself onstage. "It's very strange sometimes--people stand and watch [me] like they would at a rock concert," he says. "It's a difficulty that's inherent in trying to do a new kind of music. The attitude that people have is left over from the rock era, where you go see a band and they perform and things explode. A lot of sample-based musicians start getting successful, and they realize that they have to pander, and suddenly they turn up with a band and it's back to the rock format. I've decided not to do that." Many mistakenly tag a samba influence on Tobin because he's from Brazil, but he plays down connections to Jobim and Gilberto: "I could have been born in Sweden and I'd still be using Brazilian percussion because it's really strong."
originally published September 16, 1998
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