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 October 1, 2005 Andrew Durkin Confounds Expectations
Over three discs, the Industrial Jazz Group has created music that is bracingly unpredictable. As Durkin told me in an e-mail, "I think it has something to do with deliberately trying to confound expectations (both my own and what I understand of other people’s)." His group has grown from the quintet that performed Durkin’s compositions on Hardcore (2001) to the 11-piece orchestra that negotiated the complexities of last year’s The Star Chamber. While the group’s name might suggest something noisy or unpleasant, Durkin is at heart a melodist. His work contains healthy portions of free jazz and employs elements often associated with postmodern music -- tape manipulation, short spoken-word interludes, random nonmusical sounds -- but Durkin is no cold theorist. Even The Star Chamber, his most challenging work so far, retains the sense of humor and accessibility that make his music so enjoyable. Durkin grew up in New Jersey and began taking piano lessons when he was seven. "I had a few good teachers here and there -- particularly my first piano teacher, when I was in second grade, Shelley, who made composition seem like the most natural thing in the world." One of the songs she taught him was Monk’s "Blue Monk," surely a significant formative experience. Durkin played a variety of instruments throughout his school years and participated in "pretty much every official music thing a student could be involved in: concert band, jazz band, school musicals, marching band, pep band, and so on." By the time Durkin reached his teens, he was playing in cover bands. "Those are probably best forgotten," he says. "The only memorable NJ group I was ever in was the Evelyn Situation, which only lasted two years (not even) and never officially released an album." Durkin wrote nearly all the songs for the Evelyn Situation, and their approach to playing and arranging them was typical for pop bands. "We didn’t use charts at all, and there was not a whole lot of improvisation involved. Generally, everyone had some input in the way the tunes were arranged -- usually that meant everyone made up their own part." The songs Durkin wrote for the Evelyn Situation contain many of the characteristics he would develop further in the Industrial Jazz Group: humor, a slightly askew but generous feel for melody, and a willingness to throw different genres or techniques together to see what would happen. "Secretaries and Their Bosses/Coffee" begins with a nod to Stephen Sondheim before segueing effortlessly into a paean to coffee sung à la Laura Nyro. Musical theater was a strong influence on the Evelyn Situation (you can read about them and listen to MP3s at www.llij.net/evelyn/), but Durkin was already tugging at the edges of different styles to see where he could pull them.
After settling in at USC and working on a few independent film projects, Durkin formed the Industrial Jazz Group in 2000. Although he originally intended for them to play songs he’d written for a vocalist, the group soon grew into a forum for Durkin’s instrumental ideas (apparently the singer had a tendency to blow off rehearsals). The IJG recorded its first disc, Hardcore, in December 2000. Durkin’s humor and playfulness were apparent in the song titles, such as "Valley of the Smokes," "Art & Commerce," and "Cozy ’n’ Tooty," and in the music itself, which nonetheless had a strong measure of musical complexity. Plus, it swung. Hardcore is a good place to start listening to the IJG -- the album is somewhat looser than the group’s other discs, although its compositions are still tightly structured. The reed players, Evan Francis and Mike Dodge, have the lion’s share of solo time, and their playing encompasses everything from swing-era joy to avant-garde edginess. Bassist Aaron Kohen, who has played on every IJG recording, is the rhythmic center of the band; on Hardcore, he often helps listeners maintain their balance during the disc’s more challenging sections. Durkin takes obvious delight in mixing dissimilar elements. "Cozy ’n’ Tooty" evokes polkas, circus music, swing-era jazz, and bop, but it doesn’t seem haphazard. The elements in Durkin’s compositions connect naturally, and his music has a structural soundness that feels inevitable. "All I really know ahead of time is that I want it to be interesting structurally," he told me when I asked how his songs evolve. "But it’s not like I start with a set form and try to plug some as-yet-uncomposed musical content into that." In much the way Duke Ellington did, Durkin, as he composes, keeps the style and skills of each of his musicians in his mind’s ear. "I depend on them for the creation of a specific ‘sound.’ That is, I need to get the sound of individual players in my head before I can write effectively for any group. One of the reasons I’ve been able to write so much IJG stuff from the get-go is that there has been a series of very distinctive players coming through the group. It has been relatively easy to write for them because I can hear their sounds in my head pretty clearly." Durkin released Hardcore on his own label, Uglyrug Records, but the IJG’s next disc, City of Angles, was picked up by Innova Records, an imprint of the American Composer’s Forum. With City of Angles, the group was expanded to include brass, vibes, and, briefly on one track, a mezzo-soprano. The larger ensemble allowed Durkin to use more unusual harmonies, and his compositions reflected even broader musical interests. "Full On Freak" affectionately embraces crime-film music techniques while turning them on their heads. "Tuxedo Trouble" contains hints of Erik Satie and Carl Orff. Durkin points out that his collaboration with the musicians in the IJG leads to diverse influences and ideas. "[We make] recommendations back and forth to check out a specific artist, or group, or album. Aaron Kohen was the guy who got me into Raymond Scott, for instance. And I’m fairly sure I’ve created a few new Zappa fans in the group." With The Star Chamber, also on Innova, Durkin mixes strange beauty and dissonance to create an absorbing and unsettling evocation of America at this moment in history. The loopy melody that opens "Drippy" soon begins to fracture and crumble before it gives way to a powerfully rhythmic bass solo by Aaron Kohen and a blistering, freewheeling solo by Evan Francis on alto. The rest of the track maintains a precarious balance between melody and chaos. "Schwarzkopf Takes the ‘C’ for Flagstad" employs a horn arrangement reminiscent of ’60s TV detective-show soundtracks, duck calls mixed with an Asian-influenced melody played on flutes, and a stretch of Stan Kenton-esque bravado. Once again, Durkin makes sure the disparate parts fit together seamlessly, but this time he approached the recording process from a different angle. "The Star Chamber represented a bit of a shift for us, in that it was intended as a live document of the group at that time, so there was very little manipulation of the basic tracks, which were all recorded live. The previous records were all manipulated to some degree." I saw the Industrial Jazz Group live at a show during a five-date East Coast tour in June. A dectet version of the group crammed itself onto the stage of the Hamilton Street Café in Bound Brook, New Jersey, about an hour from New York. They performed new material during their 45-minute set, including a composition Durkin introduced as "a tribute to Ray Charles." Although the song didn’t contain a specific Charles tune, it evoked the spirit of the horn arrangements on his great 1950s recordings for Atlantic. At one point near the end of the piece, two separate horn lines began to collide, snake around each other, and, at points, blend together. It was as if Charles Ives were interpreting the music of Ray Charles. Durkin has tried a fresh approach with each of the Industrial Jazz Group’s discs, and the performance I saw suggests that he will continue to push himself and his music in new directions. I expect him to go on surprising his listeners for a long time. What won’t surprise me is a career full of exciting music, critical accolades, and, with any luck, a large and dedicated following. …Joseph Taylor
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When I read on the Industrial Jazz
Group’s 
Durkin began focusing on jazz after
he moved to Los Angeles in 1995 to pursue a graduate degree in English at USC. "I
fell into jazz kind of accidentally. I had of course been exposed to it before moving to
L.A., and had educated myself a little. But it wasn’t until 1995 or ’96 that I
developed what you could call a full-on jazz addiction. That may have been because at that
point I was looking for some new direction, musically." He began playing in a
Dixieland jazz band in 1997 ("I discovered that you can only play ‘When the
Saints Go Marching In’ so many times before you go nuts") and met a number of
the musicians who would join him in the Industrial Jazz Group.