31/3/2018 Dan Weiss’s Starebaby Mines the Loud Ground Where Jazz and Metal Meet - The New

zz and Metal Meet - The New York Times

MUSIC

Dan Weiss’s Starebaby Mines the

Loud Ground Where Jazz and
Metal Meet
By HANK SHTEAMER MARCH 29, 2018

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31/3/2018 Dan Weiss’s Starebaby Mines the Loud Ground Where Jazz and Metal Meet - The New York Times

Dan Weiss onstage at the New School in January. His quintet, Starebaby, blends metal and jazz
influences on its self-titled album. Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

In January, an audience at the New School was treated to a surprising sonic

shift: placid jazz quickly evolving into punishing metal. The instrumental
quintet Starebaby began performing “The Memory of My Memory” in
ballad mode, easing into a swaying, dreamlike melody. But before long, the
tempo started to stutter and swim, and the drummer and bandleader Dan
Weiss nudged the group toward a harsh and forbiddingly loud climax.

The transition reflected the band’s unusually broad skill set, documented on
Mr. Weiss’s new album, also called “Starebaby.” (The project takes its name
from a remark that a friend’s 8-year-old son made about Mr. Weiss’s infant
daughter.) The record’s eight pieces, all by Mr. Weiss, touch on thorny prog,
gritty noise, hushed melody and a kind of sci-fi minimalism powered by
Matt Mitchell and Craig Taborn’s twin Prophet-6 analog synthesizers.

At home in Brooklyn, a few days after the group’s two-night New School
stand, Mr. Weiss showed off a battle scar: a patch of raw, red skin between
his left thumb and forefinger, the result of thwacking his snare with peak
force while using a jazz drummer’s traditional stick grip. “I’ve never had
that before,” he said.

Mr. Weiss, 41, is now best known as a virtuosic, in-demand jazz drummer —
he’s also a seasoned tabla player — and an ambitious, imaginative
bandleader. But from mid-2005 through early 2007, he could be
found performing shirtless and hooded as a member of the New York
doom-metal band Bloody Panda. “I had a lot of fun playing those live
shows,” he said. But they took a physical toll. “I remember fainting after one
of them, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m not doing this.’”

He left the group but continued to follow metal closely, as he had since
Metallica’s 1988 LP “ … And Justice for All” blew his young mind. He
obsessed over bizarre, challenging bands, and his 2006 album, “Now Yes
When,” included a piano-trio composition called “Ode to Meshuggah,”
which hints at that Swedish group’s mind-bending rhythmic cycles.

Dan Weiss Metal Jazz Quintet - "Annica" Video by Dan Weiss

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31/3/2018 Dan Weiss’s Starebaby Mines the Loud Ground Where Jazz and Metal Meet - The New York Times

He had already begun bonding with fellow jazz progressives like Mr. Taborn
and Ben Monder over their mutual interest in heavy music. Mr. Monder,
Starebaby’s guitarist, recalled being on tour with Mr. Weiss soon after the
release of Meshuggah’s “I,” a dauntingly intense 2004 EP. “I remember him
coming into my hotel room and just slapping the headphones on my head,
like, ‘You’ve got to check this out,’” he said in an interview at his Brooklyn
apartment.

The musicians began discussing

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Dunn — who has worked
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31/3/2018 Dan Weiss’s Starebaby Mines the Loud Ground Where Jazz and Metal Meet - The New York Times

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Mr. Weiss and his collaborators aren’t alone in mining this intersection,
which has been explored by everyone from John McLaughlin and his
Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 1970s to John Zorn — via projects like Naked
City, Painkiller and Simulacrum — from the late ’80s up to the present. The
sui generis guitarist Mick Barr, a member of the New York metal
vanguardists Krallice, recently released “The Bowels of Jupiter,” a bracing
duo album with the veteran free-jazz drummer Marc Edwards. And on Zig
Zag Power Trio’s new album, “Woodstock Sessions Volume 9,” the
multifaceted bass master Melvin Gibbs joins the Living Colour members
Vernon Reid and Will Calhoun to perform jazz repertoire by Pharoah
Sanders and Ornette Coleman in an incendiary, post-Hendrix style.

For some members of Starebaby, the group has yielded real-time musical
breakthroughs. Playing alongside Mr. Dunn at the quintet’s first live show,
in Los Angeles last October, Mr. Monder — a rock-savvy musician who
appeared on David Bowie’s “Blackstar” — realized that he’d entered a new
zone. “I could feel Trevor’s experience, just through his sound and his rig,”
he said. “I’m like, ‘Wait, this is kind of the real deal.’”

Mr. Weiss had that heaviness in mind when he was composing “Starebaby,”
but he wasn’t out to mimic the sound of metal. For one thing, the often-
distorted keyboards of Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Taborn — both also play
acoustic piano on the album — handle much of the heavy riffing. (“The
more rude sounds, the better, as far as Dan was concerned,” said Mr.
Mitchell, an encyclopedic metalhead who has played with Mr. Weiss since
2009.) And though the record features a number of shredding guitar solos,
Mr. Monder is equally featured as a generator of pure ambient texture.

Mr. Taborn appreciates that Starebaby’s sound sprung from its members’
distinctive styles, rather than rigid ideas of genre. “That was the key,
because everybody could be much more like, ‘O.K., we’re going to play a
metal thing,’” he said. “But everybody’s also aware that it would be kind of
lame to just try to be a metal band. So everybody holds their space and finds
a thing around it.”

Even during the group’s most aggressive moments, the musicians’ jazz
backgrounds shine through. On the 14-minute “Starebaby” closer, “Episode
8” — one of several pieces on the record inspired by Mr. Weiss’s deep
immersion in “Twin Peaks: The Return” — the band navigates a series of
breakneck, diabolically complex themes with a nimble, organic feel.
(Engineering and mixing by the studio veteran Ron Saint Germain, whose
credits range from Soundgarden and Bad Brains to Ornette Coleman and
Paul Motian, lend the album both beautiful warmth and serious punch.)

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31/3/2018 Dan Weiss’s Starebaby Mines the Loud Ground Where Jazz and Metal Meet - The New York Times

Ultimately, Mr. Weiss said, his various influences have more in common
than it might seem. “I think whatever music, whether it’s jazz or metal or
Sufi music or ambient music or electronic music, there’s a certain level of,”
he paused to find the right words. “It’s like a higher kind of plane of
existence.”

Dan Weiss’s Starebaby will perform on April 1 at Nublu 151, Manhattan; nublu.net.
“Starebaby” is out April 6 on Pi Recordings.

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