Alex Sowinski of BADBADNOTGOOD plays in front of an epic sunset. Photo by Matt Schonfeld
I first heard of BADBADNOTGOOD in the winter of my freshman year. My roommates were giving me a hip hop education, and everyone I knew started listening to Odd Future rappers Tyler, the Creator and Earl Sweatshirt. We listened to and watched everything we could find online. A random YouTube search took us to a video of three kids still in music school. Clearly set up in a classroom reminiscent of Zankel, the three began playing the opening chords to Tyler, the Creator’s “Bastard.” The next thing I know they’re shredding through Gucci Mane’s “Lemonade,” but never how I had heard it before. Gone were the drum machines, synthesizers, and vocals. Inserted in their stead were acoustic piano, electric bass, and drums. Jazz chords, and soloing, took the arrangement by storm building the song to a huge climax. And just like that, I was hooked.
One viral video later, the trio quickly released their first record, BBNG1. Buzz soon formed, and we learned that the three were jazz performance students at Toronto’s Humber College. Almost overnight, an outpouring of love came from the hip hop community. Tyler, the Creator played, soloed, and improvised with them. Giles Peterson became an early fan and included them in his Worldwide Awards in London, England. They released BBNG2, and then Frank Ocean called upon them to back him up at Coachella. They’ve produced for Danny Brown, Earl Sweatshirt, and currently have much more in the works. In anticipation for their first label-backed release BBNG3, off of Innovative Leisure, they headlined the annual WSPN Earth Day Music Festival. Before their jaw-dropping, mosh pit-inducing set, we got to show them around Zankel and give them a jazz student’s inside look at the Skidmore music department. After we got to show off for a sec, the whole crew sat down (along with their producer, Frank Dukes) for a rousing conversation about performance, hip hop, and what it means to be a jazz kid in 2014:
So which one of you at the end of BBNG 1 was like “Fuck Giant Steps, I hate that song?”
Matty: It was Alex.
So as a drummer why do you hate “Giant Steps” so much if you don’t have to deal with the chords for it?
Alex Sowinski: Well I don’t really hate “Giant Steps” anymore. I don’t really hate it. It’s actually a pretty fucking badass song originally.
Matty Tavarez: I mean I don’t think any of us really hated the song. I think we hated the performance practice of it. It’s like “Can you play ‘Giant Steps’?” You know what I mean? But it’s actually not that difficult…if you go to music school. It’s stupid that people talk it up.
Alex: I was just being stupid and getting fed up with Jazz school.
Matty Tavarez: Yeah, we were in Jazz school and everybody’s like learning their new triadic elements and shit.
Do you think you’ve gotten a lot more from being out of that conservatory/Jazz school community?
Alex: Yeah, one hundred percent, definitely. We’ve learned a thousand times more from being out of school for the last year and a half.
Chester Hansen: It’s just such a small part of music that you focus on in school and once you branch out into other things you realize how much more there is.
Did you guys get shit for the kind of Jazz you were playing from your professors?
Alex: I mean the funny thing is, when we were in school we weren’t really playing stuff like that. It was literally like goofing around and jamming. The only time we played it for our professors was the one assignment we did with [Chester] basically, which, yeah, we got shit for.
Matty: It wasn’t like we were the dudes around town. It was more just us goofing around in our free time.
So how do you guys balance all of the different sounds you hear. You obviously get influence from some Hip Hop shit and electronic stuff and Jazz as well. So, for you guys, how does that come together and balance on a BadBadNotGood record?
Chester: Uhm, we just play our instruments. Just like try a bunch of different things—some things work, some things don’t. I mean, you never really know until you try something. There’s not like a formula or anything.
Alex: I think going to Jazz school, one of the things we hated there was the production stuff because it was all about recording everything with a lot of mics on the drum kit and stuff. And how you do that kind of production is you mix or you sample or place or do a lot of fucking “in the box” shit and that doesn’t help anyone who has no idea about proper mixing or using plug-ins or drum replacement. So I think all of that and just you know having to play all these Jazz songs and having to be judged all the time by playing. You don’t really get the opportunity to improvise on your own or come up with your own thing. Like even when you take a private lesson, they would teach you their music and they don’t really ask you what do you like or what music do you write? I think we were just all getting fed up with that stuff and we got a couple opportunities and we said our stupid things and… From all that shit we’ve just learned a lot and now we focus on just writing songs and making beats and putting out just something that we think is cool and has the feelings that we like.
