NOMO
In The Midst Of A Chase For A Happy Hour
Aug 27, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Patrick Stolley
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Invisible Cities
original version appears on Invisible Cities
What is that sound? Where does it come from? Where are we from? Where are we going?
All of the songs that we recorded for this session are from our new album Invisible Cities. The name of the album comes from the novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. You should read the book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italo_Calvino
The music and the writing are not related in any direct way, but the imaginative spirit of Calvino's novel is something that we aspire to in our music making. In the book, Marco Polo is giving Kublai Khan these fantastic descriptions of the cities in his empire: Cities underwater, cities hung from cords in the mountains, cities that move around etc. It becomes apparent that Marco Polo is just cataloging different facets of Venice, and that the world he has described only exists in his imagination.
I think that this is a nice analogy for the process of making music in this band. We're reaching for new sounds, combining them with old sounds and trying to re-imagine the places we come from in new contexts. Our drummer Quin lived in New Orleans for a number of years, and the working title for this song was "Quin Beat." I think it has a certain second-line shuffle that is indebted to the crescent city sound.
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Waiting
original version appears on Invisible Cities
What are we waiting for? Who is going to show up? How long will we wait?
This song is a call and response-question and answer style conversation between the horns. Justin Walter and I have a shared solo…a duo I guess. I liked to think of it as a conversation, but one day during sound check, he informed me that he had been thinking of it as a battle. So, I switched over to battle mode. He usually defeats me, but not before I get in a couple of high notes, and a few fast triplet figures. Are we listening to each other? Sometimes.
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Bumbo
original version appears on Invisible Cities
Who is Moondog?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moondog
This is one of our favorite Moondog tunes. We changed up the arrangement a little bit, and gave the song a bit of an island-style makeover. On the album, Erik is clanging away on a set of three antique fire extinguishers. Those wouldn't fit in the van (according to the survivor style method by which items are eliminated from the "necessary" list) so Erik switched to roto-toms, and when those were eliminated, he gathered up some hubcaps and banged on those. Moondog was a great inventor of percussive instruments. Check out his "Trimba" on the wiki page. I think we're gonna build one of those next, and I'll hide it under a bench in the van. This tune gives Dan Bennett some room to stretch out on the Baritone.
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Banners On High
original version appears on Invisible Cities
This is the most free-form jam in the NOMO catalogue. It's basically a fuzzy kalimba riff with everybody blowing on top of it. There is some semblance of a melody in the Rhodes, but the horns are left to their own devices and just get to freak out while trying to play an ascending pentatonic line at will. It's fun for us, and Quin and Erik switch things up. Erik plays drums and Quin moves over to Kalimba. We are getting ready to make a new batch of electric kalimbas, so check out http://twentysevenkalimbas.blogspot.com/ soon.
Be prepared to enter into a mélange, a brouhaha of silvery proportions that starts off warm and then begins to bake, before cooling down and then starting to condensate before you. It gets slippery and yet provides an epic ride through parts of the jazz world that involve dynamite players, none of which will ever (might be a stretch) be seen with their shirt tails tucked into their pants. It's street jazz or the kind of jazz that academics do when they're slumming it and actually enjoying themselves a little more than they thought was possible. It's more about the performance for Michigan-Chicago-based band NOMO, a collection of instrumental wizards who know the ways to multiple climaxes and exasperated crescendos. As a band, NOMO glides through its hot-buttered passages and makes them feel as if they were part of a spiced cake that's been dropped on the ground and trampled through, the frosting and the insides banging off the ground with the hoof steps thumps and bumps, almost as if they were dancing. The tensions get battered and strung out as if they were being deprived of oxygen, but before they go purple, they're released and they show their appreciation with further action, the molecules scattering like spilled marbles or mercury, forming the second and third acts of the booming dance. You'll find yourself immediately taken, whisked away on a wild sea change, out, out, out on the salty currents as you're up to your armpits in the oranges of a setting sun and cocktails putting the red in your cheeks. A song like "Waiting" feels like a happy hour that's been completely engaged and is nearly halfway over - which is not to be seen as a disappointing piece of information, but as a sign that everyone's beginning to get properly lubricated and ambitious. There's a bongo-ing rhythm popping off like down-pouring raindrops on the top of a taut canvas roof and the brass sounds are swinging together to make a sweltering romp as if we were all moonlighting as 1970s-era, television police officers in some tanned, boardwalk city on the coast chasing down a mugger on foot, flashing a badge and a pistol in a hurried way and finally tackling the evildoer in the sand right beneath a lifeguard's stand in front of some buxom hotties - all in a day's work. It's a song that doesn't make you feel as if you're waiting around for anything to come to you, but that it's coming to get you if you're ready or not. The same can be said for everything NOMO dishes out.
Nomo Official Site
Ubiquity Records
