Season Four at Cous Cous

Tonight marks the return of Fight the Big Bull and Ombak’s rotation on their home turf venue, Cous Cous. The summer there has been occupied by various bands, but these two regulars have been on summer vacation since May 27. In what’s being called “Season 4,” they’re back to bring life to Wednesday nights once again.

August 26, 2009; 12:00 PM • by Dean Christesen

Band leaders Matt White and Bryan Hooten spoke about their plans for the season, how they kept busy this summer, and their future goals.

From Matana Roberts, Glows in the Dark, Fight the Big Bull @ MUSE

Fight the Big Bull

RVAjazz:How have you spent your summer, Matt?

Matt White: I planned the Richmond Marching Band Party, went on a tour, I went and heard a lot of music in the south, spent some time in New Orleans. That’s basically the music-related things I’ve been doing.

RVAjazz: What should we expect with season 4 of Fight the Big Bull at Cous Cous?

MW: Fight the Big Bull will be retiring a number of songs.

RVAjazz: Like “California is for Suckers”??

MW: I don’t think we’ll retire “California is for Suckers.” That one has kind of been semi-retired many times now, though. I think we’ll probably retire the whole first record for now and kind of focus on just spending time with some of the new material. We spent a lot of time playing “Grizzly Bear,” for the good. It’s a lot different now than it was 3 years ago. But you only have a certain amount of set time. I want to focus on new All is Gladness material. I thought the Ken Vandermark material was really good, but it never became part of our set. Part of that is its different instrumentation.

We’ve got a recording session coming up in November with the Giant Bull. We’ll probably be workshopping some ideas for that (at Cous Cous), although it won’t be the same kind of thing, won’t be the Giant Bull obviously. I’ll probably pass around some ideas and see if they sound cool.

RVAjazz: Are you going to be shopping the Giant Bull record like you did with Big Bull, ultimately landing with Clean Feed?

MW: We’re doing a collaboration with this guy, Karl Blau, who did some work with The Great White Jenkins. He’s kind of famous in indie rock circles. He’s on K Records and does a lot of really quirky home recording stuff, and he’s really fluent with tape, cutting and splicing. A lot of mixing, post production, dub. The way we record will be different: it won’t be all live. You don’t have the same mixing options when you (record live). He wants to do it kind of On The Corner, Teo Macero style: basically be big grooves. We’re not shopping it around. He’s got some serious street cred as far as major indie markets go. Critics love him to death. Karl will be in town for three days, so it’ll be done really quick.

From Fight the Giant Bull, Ilad, Runaway Circus @ Gallery5

RVAjazz: Will you be recording at Lance’s (Minimum Wage Studios)?

MW: I have the date scheduled at Lance’s, but the more I think about it, I just got a new 16-track tape machine. Basically, if I’m using that, I’m using the same platform that Lance is. And then we’d be mixing down to my quarter inch mastering machine anyway. I might try and do it at my house and see what would come of it.

I want to do short little vocal snippets, like Dizzy Gillespie’s Big Band did. Kind of like a cheesy big band thing, that I think would be funny. People chanting shit every once in a while. I think there will be some vocals, like in Charlie Haden’s Liberation Orchestra. I think that would be cool if there was wild groovy shit and in the background there’s some opera singing.

Fight the Big Bull plays tonight, Wednesday, August 26, 2009, and every other Wednesday thereafter, at Cous Cous, 10pm, free, 21+. Cous Cous is located at 900 W. Franklin St. at Shafer St., Richmond, VA.

Ombak

RVAjazz: How did you spend your summer?

Bryan Hooten: Ombak performed at the Virginia Governor’s School for the Humanities and Visual and Performing Arts on July 24. It takes place at CNU and is a month-long program for gifted Virginia high school students. This was my 3rd year on the faculty there. Ombak did an hour-long concert, and we also did a thing where musicians in the program came up and played with us, and we had a question & answer session at the end. Fight the Big Bull played last year. It was really cool to see a room full of 400 high school kids go absolutely nuts for the music we’re doing. They were completely excited about it. Everyone had a blast.

We worked a lot on Verbatim stuff, put out an album, went on tour. I was on the No BS! tour, stuff like that.

RVAjazz: Where is Ombak at the moment, musically?

BH: Snow Panda (Gabe Churray) is in the process of working on a remix project of some of the studio recordings from Framing the Void and some live recordings. So that’s been in the works. Towards the end of our spring run at Cous Cous, we got into some Tuvan folk music and some drone oriented things, and some of the new music that I’m writing alludes to that a little bit. It was kind of a refreshing change of pace to all the math-rock centered stuff. We also did some kind of very, very loosely composed stuff, where I just gave the band rhythms to work with.

RVAjazz: What’s Ombak’s music going to be like during this season at Cous Cous?

BH: We’re planning on doing some Radiohead music (“15 Step”), some Ornette Coleman tunes, plus new original tunes by everybody in the band. Lots of new music, including re-imagining some of our older material. We’re probably going to explore playing some music that is a little less thorough on the compositional side, and a little more open, just to juxtapose the newer music that we’re doing with the body of work that we already have.

RVAjazz: I’ve heard you talk about doing another album. What’s Ombak’s plan for the near future?

BH: I think I’d like to record another album at the beginning of next summer, so we’ll start thinking about that. I don’t want to give it away yet, but I’m working on bringing somebody down to guest artist with the band in the spring. We’re also planning to play more up and down the east coast.

Ombak plays next week, Wednesday, September 2, 2009, and every other Wednesday thereafter, at Cous Cous, 10pm, free, 21+. Cous Cous is located at 900 W. Franklin St. at Shafer St., Richmond, VA.