Bringing a Little Madness - and Lots of Teamwork - into the Mix
An Interview with Koko Dozo
By Mark Kirby
The rock and roll super group - a group made of musicians who are well-
known for being in other groups, or, solo stars who band together into
one entity, like the comic book heroes X-men or The Avengers - has a
long history in rock music. The super group Blind Faith was comprised
of guitar giant Eric Clapton and drummer Ginger Baker from Cream,
joined with Steve Winwood of Traffic. Clapton also joined with
legendary Allman Brother Duane Allman and super drummer Jim Gordon to
form Derek and the Dominoes, who recorded the classic rock album
'Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs.'
Oftentimes in jazz, musicians from different groups (who are great
solo artists in their own right) will come together and create great
music. However, this is not always the case. Groups made up of great
performers - those used to working alone or being the "star" - can
sometimes be less than the sum of their parts, as egos clash and the
group becomes like a bad basketball team, where everyone wants to
score and nobody wants to pass or play defense. Koko Dozo, however, is
a dream team. Each member of the group, which includes Polarity/1,
Rubio and Amy Douglas, is an equal contributor, with the entire group
utilizing each member's skills and talents. Once more, there are no
egos clashing. Quite the opposite occurs, as the members provide
support and encouragement for one another. On the group's debut
'Illegal Space Aliens,' Koko Dozo shows that individual and group
expression can meld into one, and - just like a good jazz band,
baseball team or this year's Boston Celtics - can result in something
even greater than the sum of its parts.
[Mark Kirby] What kind of music was played in your homes when you were
growing up?
[Polarity/1] I started off with my dad's records. My earliest faves
were Cab Calloway, Tito Rodriguez and other salsa music, Elvis, James
Brown, Chuck Berry, Beatles and Led Zeppelin. Then there was the radio
and television shows like American Bandstand, Soul Train and the Ed
Sullivan Show.
[Rubio] My parents were fundamentalists and went through this period
of being afraid of having any secular music in the house, so for a
while we had nothing but this old 8-track with Pat Boone and Bob
Dylan's one Christian album. No, I'm not making this up. I used to
stay up nights just surfing the dial on this crappy transistor radio I
had and absorbing everything I could get my ears on.
[Amy Douglas] I come from a family that played instruments. Growing
up, I was fortunate to have parents that liked music quite a bit. My
dad was all about jazz - Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Miles Davis,
Brubeck, Duke, Bird and Diz, etc. - so I get my love of jazz from him
and my grandparents. My mom was a huge fan of artists like Carol King,
Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Paul Simon, Jim Croce and Elton John
(still one of my personal heroes to this day). She was also a huge fan
of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Temptations, Philly soul, and
anything Gamble and Huff touched, from Harold Melvin and the Blue
Notes to the Spinners and all in-between. She liked Black music in
general. Also heavily on rotation in the house growing up was Aretha
Franklin, who served as my initial influence into opening up my head
and wailing away, and Stevie Wonder, who was one of my greatest
influences of all.
[Mark Kirby] What incident or moment ignited your passion to perform
or otherwise get into music?
[Polarity/1] When I was in high school I discovered Brazilian music,
Appalachian folk, Eric Dolphy, 16th century Japanese court music, Bob
Dylan and Mahavishnu Orchestra. My thing with Dylan got me to buy a
guitar so I could express my rage over the inconveniences of life on
earth. Within weeks I was writing clueless protest songs about
important political issues I never bothered to read about.
[Rubio] I've had a passion for music as long as I can remember. I used
to go nuts over it even as an infant apparently. I started taking
lessons at age four. When I was 11, I formally made a decision to
dedicate myself to music. I was classically trained on piano and organ
as a kid. As a teenager, I started getting heavily into metal and prog
rock and things like that.
[Amy Douglas] I think growing up as a child in the 1970s served as a
constant source of inspiration and was a catalyst. From just listening
constantly to my parents' music, and then turning on the TV or radio,
it seems like virtually EVERYTHING influenced me. But if I had to
narrow it down to a few choice moments, I'd say playing Stevie
Wonder's "Songs in the Key of Life," seeing Chaka Khan on Soul Train,
seeing Bowie everywhere on TV, hearing all the Beatles' albums, and
most important, hearing Led Zeppelin, my favorite band of all time.
Between the TV shows Soul Train, Midnight Special and Don Kirshner's
Rock Concert, there was no shortage of good stuff to draw on. I think
the combination of hearing all this stuff as a child was like a bomb
going off. Certainly, I take almost all my visual cues from Donna
Summer, P-Funk and Chaka.
