Radiolab - Curious Sounds: A Radiolab Concert

Episode Date: June 28, 2011

In this short, Jad presents the electrifying sounds of three mind-bending musical acts: Brooklyn duo Buke & Gass, drummer Glenn Kotche of Wilco, and the one-and-only Reggie Watts. Their performances were recorded live at our Curious Sounds concert earlier this month in NYC.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From.

W. N. Y. C. See? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Chad. I'm Robert Rolwitch. This is Radio Lab.

That's my line. Who are all those people? Well, yeah. Okay, so here's the thing. Here's the story, Robert. I've been meaning to talk to you about this, but, um, last Saturday I did an event I remember you were going to go brush your teeth and put the kid to bed

No I I after that I hosted this radio lab show I'm sorry I should have told you I'm sorry I should have told you That's okay that's okay that's okay That's fine you're upset I've made you know this is a terrible way to start the podcast

How many people were you with exactly because I I heard a lot of people yelling at the podcast. 800. Yeah, just a few people? Okay. It's not that many. Are you sure you're not upset? No, because I had, as it happened,

800 creatures of my own, flies, mostly, uh, in my, in my, in my, in my home where I often talk with them. Yeah. All right. I feel terrible. Eight hundred people, were they paying? Yes. Oh, really?

Yeah. It's interesting. My flies, they didn't pay very much. Maybe we shouldn't do this. No, no, no, of course. No, no. No, no, no, no. No, no.

Maybe we shouldn't do it. You know, like me, wondering what you did on Saturday night. All right. Okay. So just go ahead and wind up and let us know. You sure? Yes. Okay, so Radio Lab is a show that's about science and philosophy and big questions and mystery and wonder and curiosity and all the stuff.

The not so secret about what we do is that it's a deeply musical situation that we have here. So I thought I'd get up on stage. We're going to do something a little different on the podcast. Well, first of all, we are live. at the NYU Scurble Center with 862, some odd people. And I was like, let's just do music. All music. All music.

All the time. All the time for about two hours. Just a little bit of an experiment. But honestly, no BS. It was an amazing concert. It was really, really amazing. We had three people, three acts. First.

We got Buk and Gase coming up. Remember them? You're sure I do. We had the drummer Glenn Cochi. From the band Wilco. It's going to perform for you. Doing a very non-Wilco situation. And then we had the amazing Reggie Watts.

So what follows is an all music podcast to let you know. Here's how I set it up for the audience. These are three acts that are really hard to describe. And if I were to get highfalutin about it for just one second, I would say, all right, like a metaphor. Like if I were to say to you in the striped shirt, hi, your eyes are like a star. Okay, it's a metaphor.

right? Something people say. Oh, simile, okay, fine. My point is that your eyes really aren't like a star at all. A star is a giant thing aghast, your eyes are really tiny things in your head. They're very different.

But that experience of putting them together, finding an affinity between two things that are on opposite sides of the universe, that, to me, is what makes life worth living, honestly. And I think each of these three acts do that in their own musical way on the level of sound and genre and blah, blah, blah. So I'm going to

shut up now and actually get them out here. So our first group, what should I say about our first group? I mean, there are two people. They're both named Aaron. They have been, and this is the honest truth, they've been raping and pillaging my iPod for about six months. One of them plays the Buk, one of them plays the Gase. Together, they are Buk and Gase. Since we featured Buk and Gase on the podcast before, we're not going to play the full set. Here's one of their more recent offerings.

Give it up for Bukes. So our next performer to take the stage was a fantastic drummer by the name of Glenn Cochie, who normally plays with the band Wilco. Do you know Wilco? That's sort of insulting. Do I know Wilco? Who doesn't know Wilco?

All right, I wasn't trying to insults you. I even know Jeff Twimbly. Tweety. Tweety. There you go. Any case, Wilco is this huge band. You know, they've sold tons of records, won bunch of Grammys. And they play kind of this straight-ahead southern rock type style.

Glenn, when he's not, you know, rocking out with them, has this whole other side to his musical life, which is he is a classical composer. He's written music for so percussion, chronos quartet, among others. And when he's in that classical mode, his approach to the drums is completely different. It's like the drums become a kind of orchestra for him. All right, so Glenn, before you really get rolling here, since we are recording this for people who are out there beyond the room as well as people in the room, can you, I mean, you're sitting in a drum set right now,

but it's not an ordinary drum set. Can you introduce us to the cast of characters that you've attached to your drum set? He had all this stuff hanging off his drums. Sure. I'm going to walk over here so I can actually see what you're talking about. These guys over here, which are called Crotallis, which are... Do you want to bang on them so we can hear while you're talking?

