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Jimmy Herring's Joyful Noise: Jazz Is Dead, ARU and Onward

by Dean Budnick

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Jimmy Herring first came to the attention of a national audience through his work in the Aquarium Rescue Unit. He thrived in that band, which also introduced many listeners to Colonel Bruce Hampton, Oteil Burbridge, Jeff Sipe and Matt Mundy. At the same time Herring won over additional fans, as he appeared on stage with a number of groups including the Allman Brothers Band, Gov't Mule, Phish and Widespread Panic. After the departure of Hampton, ARU's tour schedule abated, particularly after Oteil joined the Allman Brothers. However in 1998, Herring took to the road with two new bands, Butch Truck's Frogwings ensemble, and a new quartet of all-star players committed to interpreting the music of the Grateful Dead, Jazz Is Dead. That group has since released two discs, most recently Laughing Water, which "revisits" the Dead's Wake of the Flood album. In October, Jazz Is Dead will be embarking on a national tour (for more info visit the band's site at >www.jazzisdead.com). Jimmy took a few moments one fall afternoon to discuss all of these projects.

DB: Before we start talking about Jazz Is Dead, I'd like to briefly discuss ARU. Last year you recorded a new Aquarium Rescue Unit disc. When do you think that will come out?

JH: They're shopping it to another record label right now. You see we went in there and recorded the record before the contracts were issued, which is backwards. I knew something was funny when we were doing it but we were so happy to get to play together again because it had been a year since we'd played a gig together. At the time we didn't think too much about the contractual stuff and then we just couldn't agree. There were a lot of lawyers passing papers back and forth. Finally the label just got fed up. They said "We don't even want you guys." We said "Thank you very much, we'll go somewhere else." It'd be a shame for the record not to come out although it is over a year old now.

DB: Do you think that this incarnation of ARU will tour when the album is released?

JH: There's a chance. There's also a good chance that the original band will go out and play some more. Man, we want to do everything we can. To us it's a no-brainer, it's all about fun. And now, we could probably draw a decent crowd with what we've done: Oteil in the Allmans, myself in Jazz Is Dead and Jeff with Leftover Salmon. A lot of people who didn't know about us before probably know about us now. We've talked about maybe doing another tour and maybe another record with the original line-up, except quite possibly without Matt. We're trying to get Matt to come out and play with us but he's given up music completely. We're trying to coax him back into it, or I am, that's been my mission lately.

DB: I'll tell you, in my opinion, that ARU line-up produced some of the most interesting live shows I've seen.

JH: Thank you. That was absolutely the best thing that ever happened to me. I long for those days, I definitely miss those days. There was no money at all, we were pretty much at the mercy of the people in the audience to give us a place to crash on their floors. It was just a great time, and a lot of great music is born out of that kind of adversity. It was really fun. We did get back together to play at Wetlands one night in February, without Matt, and it was fun. Man, we hit the ground running and never looked back. We had rental equipment there, we didn't even have our own equipment but it didn't even matter. It felt so natural. It felt like putting on an old pair of shoes. So I'm hoping that we can do that again. Even if it doesn't happen in the near future it will definitely happen some time and we're looking forward to it.

DB: What was that experience like, to perform again with Bruce, Oteil and Jeff after quite a few years.

JH: There was no pressure at all. We didn't have to rehearse because we never rehearsed anyway. That whole group's thing was the moment, just follow the moment and see where it takes us. That's the same way it was at the Wetlands that night after we hadn't played together for four or five years. I mean we'd all played together in different pairings: me and Oteil have played together many times since then and so have Jeff and I, and Bruce and Jeff, and me and Bruce but not the four of us. We really missed Matt though. He was our secret weapon. He was what made us sound different from all the other bands because guitar, bass and drums are just about everywhere. You add a mandolin and that changes the sound of everything.

DB: Aside from that I can remember the Colonel picking him up and chucking him around the stage, offering a bit of visual stimulation.

JH: That was so fun. Playing with those guys was more fun than anything I've ever done. You'd spend the whole gig laughing, which can't be bad.

DB: No arguments here. Let's talk about your current project, Jazz Is Dead which I know has elicited quite a few on-stage grins as well. How did you come to be involved?

JH: My friend T Lavitz gave me a call. I was down in Macon rehearsing with Frogwings and I received a call from T. Nobody knew I was down there so my wife must have given him the number, and he said "I'm calling to see if you want to play with me and Billy Cobham and Alphonso Johnson." So I said "Come on, stop teasing me," because I've known T for a long while and he's a funny dude, always kidding around. So I said, "Come on, stop pulling my chain." He's like "No, I'm serious, do you want to do it?" And I said "Yes, I'll do it in a second." Then he said "Well do you know any Grateful Dead songs?" I was like "What? No...Should I learn some?" And he said "Yeah because that's what we're going to be doing." He told me that Michael Gaiman had come up with the concept and that he was putting together the group. So he said "Pick up Blues For Allah and learn as much of it as you can., and I'll call you up later with more tunes to learn." Eventually we got together to rehearse and then we went out a did a tour. When the tour was over I figured that pretty much that was going to be it. Then they called back a couple of months later and said let's do another, and we ended up doing four tours that year.