[Mark Kirby] Describe your musical backgrounds. Did you study formally
in school? Or take lessons?
[Polarity/1] When I was 14 I bought a plywood guitar with a book of
tunes that had chord diagrams, and then I starting writing my own
songs. A couple of years later I took a few lessons and learned how to
play major and minor seventh chords so I could add some jazz and bossa
nova flavor to my songs.
I spent a semester at Berklee School of Music in Boston, which was a
weird move, being that I couldn't functionally read music and my brain
isn't wired for formal learning. But I could write notation a little
bit and tried to prove that I was Berklee-worthy by hot-dogging the
homework projects - like scoring an arrangement of Monk's "Epistrophy
in 7/4," which nobody could play. I was redeemed a few years ago when
I notated a 7/4 thing for Pete McCann and Gregg Bendian to play on
"Munton's Revenge" on the Polarity/1 'Speechless' album. They nailed
it pretty quickly. What was good about the year at Berklee was that
even though I couldn't learn in a normal way, [with] what they were
throwing at me, I was able to sort of "visualize" all these concepts
like chord functions and voicings. It all came in handy much later on
in unexpected ways when I would create quite complex things without
"knowing how" and be taken seriously. In that sense I've had a very
real musical training.
[Rubio] I had lessons up until I was 16, mostly classical music. When
I was younger, we had a deal where I got free lessons in return for
performing for Kawai, showcasing their instruments in malls and
conventions. Because of that, I had some performance training as well.
By my 17th birthday I was playing full-time with bands and earning my
keep.
[Amy Douglas] I started doing music from age six onward. I first
discovered I could sing when my elementary school teacher wrote my mom
a letter saying, "Ask Amy to sing for you sometime." My grandmother
taught me piano initially, and from there I took lessons. From 6th
grade on, I was one of those disgusting "Music Big Concert School"
kids. I started learning music theory in junior high and I got a lot
of credit from the state of New York, won the Louis Armstrong and
Eubie Blake music scholarships and then went to study Jazz Theory and
Composition at New York University. UUUUUUGH.
[Mark Kirby] What were some of your earliest musical experiences?
[Polarity/1] My earliest gigging experiences in high school were great
antidotes for bad looks and bad conversation-starting skills. Music-
making has been all good except for one rough period where I got a
real-world lesson about where my strengths and weaknesses were. My
songs started off in folk and rock. Then they got jazzy and funky.
Then I wanted to bring elements of the late John Coltrane, Mingus and
Mahavishnu. So I created a band with all jazz guys instead of folk-
rockers which was most[ly] cool - except that I wasn't that kind of
player with that kind of training. Since my only interest in the
guitar was for songwriting, I had no chops and couldn't contribute
much on the instrumentals the other guys were writing. And they needed
a serious jazz/metal guitar player. So I got fired from my own band.
It triggered a move into a radically different direction, where I had
to start from scratch and discover what my own creative process was,
make a commitment to it and then succeed on my own terms. And with
that kind of focus, I found that there were a whole lot of different
things that I did really well with my own vision and method and
developed big chops with it.
[Rubio] It was rough from age 11 to 16 because I basically had to
disappear into a hole and hibernate in order to switch from organ to
piano, and didn't perform live at all during that time. It was a
definite case of withdrawal. My first few rock bands were rough, too.
I was nicknamed "Wendel" because that was Gomer Pyle's actual first
name in the TV show. I'm sorry to say that at the time the name fit
perfectly. I was more than a bit naive. I'm very grateful for those
times, though, because I learned a lot very quickly.
[Amy Douglas] I played my first pro gig at age 12 and did my first pro
session at 13. I told my parents I didn't want to go to school
anymore. From then onwards, it got darker. My first pro gig was at a
supper club on Long Island. Between dishes of steak and shrimp, I sang
a combination of jazz standards and disco classics. It was a blast.
[Mark Kirby] Describe your individual musical journeys from the first
bands to Koko Dozo.
