Englanninkielisiä nimiä ei kai ole vielä mainittu; Porn Flakes tai Swingin' Swamis :)
From: The Baltimore City Paper
NO COVER by Michael Anft (June 24, 1998)
It's getting late on a Saturday night at the Ottobar, but the crowd's game, twirling and shuffling itself into a mock frenzy to the strains of Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass' arrangement of "A Taste of Honey." As the band polishes off the kitschy outro, Swingin' Swamis' main man Bryan "Snackie" Hillman leans into his mic and asks, "Does anybody know what that one's called?" Silence. "Anybody at all?" After a few moments of collective head-scratching, a light bulb lights--a solitary woman wins a free cigarette by pulling the title from deep within her memory banks.
Which, in a way, is what Hillman and the boys are doing: pulling out forgotten or lost gems from the vinyl-filled vaults of recorded musical history for a new generation to appreciate. And as their ample following has proven, the Swingin' Swamis' way with the cheesy pop-culture musical forms of yore makes their ethnomusicological mission easy to take.
Not that Hillman takes it all that seriously to begin with. "If the audience can't dance to it," he says of the Swamis' eclectic set list, "then they can at least laugh at it."
But the Swamis' approach, while it may include covering erstwhile lounge maestros Alpert and Henry Mancini, isn't locked into any retro-lounge formula. You won't hear Burt Bacharach or Juan Esquivel, for example. What you may hear are obscure Venezuelan sambas, bouncy calypso, deconstructed jazz standards, and musical shotgun marriages such as "Oriental Chacha." Or a version of the Three Suns' "Stumblin'," more popularly known to longtime Baltimoreans as the Capt. Chesapeake theme. Both in goofy spirit and wide-ranging, genre-crossing adventurousness, the Swingin' Swamis resemble the legendary Denton, Texas-based quartet Brave Combo, which frequently butchers/pays tribute to polkas, twists, ska, jazz, and folk, even though it's probably best-known as David Byrne's wedding band.
Hillman has no such, uh, aspirations for his crew--even though the band (Hillman on keyboards and guitar; Steve Swan on reeds; Eric Myers on acoustic guitar; Eddie Chabot on bass; and Zak Fusciello on drums) did provide reception music for All Mighty Senators frontman Landis McCord's nuptials. "We don't want to be famous," Hillman says. Further, he steadfastly claims that he's no lounge craze-hopper. "Even without the popularity of lounge now," he says, "we'd be doing what we do--absolutely." Besides, Swan adds, "We have too much edge to be considered 'lounge.'"
Hillman says the initial incarnation of the Swamis arose from the ashes of Porn Flakes, the similarly eclectic but stylistically antithetical group Hillman headed from 1992 to 1996. After the Flakes' breakup, Hillman took time off to produce an indie cassette of solo material, then started looking for players to flesh out a jam session planned for Louie's Bookstore Café's 1996 Christmas party. The Louie's gig was "so well received we were hired to play New Year's at Memory Lane," Hillman says.
By winter's end the band had a name (courtesy of since-departed drummer Mike Daugherty), a few gigs, and the surge of a nationwide lounge fad going for it. A few jobs at Memory Lane and the 14Karat Cabaret followed. So did numerous personnel changes, à la Porn Flakes. Not surprisingly, Hillman's recruits came from divergent backgrounds. Bassist Chabot (the Wobblies, Ozzy Osmond), who moonlights as an electronic musician and samplemeister, joined last July. Myers, who plays in a band dedicated to Balinese gamelan music, followed shortly thereafter. Swan, an accomplished jazz sax player and a member of the Eubie Blake Orchestra, came on board in September. Fusciello (the Hassassins) signed on this past March after Daugherty moved to Seattle.
The Swamis have developed an audience through what were once- or twice-monthly gigs. Now, however, the band is booked every other Wednesday at the Belvedere's 13th Floor--a highbrow lounge when compared to some of the more "underground" rooms the band is used to playing. Hillman doesn't mind the transition from obscurity to commodity. "It's good for us," he says.
The change in local stature from curiosity to "party band" mirrors Mambo Combo's rise in the early 1980s; the Latin dance band is still doing club gigs, parties, and weddings with regularity. Hillman says he wouldn't mind being the turn-of-the-millennium answer to the Mambo's Beefalo Bob Friedman. "I've got plenty of beef," he jokes. "Plus, I think we could go on as long as we want to go on with this."
"Yeah," Swan adds, "we could drive it right into the ground."
During a recent 13th Floor show, a couple in their 70s gets up to dance to a swing tune. "They told us we're the best band they've seen in a long, long time," Hillman says, shaking his head. "Maybe that's a good audience for us. Maybe we could play nursing homes and stuff."
Anything to enlarge Swami Nation. Not that Hillman takes it all that seriously to begin with. "If the audience can't dance to it," he says of the Swamis' eclectic set list, "then they can at least laugh at it." |
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