How does it differ for you to make a beat for someone like Earl Sweatshirt or you guys backed Frank Ocean at Coachella, rather than just make music for your own record?
Chester: Well it’s kind of funny because [Hoarse] was the first beat that we all made together. But lately we’ve been experimenting with that type of stuff. Getting influenced by more people that we know. I wouldn’t say we try and make beats for specific people; we kind of just get into it. Any collaborative thing is always going to be defined by what the other person brings to the table too. You can’t really plan it all out in advance.
Alex: I guess one things we’ve been trying to do is make some more musical sounding beats: like writing choruses and verses and stuff, rather than just a 16-bar loop that’s just the whole song. We don’t really have an approach to beats we just goof around.
Matty: It’s even weirder because we play different instruments—Alex plays drums, Chester plays bass, and I play keyboard—so when we make a beat it’s like what if we use this drum beat, or what if you play these chords, you know what I mean? Or we just have Chester play everything [laughs].
But like what about on the few songs on III that we’ve heard already, it seems that there’s a really good balance between the parts that are together and are planned out and there are all these moments where there are prior agreements but there also seem to be these moments, like on “Sustain,” where you get to play around a little bit. There are these areas where you get to let loose and just improve. Where’s the line drawn?
Matty: It’s on a song-by-song basis but generally we’ll play—just like you’d have a Jazz son—we’ll have a form and try to have roughly the same feel. Everybody has embellishments and different parts that sometimes when you listen back it just almost sounds like it was arranged but it was actually just made up.
Alex: Right, and when we recorded it we really tried to hone in on some vibes that we felt would be appropriate for each song and Adam (Frank Dukes) actually helped us produce the record and so we were referencing old drum breaks and that kind of stuff just to try to do something that’s a little bit more creative and that’s something that we’ve wanted to do. Also, do it all to tape and stuff like that instead of having to do like the 57s drum replacing and compressing the shit out of it.
So how does the new record differ from the other stuff you put out? This is the first official label release, right?
It’s Innovative Leisure in the US and is it Sony Canada?
Matty: It’s Arts & Crafts in Canada. So that’s pretty cool.
I had never heard of Innovative Leisure before you signed this summer and I was kind of freaking out. How did that come together?
Alex: Our manager has known them for a long time. The two guys who run it worked for Stones Throw for ten years, so they were the ones doing Madvillainy and Aloe Blacc’s record.
That’s where you want to be.
Chester: They ended up coming to like our third show ever.
Alex: Yeah, they just came down to Toronto when the label was like a year old and they were building the label and doing their thing. So we have known them for a while and then it’s like we’re going to do this new album and they just offered us a little contract to do it and we were like, “Yeah, sure, let’s go for it.” And so we tried to do a real album on a label.
Did the mindset change at all? Now that you knew you were making an album for the label?
Alex: Uhh, I mean probably. But it’s been such a growth progression. You know like the second thing was recorded in one session and then this was recorded in two difference sessions. Between them I think there have been lots of new influences and that kind of stuff.
Do you prefer that, just sitting in the studio one session and trying to bang it all out?
Chester: I mean if you have enough time to prepare in advance, then, I guess. But it’s hard to have enough time to really go for stuff that you want to go for and not just be limited by how much time you have. Because the previous two albums—the first session was like four hours and the other one was like six hours and we had played the stuff for the second album before but for this we have literally been writing the songs for like a year or a year and a half. Through the process we got our own studio, tried a lot of different recording techniques and stuff, so it’s been a long evolution.
Could you guys ever see yourself ending up on a Jazz label? One of the things I always wonder is like could Jazz maybe be saved if you guys or someone like you guys ended up on Blue Note or something like that?
Frank Dukes: I don’t think you guys are trying to “save” Jazz.