[Polarity/1] I started off writing songs until I hooked up with the
SIM (Studio For Interrelated Media) department at Mass Art
(Massachusetts College of Art) when I was discovering Cage, Xenakis,
George Crumb, Joan LaBarbera, Steve Reich and others. I made a
decision to not use melody, harmony or rhythm in any way that
resembled songs or jazz. And since I was also a visual artist at that
time, the art scene provided venues for this new direction. So my
visual stuff, music and lyric-writing got re-channeled into
performance art and composing for choreographers and experimental
theater. I also formed a group called Vocal Repercussions that did
totally improvised vocals-only performances, where abstract vocal
sounds morphed into words, free-associated texts, rhythms and
harmonies. Then I moved to NYC and got obsessed with groove. I studied
African drumming, played in samba bands and had a hip-hop thing with
rapper D.A.V. called Medicine Crew. Hip-hop was an easy transition
because I was already into looping and collaging, but in an abstract
mode, and my performance poetry worked in a rap format. I was always
into groove since I was little - funk, salsa, African drumming,
calypso, samba and reggae. A couple years later I got back into
songwriting and all that stuff merged into songs and electronica when
I became Polarity/1. And that led to film scoring and collaborating
with Rubio on Audioplasm, which led to Koko Dozo. And recently I
circled back to the art scene, scoring for Battery Dance Company and
Quorum Ballet from Lisbon.
[Rubio] My very first band I was in was ruled with an iron fist by
this absolute tyrant and it was a real wakeup call. Those were also
very fun times, of course. After a couple years in my hometown of
Winnipeg, Canada, I moved to Toronto for six years before coming to
NYC in 1997. I've done just about every kind of gig you can think of
in that time, both live and in the studio.
[Amy Douglas] I had been gigging steadily in my own bands, ranging
from funk to rock. I was part of a group of downtown artists known as
the "Homocorp" scene. I was [also] a part-time member of the
Squeezebox Band - the same Squeezebox they recently released a film
about at this year's Tribeca Film Festival - and basically spent my
20s either gigging, doing sessions or hanging with drag queens and
getting into trouble.
[Mark Kirby] How did the three of you meet and get together?
[Rubio] I had met Polar in 2003 through a mutual friend, a drummer
called Curtis Watts, with whom we had a mutual interest in samba. We
hit it off and started working together sporadically. In the fall of
2005 we decided to completely redesign Polar's studio with my help and
work on each other's projects. That blossomed into us working together
on some production stuff, mainly soundtracks for documentaries, and an
instrumental collaboration called Audioplasm.
[Polarity/1] Rubio and I were working on the Heavy Meadow album at the
same time he was working with Amy in her "Red Hot Mama" show. He
suggested the three [of us] get together to see if we could come up
with something interesting.
[Amy Douglas] I had a show called "Red Hot Mama," which was a rock
vaudeville show, and I had hired Rubio as the keyboardist, and we
really hit it off. When the show folded, he introduced me to Polar,
the two of them having done a project called Audioplasm. I am way
happier in Koko Dozo than I've been in just about anything I've ever
done. We got together on a super hot summer day in 2007 and realized
we had a great capacity to make incredible music based on our
collective musical passions and influences, which also include a group
devotion to Brazilian music, Afrobeat, and Latin music, so we really
had quite a stewpot brewin' by the time we started to write songs.
[Mark Kirby] How did you arrive at the name Koko Dozo?
[Amy Douglas] At the risk of hurting myself by patting myself on the
back, I have to take the credit for it. My ex-boyfriend had mentioned
wanting to do an avant-garde project and he threw out Koko Dozo as a
trial name. When we were thinking about names, I threw it out there,
and the guys liked it. I think it's fab. [My ex-boyfriend] did so
little for me while we were together, [so] at least he gave the band a
great name.
[Mark Kirby] What is the musical concept of the band?
[Amy Douglas] It's a really huge one. First and foremost it's to
virtually force people to have to really listen to what we do, and to
help audiences that have been pandered to and been reduced to some
sort of lowest common denominator grow some brain cells back. The
music is obviously a ton of fun, it puts you in the mood to do some
serious dancing and there's more than a healthy dose of silly swirling
around in the mix. But really listen to the words and you'll hear that
we have some deep issues we're struggling with and we do address them
in our songs, ranging from our distrust of our government, to the
polarization of culture in our home of New York City and a whole bunch
of other things. Our musical concept is to shrink the globe as well;
the internet has made the world a smaller place and we wanted to find
a way to fuse cultures, languages, styles and influences together in a
way that reeks of New York City life, but will appeal to an audience
that is truly global.
[Rubio] Generally, Polar handles the arrangements and the drum and
percussion elements. I come up with harmonic ideas, play most of the
keyboard/bass-type things and mix the tracks. Amy is the voice of the
project and handles melodies. Obviously, there is a lot of overlap.
