Biography
by Josh Potter
Once upon a time, music was a craft, and the art form's great craftsmen weren't known as producers, but rather composers, arrangers, soloists and bandleaders. It was an era when jazz served as the great storehouse of culture and style, and the big band functioned as archivist, interpreter and emissary to the masses. Matt White, the 27-year-old guitarist, composer, bandleader and craftsman behind Fight the Big Bull, knows that time is now. All Is Gladness in the Kingdom, the tentet's collaboration with legendary downtown trumpeter and spiritual forefather Steven Bernstein (Sex Mob, Millennial Territory Orchestra), is simply the latest evidence of how vital, powerful, and relevant the big band formula can sound in the 21st century.
Make no mistake: There's nothing nostalgic or revivalist about Fight the Big Bull. The "rapturously chaotic sound" owes as much to the band's open ears as it does to their mastery of tradition. Forged in the fall of 2005 around the (now defunct) avant guitar-trombone-drum trio Fight the Bull, the group has become a Richmond, Va. institution through their reputation for fearless improvisation and White's clever, forward-looking charts. A bi-weekly local gig quickly garnered the band an eclectic following of devoted purists and eager converts, and their 2008 debut Dying Will Be Easy, on the Portuguese label Clean Feed, pushed the group before a national audience, earning them feature spots on WNYC and NPR?s Fresh Air, while Popmatters.com listed the record among the year's best. It wasn't long before the band landed a gig at celebrated New York avant-garde space The Stone and a series of guest spots with visionary saxophonist Ken Vandermark in Chicago.
Much of this can be tracked to a two-word email White received shortly after college graduation. With fawning admiration and little expectation that he'd get a response, White wrote to Bernstein requesting charts to study. "Call me," was Bernstein's reply. A one-hour lesson in composition turned into an eight-hour session and a lasting mentorship that has guided Fight the Big Bull's career as well as White's growth as a composer. When, in early 2009, White asked Bernstein to help write and record his band's hotly anticipated sophomore album, the answer was just as concise.
Recorded over 10 days in Richmond, All Is Gladness in the Kingdom is a sprawling, jubilant mess of styles and influence, as welcoming and inclusive as it is gnarled and boundary-pushing. Amid tight configurations of brass and woodwinds, and with a rhythm section that can vamp, stutter and grind as well as it can swing, the spirits of Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, Archie Shepp, and the Lounge Lizards are evident from the first notes until long after the tracks run out. Yet, for a group of young musicians, to whom the notion of "sampling" has exploded the limits for what's valid in composition, it's just as natural for certain songs to owe a debt of gratitude to King Tubby, Steve Reich, Dr. John, the Staple Singers, the Velvet Underground, or the Band without sounding like anything other than that great hybrid genre "jazz." True to his southern roots and the old cliché that all music is folk music, many of White's arrangements draw on old shape-note melodies and traditional slave songs. The album's title track uses one such redemptive refrain to catapult Bernstein's caterwauling horn into a New Orleans R&B groove. "Shouting Song" and "Mobile Tigers" each use traditional lamentations to patiently build toward clattering catharsis.
Despite its polish, there's a glimmer of anarchy in the record that fuels the band's charge and groove-sense without threatening the integrity of the compositions. "Mothra" takes its name from Godzilla's winged foe and rampages appropriately, while "Eddie and Cameron Strike Back" pushes a Mingus-style vamp with Afrobeat intensity. Bernstein and White play supportive roles much of the time, allowing the saxophones and trombones plenty of solo space, but when they step forward they do so with authority, Bernstein utilizing effects pedals to match White's searing volatility.
Of White, Bernstein says, "He's not just a great writer/arranger but an amazing guitarist as well." Clearly impressed with the collaboration, Bernstein calls Fight the Big Bull "A band with no fear, that is used to playing in front of an audience, that doesn't mind rocking out, and doesn't mind spacing out."
It's a reputation that's rapidly spreading. In June, London-based Fat Cat records will release a collaboration between Fight the Big Bull and David Karsten Daniels, a singer/songwriter who approached White with a number of tunes he'd adapted from poems by Henry David Thoreau. In September, Fight the Big Bull joins forces with experimental rockers Megafaun and indie folk sensation Bon Iver for a gospel-themed recording and performance series commissioned by Duke University. Also this fall, Fight the Big Bull will release Live Slow Die Old, a collaboration with K Records artist Karl Blau featuring Chicago Bass clarinetist Jason Stein.
It's been said that breaking the rules requires prior knowledge of what those rules may be. 2010 looks to be the year when Fight the Big Bull charges out from under the wing of history, horns drawn, to rewrite what can be accomplished with a little old thing called the big band.
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