DB: How well did you know the Dead's music when you joined the group?

JH: I liked the Dead but I was never all that familiar with them. When I began playing guitar I was trying to get my inspiration largely from stuff that was much older just because I didn't want to sound like my contemporaries. I mean you can't avoid that, there's so much great music out there that you can't help but be influenced by it, and it's stuff that's happening right now. But one of the reasons I hadn't really focused on their music was I knew that other people were out their listening to it and that's where they were getting their inspiration and I was seeking out other sources of inspiration. Then when I bought Blues For Allah, I was just knocked out by their tunes.

DB: When you started listening to the Dead's albums and live tapes what did you discover that maybe other people hadn't appreciated or perhaps you yourself hadn't recognized?

JH: A few things. First of all, their songs. They hit me on so many levels because they have tunes like Terrapin that are well-orchestrated and then they have tunes like Dark Star that are open for interpretation and each night can be completely different. I also like some of their more fusion-oriented tunes like King Solomon's Mines. I like all that and then they have those beautiful, sensitive ballads. I love their ballads: Ships of Fools, Row Jimmy, Stella Blue. It's amazing to me that one group could encompass all that, and they did it.

I also love their songs because you don't have to copy the Dead to play them. Some people, you kind of have to copy them in order to play their songs but the Dead's music is so open and free- they are such strong compositions yet you can play them your own way. Everybody knows you're playing a particular tune but you don't have to copy what they did.

I've also really come to appreciate the fact that they were not afraid to take a chance. They weren't afraid to fail. They were willing to reinvent themselves on the spot. That's what the Rescue Unit was always trying to do. People used to come up to us and compare the Rescue Unit to the Dead. They thought that we were all Deadheads and that this was where our main source of inspiration was coming from. It wasn't. At that time it was Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and the traditional jazz thing: Wayne Shorter and all that stuff. At the time that's all we would listen to: Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Wes Montgomery. So we said thank you very much, thank you for comparing us to the Grateful Dead but we weren't listening to the Grateful Dead.

Not long after the Rescue Unit stopped playing I heard some Dead from the late sixties. A local radio station had the Grateful Dead Hour, and I turned it in on one night while I was cleaning up my basement. And man, they did an improvisation for like forty-five straight minutes. That's when it hit me that those people who were comparing us to the Dead were right because the Rescue Unit did sound quite similar. I think that when the Dead were doing that, they were listening to the same stuff that we would be listening to much later: crazy Ornette Coleman stuff, free jazz.

There is a school of people who think that the Dead were inferior to jazz musicians, that they were just a bunch of out-of-tune guys. That misses the point of what they were trying to do. What they were doing is reinventing themselves in front of an audience every night. Also, you have to respect their intense, ridiculously eclectic body of work. They have everything from bluegrass, funk, jazz, blues, classical. I think that's underappreciated as well, the scope of their work. Also, they weren't afraid to go out on stage and not try to sound like the records. I mean I've never heard a Grateful Dead song on a live tape that sounded like the record. They weren't worried about selling a million records, they were worried about how they could grow as musicians: "Let's do what it takes to help us grow as musicians. Let's move onward to where we haven't gone before." They had a lot of parallels with the great jazz musicians of the 50's and 60's. I definitely see that now, I didn't see it before. But now that I've learned a lot of this music, I've really picked up a new perspective on it. Then again there are also those jazz musicians who think that Ornette can't play and that Cecil Taylor just isn't any good. And they would just never get Sun Ra. They'd tell him to be more traditional and he'd say "I'm making my own tradition." And he did.

In many ways that's what the Rescue Unit ARU would do too. You know, sometimes we would purposely empty the room. I will admit that I wasn't one hundred percent in favor of this but this is sometimes the way the band wanted to do it. We would go into a room in a town we never played before and there would be a crowd there and we would play the most abrasive, ugly music that we could play until everybody would leave except for a chosen few who heard something in what we were doing. And then when they stayed we would play for them. If people would have stayed eventually we would have played what they wanted to hear, but it was one of Bruce's methods of getting rid of the spirits that he believed didn't need to be there. That was one of his favorite things to do, to go into a room and empty it. And the people that remained, those were the people who got a special show. Sometimes we would want to exchange instruments. Sipe would grab my guitar, I'd play drums and Bruce would play a piano or something, and people would be like "What the hell are these guys doing?"

It really was a great lesson, and it's just weird how much we all learned playing with him. It was like a special school, the School of Hampton we called it. Musicians who played with Frank Zappa, musicians who played with Sun Ra, Ornette or Miles Davis would feel that they been through those schools. He's like the Alabama football coach version of Miles Davis, that's the way we viewed him. We learned so much from him, and a lot of it was what not to do. He would talk about that all of the time. Now that a number of years have passed and I'm doing these Grateful Dead tunes, I see a lot of what I learned from him in that group that I am able to apply to this gig. I see a lot of parallels with their stuff and what Bruce was trying to convey.

DB: How has Jazz Is Dead's sound changed over the past two years?