So those are like high bell tones, and those, you know, originally were from Turkey, like antique symbols, but they kind of are used more in classical music. And then there's these tune cowbells called Amglochen, which are like Swiss or German. And then this is a prepared snare, so it's the same idea is like a prepared piano. But with a snare drum. You see a bunch of screws and springs sticking out the top of your snare. Yeah, yeah. So the drum acts as a resonator for these little sounds.

I'll play a bunch of those sounds. And what is this right here, this last... That was a wedding present. This is a wedding present. Can everybody see what this is? Can you guys see it? A fruit basket, a fruit bowl. A fruit bowl.

It's like a metal coil, yeah. And my wife of 13 years now is Midi is very forgiving of me banging on kind of everything all over the house and anything we might pass in a store on the street that looks like it might make a cool sound. And this is one of them. And it didn't actually sound that great. Kind of whatever. But when you hang it from a rubber band

over a contact mic, it sounds really cool. Kind of like a big gong. So what are we going to hear first? The first piece he played is called Monkey Chant. And it's based loosely on a story from the run. Ramayana. The what?

Ramayana, I guess, how you say it? Well, it's the great Hindu epic with Rama and Sita and all that. Crazy, complicated tale with tons of characters. So what he did was he assigned all the different characters to different pieces of his drum set. Different pieces of the drum. Yeah, each character would have their own sound. Like, I don't remember exactly how it went, but like, say this would be Rama, and maybe this would be Sita. And then this would be another character. So he could kind of make the whole story unfold before you in music. Now, you don't really need to know any of that to appreciate this. All I'll say is it's a little bit longer than the last one, but it's so worth it. Okay. Well, ladies and gentlemen, Glenn Cochie.

That blew my mind. Thanks. I have to say that's the first time, well, for me, maybe ever, that the thumb piano, the Clemba's got an applause mid-tune. Thank you for that. Wow. I mentioned in the introduction that you write music, you've written music for string quartet, you know, for chronos.

Right. I mean, when you've got to write music for strings, do you then step away from the drums, or do you, how do you, as a percussionist, write that? On the drums. On the drums. Yeah, for me, for me, everything, anything I do outside, like composing for other groups is an extension of drumming.

Well, how do you get a drum to make a string? Well, you don't, but the idea is the concepts come from it. Like for the Kronos piece, for example, I sat behind the drums and started playing and thought there's four guys on stage and I have four limbs, so why don't I just treat them like a drum set? And have them play what I would play on the drums and then, you know, instead of it being Tom, Tom, Rack Tom, Floor Tom, snare drum, have it be violin, viola, cello, but then assign pitches to it. So we did, how do you assign fit, do you sign pitches based on the music? the pitches of your instruments there?

No. No. That's okay. Yeah. Huh. So you write for strings on the drums? I did. You did.

Okay. Can you play as something else? Yeah, I'll play one more. This is another tune from my record mobile. And this is called projections of what might. Everyone? Glenn Cochie. Give it up for Glenn Cochie.

Thank you. Thanks, Jack. Final performer of the evening was a guy that's just just difficult to describe. His name is Reggie Watts. You could call him a hip-hop musician or R&B singer. That wouldn't be right. You'd call him a comedian, but that doesn't quite capture it. He's kind of everything all at once.

And he just happens to be maybe the most talented performer I've ever seen. So here's Reggie. So you write a song. I write a lot song. I'm almost for a time. Anyway, this is a song here. All a moon dough how old dog. All right, just to stick a picture in your head.

Reggie's got this giant afro, extends in like two feet in all directions. Like he has his finger in an electric socket? Yeah, and everything he does is completely improvised. Like, I'm pretty sure he has zero planned the moment he opens his mouth. Really? When I do... I'm dry...

Brown. Just kidding, okay, here we go. Here we go. This is it. So he does beatboxing, right? He'll do this into the mic, and he'll loop it. It's got effects pedals and various things. And then he'll add a part.

