Big audio dynamite

Jesse Zubot, musician and founder of the Vancouver record label Drip Audio. (Jessica Eaton)

Vancouver violinist Jesse Zubot loves every little shard of contemporary music. Get him talking about bands and players and styles — as I did over lunch recently at a lounge in the city’s West End — and he’ll pedal through every corner of his musical imagination. He’s interested in the work of Daniel Lanois, the fabled Canadian-born producer and singer-songwriter. And Warp, the English techno label. He’s an admirer of Billy Bang and Leroy Jenkins, the jazz avant-garde’s violin pioneers, but as a teenager, Zubot remembers a time when he was devoted to gangsta rap. Of late, he’s become obsessed with distortion and noise music.

“The truth is,” Zubot says, speaking so low and so deadpan you might mistake it for a put-on, “I can’t concentrate on anything, really, for long enough, which can be a bit of problem.” It would only be a problem, perhaps, if the weight of it ground him down, or if his chatter were merely a stand-in for substance.

This mad-mash aesthetic is what makes Drip Audio, Zubot’s independent record label, one of the most original musical operations in the country. Its 11 releases are located at an axis point in Vancouver’s creative underground — a melting pot of jazz improv, indie-rock, ambient music, electronica and something you might call 21st-century cabaret. Despite being in its infancy, Drip Audio already feels like a Canadian version of Thrill Jockey or Tzadik, those small yet influential U.S. labels devoted to all things progressive.

(Black Hen Music)

“I’m finding I can’t ever really make or record anything that really sounds right or proper even within the same genre,” the 32-year-old Zubot observes, calling Drip’s roster a community of “outsiders,” people who “don’t fit anywhere else.” It’s a sharp turn for a musician who’s probably best known for Zubot and Dawson, the Juno Award-winning alt-roots group he founded with guitarist Steve Dawson, or for his role in bluesman Jim Byrnes’s band. This fall, the versatile Zubot is featured on the new disc by Vancouver trio the Be Good Tanyas. And as the savage yet tender Dementia, his recent multi-instrumental album, shows, Zubot flits naturally from strings (violin, mandolin, guitar) to electronic sound design.

“I think the man is a savant,” says Brian Watson, the former manager of Zubot and Dawson and president of Maximum Music Group, the record company Drip has partnered with since launching in March 2005. “He’s just one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.”

Vancouver’s music community isn’t used to having someone like Zubot in its midst. He’s practical-minded and eccentric. He has a sense of musical fashion that’s urgent and immediate and makes the term “genre” obsolete.

In many ways, it was an existential crisis that gave birth to Drip — namely, the anxiety stirred up by Zubot and Dawson’s success. With their self-fashioned style, “strang” (“strange” and “string” rammed together), the duo carved out a little niche. Call it roots music with zip, Zubot and Dawson’s albums are an expertly crafted and easy-on-the-ears alloy of catchy country riffs, neatly mapped-out jams, blues wails, slide guitar and hoedown violin. Their third disc, Chicken Scratch (recorded with master American producer Lee Townsend), won the 2003 Juno Award for roots music. Their next project, The Great Uncles of the Revolution (spearheaded by Toronto bassist Andrew Downing), won a Juno in 2004, this time for best contemporary jazz album.

Between 2002 and 2003, Zubot and Dawson were touring almost non-stop in North America and Europe. “It was on the cusp of going to a whole other level,” says Zubot, who claims the duo burned out on the road. “I kind of went crazy and lost it,” he says. Eventually, Zubot declared a need “to play some f------up music for a while.”

A farm boy from Mendham, Sask., Zubot grew up in a family of musicians. He was trained as a classical violinist, commuting up to two hours each day to a school in Medicine Hat, Alta. His father, Orville, a saxophonist and drummer and a huge fan of jazz and blues, recruited 10-year-old Jesse for his band. Jesse’s grandfather, Adolph, joined them on accordion. Zubot says they covered mostly “hack country” and polkas, with him playing a bit of everything: violin, mandolin, guitar, bass, keyboards. When Zubot arrived in Vancouver in 1992 to study music at Capilano College, he very quickly found musicians with equally eclectic tastes. When he started to pull away from Zubot and Dawson, he found refuge in the city’s strong improvised music community.

“I also saw it as an answer to feeling confused and feeling like you’re trying to figure out who you are as an artist or as a musician … which is something I could never quite really figure out. This whole area enables a person to do whatever they do and it’s OK,” Zubot says.

He spent a lot of time just hanging out: at clubs, lofts, bars. Just talking music and playing, in spots like the Railway Club, 1067 and, most importantly, the Sugar Refinery, the now-shuttered Granville Street room. Practically all of Drip Audio’s roster — from guitarist Tony Wilson to trumpeter JP Carter — first connected and became friends there.

“They had all kinds of music,” Carter says of the Sugar Refinery. “It was a neat place to hang out. When I think about it now, there were a lot of people around the same age, generally speaking, that were able to use it as a place to start out and express their ideas.”

The Inhabitants. From left, Pete Schmitt, JP Carter, Dave Sikula and Skye Brooks. (Jessica Eaton/Zubot Audio)

Two years ago, when Zubot decided to start a label, he tapped directly into this scene – its eclecticism, its allergy to tags. Take Carter as an example. He’s a member of the Inhabitants, a quartet who this year played Germany’s widely admired Moers Festival; the band’s self-titled debut sits somewhere between, say, electric Miles Davis and Montreal avant-rock ensemble Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Then there’s Carsick, Carter’s duo with Inhabitants guitarist Dave Sikula, an experiment in processed soundscapes and spare, simple melodies. Carter is also in Fond of Tigers, a seven-piece co-operative that includes Zubot. Tigers’s summer debut, A Thing to Live with, centres on guitarist Stephen Lyons’s nervy musical sketches, a series of grinding motifs that morph into sprawling collective improvisations. (Their October concert at Vancouver’s Museum of Anthropology was billed as “Space Pop/Experimental Jazz.”)

Brian Watson, onetime manager of singer Denzal Sinclaire and Canadian electric jazz quartet Metalwood, sees Drip’s artists as part of Zubot’s overarching affection for all things indie. “Indie is a culture. Indie is wave the flag, go against the grain,” Watson says. “For me, I couldn’t care less about that. But that’s Jesse.”

Zubot doesn’t want to hide this stuff away. It’s an implicit part of his mission: to bring creative music to a wider audience. Whether Drip Audio nabs some indie gold dust isn’t the point; the label has put a mirror up to this emerging Vancouver scene.

“There were periods in the past year where I was like, ‘This is totally ridiculous. I have to end this now or I’m gonna lose my mind,’” Zubot says, referring to the load of Drip’s day-to-day operation. “But it’s on an upward climb right now and I feel really inspired, just because of the music. I love it when people notice these albums. For everybody involved, and for everybody who made them, it’s really exciting.”

Greg Buium is a Vancouver writer.

CBC does not endorse and is not responsible for the content of external sites - links will open in new window.