Alex: That’s the thing too. Like even talking about Jazz, we’re not as prolific as like Kurt Rosenwinkel. I’m not as good as Brian Blade and probably will never be, but I think what we’re tying to do is just use what we do like and what we enjoy and the flavors of Jazz and Hip Hop and Trap music and Psych music and synth music and just kind of create something new. If that inspires people to play Jazz or to Hip Hop or synth music or Psych music then that’s super bonus. I don’t think we would ever be on a Jazz label.
Matty: But maybe one day we’ll do a more acoustic Jazz album. We were talking about that.
I think you guys have been really successful in terms of bringing a Jazz context to a younger audience that doesn’t know any Jazz greats or listens to Jazz but are interested in your music. Do you see yourself as part of a young community that’s into Jazz? Like there’s a bunch of Chicago guys doing it—Kids These Days had that whole community of big band Hip Hop stuff—and you guys have been involved with the Odd Future guys… What does that mean to bring Jazz to a more contemporary, progressive setting?
Matty: We don’t really think about stuff like this a lot. Like, I don’t know what it means. It’s just the music we like to play.
Alex: If people get inspired to go learn to play piano or drums or solos or stuff like that then that’s fucking awesome.
Chester: We obviously don’t put that much thought into it. We just listen to all our influences and try to combine them.
Alex: Because there are already people trying to inspire and do clinics at schools and stuff so like, there are amazing musicians and a lot of prolific players and legends still going at it, so I think that we’re just trying to have fun with it and maybe keep it a little bit more underground than doing schools and stuff like that. We also haven’t been offered to do that, and if we would there are probably kids at schools that are way better than me at drums.
There seems to be a shocking number of kids our age that are Jazz-trained musicians who don’t want to have anything to do with Jazz. It seems like, not like a renegade group, but it seems like more so in recent years you’re seeing kids graduate Jazz school and get more fed up with playing Jazz music or playing anything swung or anything with be-bop changes on it.
Matty: Sure because you learn it for fucking eight hours a day and you practice for twelve hours.
Alex: And you play it to dudes who just listen to you play it and grade you on it. And a lot of time you don’t get to just go play it to people who want to hear you play. You can try sometimes booking your own stuff but then, I mean I know in Toronto there are not a whole lot of spots for young people to play. Then they’re still competition with all the teachers who play in the city.
Chester: And there’s so little focus on creating your own music. It’s all about mastering the techniques of music that was played by legendary Jazz musicians, which is really great to learn from but you can’t end there, you have to try and go beyond that. Try and branch out and try something else.
Matty: I feel like a lot of people who get fed up with music school kind of become session musicians. You don’t see too many people coming out in Punk bands or something like that, which would be really cool.
Alex: Also, when you’re at school you’re so isolated from outside music and clubs and playing shows that you have to do both a lot or else you’re never getting out. You can’t just join the music scene. You have to start a band, you have to meet people, play shows, bring your drum kit around the city, and never get paid. I did that a whole lot just to play and have fun and meet people.
Matty: Yeah and you have to listen to relevant stuff. I mean, now it just sounds like we’re going off on music school, but I remember going to music school and like nobody knew what Pitchfork was, which…whatever, but you know what I mean. Like if you’re only listening to what Brad Mehldau is doing in 13 then you’re not going to know what music will be enjoyable to listen to other than intellectually, or what’s going to get to people, what people are going to respond to.
Alex: But if you use it as a tool to just learn your basics and get inspiration from all the teachers and you find out what you like to do, what you like to listen to, and you find all these opened doors and then that’s when you should be like alright, cool, I’ve got my basis for what I want to do.
Frank Dukes: Well it’s like trade school not art school, right?
Matty: Yeah, that’s a good point actually. You go there to learn your trade and then apply it afterwards.
Alex: And when I was in school, I was afraid to take risks because you’re fucking being judged. Like you’ve got this drummer who tours with some Canadian pop singer or whatever he’s like watching you all the time and you’re just like… I mean obviously it’s a school and you have to get graded and stuff but you also want to be able to just do your own thing and take risks and make mistakes and not have to worry about maintaining a grade of skill level because sometimes being sloppy is awesome.