And pretty soon he'll have this full sound that he'll then start singing to. There you go, sing it. Wait, no, no, no. Okay, let me ask you this. Let me ask you this. Yeah. Whatever that was. Yeah. When did that begin for you? Was it, like, if you wind it all the way back to the beginning, was the beginning, like, I'll make this up.

You standing in your, in your bathroom, looking in the mirror, doing impressions. Was it your first Duggy Fresh record? Was it comedy? Like, where did that start for you? I mean, I think it started because I was an only child. and you just need to like, you need to come up with stuff to, you know, make sure that you're entertained.

But, I mean, it was something, I was always interested in everything for the most part. I really like science and music and art and period pieces. Paint me a portrait of Reggie Watts as an only child. Yeah. What would you do? Would you be in your room just doing that? I mean, I used to take a model.

Sometimes I used to take models, and I would build like an airplane model and like a jet fighter. And I put firecrackers inside of it. I'd build it fairly sturdily. I'd put firecrackers in them, and then I would go into the garage, and I would take a huge paint bucket, and I'd put it over the model and light the fireworks. And then I put the bucket over it, and I'd sit on the bucket. I'd blow up the plane. And then I would collect all the pieces, and I'd re-gluom together again.

and then the pieces that were missing I would cover with tinfoil and then I would paint over it and then I would suspend the airplane on two bits of fishing line from my garage down to the gutter from a sidewalk and then I would take

two straws and glue them underneath the airplane wing and then I put a smoke bomb some like lighter fluid saturated Kleenex tissue and with some fireworks and then I would light the smoke bomb and I'd let the aircraft kind of slide down and it would end up

kind of crashing into a mud thing. And then my friends, we'd do it for each other, but my friends would be in the grass laying down with binoculars pretending like it's a movie. So I used to... That's a... That's a easy. That explains everything.

Gereg Watts. Yeah. Hey, guys. Thank you. My last album, I hope that you take it. And I tried to put my hand on the ground, yeah, yeah. But I now give myself a chance to rectify the situation. Whoa.

What did they say to make you fall down? Baby we could Baby Really squishy And it smell weird Yeah Woo What you're true

It's like you don't even notice It's not like you don't even care Because my baby Like to take Whatever she has Put it somewhere

Maybe she'll use it for later Yeah Maybe I don't know I don't know Yeah I'm good Take Take

Babe In a bout What people do As long as they have the ability Hear and talk Wholes, your horse 30 feet high Don't know how a horse

Can get that high But the fire brigade Get that ladder truck up there Yeah Because babe built a Trojan horse Into my heart Because bad damn Trojan horse

To get it into my heart Yeah Sixty two days ago I was feeling good 61 days ago All that changed 57 days later I felt all right

But then 59 days after that It's right back where I started again But that's love You know what I'm saying Uh Yeah come on Yeah Yo

Skirball Skirball Yo Play some skirball Go play some skirball with y'all gonna play some skirball yo who's gonna be the catcher who's gonna be the squidger you know I'm saying let's play some scurball let's do this yeah you got that rectangular ball we're gonna play this we're gonna do this scurball get your team together you know what I'm saying life be changing

what you be doing I don't know but I have this haze over my head like an Isaacness that I can't get under my skin know what I'm saying yo I got some glasses I bought some I have some I'm an owner of glasses I've got some glasses I can say that proudly other people can't necessarily because they might call them something else and that's too bad that's their choice it's perception you know what I'm saying you're in control listen I've got this but someone took it from me but then I got it back but then I called Marcy and Marcy was like I don't know if I was thinking about it and I was like yeah that's a good idea Marcy and I had every intention to tell her but I just couldn't you know what I'm saying so her dress looked really good no I'm saying feeling good yeah got it

you're feeling good okay this is a this is the last song I'm gonna do here uh sorry real quick So that's Reggie Watts. How did you end an evening like this? Because it's so eclectic. Well, my fantasy was to get all three groups playing together in one big epic jam. So I asked them to do that. They came out and they started to play together. And it was initially it was a little bit shaky because no one really knew who was leading

or what key they were in or what was tempo. It's like Seattle, 1991. But eventually they locked in and they started to sound really good. Not bad, right? Yeah. Thanks to Bukin Gase, Glenn Cochie, Reggie Watts. More information about them on our website, RadioLab.org. I'm Chad Abramrod.

I'm Robert Trilovich. Thanks for listening. Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.s.org.