JH: In the beginning everybody played it sort of safe. I come from the school of Hampton so I was the first one to lay on the floor and detune the guitar and play one string for half an hour- I'm exaggerating of course, but those guys thought I was completely insane for doing anything like that. I think as the group has been playing longer we've become a lot more comfortable with not being afraid to fail, which I told you before is one of the things about the Dead I found so appealing. To me in the pursuit of something you've never done, if you have to wade through a sea of garbage just to arrive at one beautiful moment that never happened before and will never happen again, it's worth it. And the Grateful Dead's audience is totally there with you, they'll wade through the crap with you, that's the thing I love about them. In fact they'll be disappointed if you don't take some chances and play it really safe, close to the vest, inside the song. They want to hear you try something you didn't try the night before or the year before. I think the band has evolved into taking more chances. I know that I played it kind of safe on that first tour- I was playing with these guys who are absolute masters and the last thing I wanted to do was play anything that they might find offensive. I was playing with Billy Cobham, Alphonso, two living legends and T Lavitz who was one of my heroes since I was fifteen years old- I was a big time [Dixie] Dreg addict.

Something like this needs time to evolve, and with every tour that has happened a little bit more To do it right you really need to do a month's rehearsal because you need at least sixty or seventy songs. We didn't have that luxury when we first went out. We could have learned a song on the bus or at soundcheck but in my opinion that wouldn't do the song justice. That would be an insult to the Dead's music. I want to get inside the tune and really learn it before I forget about what they did in part and start to learn it my own way.

DB: Last year Billy Cobham left the group. I assume that you were you the one responsible for bringing in Jeff Sipe.

JH: Billy enjoyed the music, he just doesn't need to come to the US. He lives in Zurich, and the fact that he lives there, just for him to get here costs him quite a bit of money. Meanwhile he's revered as royalty over in Europe. He goes to Japan and Australia and receives the red carpet treatment. But the US just isn't that hip to the type of music that he's known for. He ought to do what John Scofield is doing. Sco is a jazz legend who is out there playing in front of new audiences. He's expanding and coming out and playing with people like Gov't Mule, Deep Banana Blackout, Medeski Martin and Wood. God if the Rescue Unit were still together it would have been unreal for him to come out and play with us. I would have absolutely had a cow.

Anyhow, after Billy left, there was a time when we weren't sure if we were going to continue but Michael Gaiman convinced us to stick with it. So when he called me and asked about bringing in another drummer, I said "I got a guy, Jeff Sipe who's as good as anyone on the face of the earth." So Michael said, "Great, let's do it." But Jeff is also in Leftover Salmon so he wasn't available to do the whole tour. So we got him to do half the tour and T Lavitz called Rod Morgenstein from the Dregs, and I was like "I'm going to get to play with Rod too?" because he was another of my favorite drummers from when I was a teenager. So the first tour Rod did half and Jeff did the other half, and then the next tour both of them came for the whole tour.

By the way, I still have a great relationship with Billy and he was the one who convinced me to keep doing it. In fact he's offered me to come to London and record at Abbey Road, sometime later in the fall which of course I am extremely happy about. I've never been to London much less Abbey Road. So I'm thrilled about the chance of working with him again.

DB: In terms of additional future projects, do you think you'll perform again with Frogwings any time soon?

JH: I don't really know but I would like to do it. Butch is really cool. I love working with Butch. Plus he's one of the only other musicians I know who loves to fish as much as I do. Most musicians just aren't into it. I love southern musicians because they're into nature.

Frogwings did seven gigs in February and then recorded all of them. When I last spoke with Bud Snyder, the Allman Brothers front of house mixer, he was starting to mix the record with Butch. They sent me all seven nights of tapes and asked me to listen, and I stayed up for three nights listening to all these tapes. There were three nights at the Wetlands which had a lot of good stuff and I really liked the gig at Toad's Place, so we'll see what comes out of that.

DB: Any other projects?

JH: Well Jeff Sipe and I are starting something together after the Jazz Is Dead tour and his Leftover Salmon tour. We're putting together a band with this local super genius, Ricky Keller. He's a guy that not many people know about because he's always stayed in Atlanta. He's a bass player but he's a total musician, and he understands what it takes to make great music. He's a great writer on top of that. He owns a studio, a full blown real studio. For the last fifteen, twenty years his playing has taken a back seat to his studio business but now his studio business is working for him so well that he can leave town and it can run itself. So Ricky and I will write tunes together before the Jazz Is Dead tour, and then after that Jeff will come in and we'll record. This is going to be a very experimental project. We're not going to compromise any, and we already have a deal with a local company, Terminus Records. We're doing the record at Ricky's place so we're not going to have to spend a zillion dollars. It will have everything from blood and guys rock, piledriving stuff to the most broken Zambi music you've ever head in your life where nobody is in tune with each other at all. A joyful noise is what we call it, that's what Sun Ra called it. He said "the Bible said nothing about playing music, it said play a joyful noise." Of course that quote really sticks with us so we're into the joyful noise. It will be pretty eclectic because it will have all this weird stuff plus we want to have really nice ballads too. Again, I'm really inspired by the Dead's music to do a record that has all of these different things on it. This has been a really great experience for me. The Dead's music has really influenced me and helped me in so many ways.