There is one song I arranged and produced ("Boomchi"). Polar and I
each do one lead vocal ("Kokodozonomics" and "The Heart,"
respectively). There are songs where Amy did the chord structure and
played keyboards. Polar is very avant-garde and always pushing the
envelope. Amy is very melodic and tends to create things that are
catchy and mass-appealing. I'm kind of in the middle.
[Polarity/1] We have an open source attitude about music. Between us,
we've worked just about every genre category there is and we don't
feel any compulsion to restrict where we go. Each song has a strong
identity of its own but they all sound like Koko Dozo. Conventional
wisdom dictates that our way of working will guarantee that we'll
never find an audience. But we know that's bullshit. The post-
corporate online music business has made it okay for people to trust
their intuitions about the music they discover. An amazing variety of
people are responding. We're reaching young electro heads, world-
beaters, dance-clubbers, boomers, electronica geeks, and po-po-pomo
gonzoid hairy-backed noiz gimps living in the basement of the basement
on diets of sticky buns and penis butter and toe jam sandwiches. The
parents and the kiddies like us too. And we write in different
languages (English, Spanish and Portuguese) which reaches out even
further. Also we have this whole bargain-basement-space vibe that
makes things really fun.
[Mark Kirby] What is the story behind the Sun Ra-esque (a new word!)
dress and alien mythology?
[Polarity/1] Here's the story: we came from outer space and landed on
Earth to exploit its resources - and for other reasons that we'd
rather not discuss. We're from the low-rent part of the universe where
you wear whatever is lying around in the alley on garbage pickup day.
That, coincidentally, is the same galaxy where Sun Ra came from.
[Amy Douglas] {Laughter} Well...the word "alien" permeates much of
what we do and we like to riff on the term. Alien, as we mean it
internally, is the feeling of not being comfortable in one's skin,
feeling out of synch with the world around you, feeling like the
constant outsider. And we decided to really play with the word, and we
decided that a space age "alien" theme would suit us wackos pretty
well! Besides, it gives me an excuse to wear wigs and glitter, which I
feel I was born to do.
[Rubio] We really wanted to put the fun and craziness back in music.
Too many projects take themselves too seriously these days, which is
BEYOND ironic.
[Mark Kirby] Describe the writing, recording and producing process for
this CD. Were you all in the same studio at the same time?
[Polarity/1] Since we work in my studio, I'm there for the whole
process. Generally, I show Amy and Rubio a track that I think would
work for Koko Dozo. It might be just a sketch, almost complete, or
anything in between. I might have complete lyrics as well ("Face On
The Dancefloor," "Kokodozonomics") or just a rough idea for lyrics
that Amy and I will collaborate on ("Shine"). Or Amy and/or Rubio will
take one of my tracks and turn it into a song ("Second Time," "The
Heart"). Sometimes Amy has a song and I build a track around her chord
changes, melody and vibe and help with the lyrics ("Down"). Rubio and
Amy wrote "Boomchi" together and Rubio produced that track.
Rubio is the guy with the engine-ear. He comes in when a track is
pretty much laid out and starts tweaking things. Then he'll add his
keyboard solos, sometimes bass and the more harmonically dense
keyboard stuff. I do keyboard parts that don't require big chops. Then
Amy comes in and we track vocals. Rubio and I finish the mixes with
Rubio in the big chair. Joe Lambert masters everything at Trutone
Studios. He's done all the Polarity/1 stuff and Heavy Meadow too.
Lately Amy has been playing some keyboard parts.
[Rubio] As far as recording, we were generally all there. I personally
NEVER record final voices without someone else in the room to give me
a sense of perspective. Polar did a lot of editing on his own but
often that job fell to me as well. The mixes were generally done with
Polar and me, and we would send roughs to Amy for her input.
[Mark Kirby] What is your live show like? Is there a full band?
[Amy Douglas] It's a full-on brigade of madness! We operate as a trio,
currently using our tracks and the addition of live keys and guitar,
bass and percussion.
[Rubio] I would love to have a live band, but right now circumstances
and logistics just don't allow it. The three of us do perform live,
though. Polar plays electronic drums, guitar and hand percussion, I
play keyboards live and we all sing. We use versions of the tracks
that are customized for live shows, so what you hear on stage is not
necessarily exactly what you'd hear on the studio version.
[Polarity/1] Our shows are fun for us, and I suppose audiences love to
watch grown people making funny noises up there and bouncing around
like homeless space mutants. Amy's wigs and Rubio's Viking helmet are
worth the price of admission. And gazing at my psychedelic death-ray
yarmulke is a life-affirming way to blow off shabbos.
http://www.kokodozo.com
http://www.myspace.com/kokodozo
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