Even if you don’t know him by name, you’ve probably heard Stuart Bogie play the saxophone sometime over the course of the last 15-years. As the musical director of Antibalas and an early contributor to TV on the Radio, Bogie helped introduce countless ears to a range of afro beat, soul and indie sounds. He’s performed and recorded with everyone from MMW, RANA, Gomez, State Radio and Burning Spear to Massive Attack, The Roots, Paul Simon and The Wu-Tang Clan. More recently, Bogie and several of Antibalas’ other members made their way from Brooklyn bars to Broadway as part of the onstage house band for the hit play Fela!. While the show cut away at Antibalas’ tour schedule, the Broadway run has introduced Bogie to an entirely new—and far reaching— audience.
Bogie also won over some new fans last month when Phish handpicked several members of the extended Dap-Tone/Antibalas family to sit in during its Halloween show in Atlantic City. The saxophonist and his longtime companions helped Phish cover Little Feat’s Waiting For Columbus and returned for a surprise encore of “Julius.” Below, Bogie discusses his recent time with Phish, his Superhuman Happiness Project and his future goals for Antibalas
Let’s start by taking about your recent Halloween show with Phish. When did the band first approach you and the rest of the Antibalas/Dap-King family about sitting in?
I guess Phish asked a year ago. We got asked to do the Rolling Stones record [ Exile on Main Street ] but we couldn’t do that because we had black out dates for the Fela! and had to play a certain number of shows at the theater. When I say we, we is loose [laughter]. This year we were able to do the Little Feat album when they asked us again. I don’t think we knew about it until the second week in October, though. It was pretty last minute
It was the first time I played with Phish but it wasn’t my first time in the same room as them—I’d gone to see them as a young musician, like most young musicians in the world or at least America [laughter]. But Halloween was the first time we were all onstage with them.
Were you familiar with the Waiting for Columbus album in particular?
No—I knew about Little Feat and their sound and I had enjoyed it at moments. But I didn’t own the record, and I hadn’t delved into it like we did before the shows.
I talked to Sharon Jones right after she sat in with Phish last Halloween. She was on tour with the Dap-Kings right before Festival 8 and didn’t have much time to actually rehearse with the members of Phish until the show. How much rehearsal time did the horn section put into the shows?
We had two days of rehearsal with the band, and we met as a horn section and went through the arrangements on our own. [Antibalas member and Fela! musical director] Aaron Johnson transcribed the arrangements from the record, and we played through those before we met with Phish. They were lovely. They were so laid back and it really was just a pleasure. It was their chance to play another record they love—learn about the music, and they got so into it! They had the specific pedal settings Little Feat used. I don’t know that much about guitar pedals but Trey [Anastasio] had two of them and set them just the way Little Feat had set them. When we got to the gig they had another drum set tuned to Little Feat drum set sounds. Isn’t that wild?
When you think about it, it makes total sense. That’s what they do if you’ve ever heard a Beethoven symphony played by a period group. You don’t want to hear a classical symphony on modern instruments.
This is the first time Phish covered a live album on Halloween, which means that the band aimed to recreate the experience more than the songs. Did you feel the performance was able to re-create the feel of the Little Feat concerts documented on that live record?
It’s cool because the Phish audience deserves so much credit for being open minded, enthusiastic, lovers of music that probably received the Little Feat records when they were first played live. Really, only Phish could do this—and when I say Phish I mean the band and the audience. Everybody made this happen and it’s pretty neat. I’m surprised at how much I learned. I thought, “Okay this is going to be a fun show to play with a great band” but I really had a new experience and it was wonderful.
The other song you sat in on was “Julius,” which is a Phish original that appears on Hoist. Did you prepare for that song as well or was it spur of the moment?
Phish had the horn chart ready, and we learned that in the rehearsal. It was great to play that. They originally recorded that song with the Tower of Power horn section, which is also the horn section that plays on Waiting for Columbus.
You mentioned earlier that you were a Phish fan growing up. These days you play everything from afro beat to indie rock to funk and klezmer. Did Phish and the jam scene have a specific effect on your playing as a young musician?
Yeah. I suppose the thing that I probably picked up on was a love for playful composition—things that happen and take the music into dramatically different places. In one sense you can explore the single picture and the depth of it. You don’t want it apart from that picture, you don’t want to see the frame. You don’t want to know it’s a picture. But in another way, you can be looking at a picture and then you can draw a frame around it and detach and step back, and then draw another picture. The musical environment changes and Phish has this way of steering through that—it is very interesting. The audience goes with it and they love it and they dance to it. It’s a physical reaction for them—to these changes in environment—and I must say that’s something I tremendously admire right now. I want that to influence the music I’m working on, more so even then when I was younger. I had seen Phish and was aware of their work but I think I like it now more then ever.
A lot of my friends contacted me after—more than any other concert I’ve done before, actually. One of my friends is a drummer with the Blue Man Group and he was like, “Man, I’m listening to you on a webcast now.” Another couple of friends were in the audience that I had never talked about Phish with and then a couple of friends were backstage. My friend Ryan Thornton—who plays drums in RANA and Sean Bones—was backstage at the show and Joe Russo’s fiancé was there. I felt like I had been living next to this whole artistic community the whole time that never came over.
When we started rehearsing, Mike Gordon was talking about Giovanni Hidalgo and the group he played in with Mickey Hart. I kind of jumped back because when I was 16 I read Mickey’s Planet Drum book, and I’d be lying if didn’t say it really opened me up. I took all of these ideas and traditions into my heart via that book and, really, that book was the first thing that opened me up to the idea of music as a beautiful tradition—and how that tradition can go in-between genres and how it can lead you back through generations. Then I got the 20-year-old syndrome where you think you know everything for 10 years. Thankfully, that ended and I’m back into an open space, and I look back at that book and the recordings that Giovanni and Mickey Hart have played on, and feel the whole thing coming together.
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