Place: Kino Šiška / Ljubljana / Slovenia
Interview date: 11/24/2009
The fifth visit to Slovenia by the one-of-a-kind masters of funk-metal fusion, with all those unpredictable musical spices that only they know when and how to throw in, the extravagant chameleons Living Colour at Kino Šiška on 11/24/2009, was a real dimensional doorway out of the dreary, cloudy, rainy autumn, a quick escape into a new adventure of sailing through the boundless world of music that human imagination can channel!
Around half past seven in the evening, I sat down in the “catering” room with Living Colour drummer William E. Calhoun! Calhoun is an exceptional musician and a one-of-a-kind musical sorcerer who developed a recognizable (all his own) drumming technique and breathed a unique kind of jazz experimentation into it. When he’s not with Living Colour, you can run into him in a bunch of wild musical projects like Unified Presence, Aza, Headfake, and the man has built up his career through live and studio collaborations with a slew of high-flying, big-sounding names in the music business, such as: B.B. King, Mick Jagger (Rolling Stones), Jaco Pastorious (R.I.P., Weather Report), Harry Belafonte, Pharoah Sanders, Jack Dejohnette, Paul Simon, Lou Reed, The Allman Brothers, Lauryn Hill, Marcus Miller, Dr.John, Carly Simon, Herb Alpert, Ron Wood (Rolling Stones), Wayne Shorter (Weather Report saxophonist and Grammy winner for the CD “High Life”), Lauryn Hill and the rap heavyweights Run-DMC and Public Enemy.
Will had just picked up a small plate of dessert to dig into a piece of cake when the caring hostess loaded him up with tea as well. But as it turned out, the dessert stayed untouched and the tea went completely cold on Will during the interview…
RockLine: How’s the current Living Colour tour going?
Will: Fantastic. We just went through North America, then South America, and now we’re here…
RockLine: In September this year you released a new CD, “The Chair In The Doorway”. How did the album come together?
Will: We spent a lot of time on tour in Europe, which is where most of the songs were born. We ended up with 20 or 30 songs and picked only 13 for the CD. We wanted to make an album that Living Colour fans would really love. So we tried out some of the songs at shows even before the album came out, to see how they’d work. The songs that didn’t make it onto the new CD, I hope they’ll find their place on the next one. For “The Chair In The Doorway”, our basic motivation was to concentrate on making it hit home with the audience. We recorded most of the album in Prague, with some material in New Jersey. During that time we also made sure to completely cut ourselves off from people and set up conditions where nobody would bother us while we worked.
RockLine: All four of you are busy with plenty of side projects. Where on earth did you find enough time to set Living Colour in motion, and at the same time create the conditions for a new record?
Will: Living Colour is a really big name for us and it remains our priority. All those side projects of ours are incredibly fruitful, because we come back to Living Colour from them full of fresh musical ideas and information, especially about jazz, electronic music, “open-minded” music, drum n’ bass, African music and so on,… Disconnecting and doing my own thing inspires me a lot, and the same goes for the other three. And when we sit down together to write material, we don’t work according to the Western European or American way of thinking, which revolves around four-beat rhythms. Luckily we’re full of different musical influences that help shape the record. That’s very important. Of course, there’s also your “ego”. Sometimes you want to force it through and make it happen without much regard for others,…
RockLine: How would you compare the two albums? The previous one, “Collideoscope”, sounded pretty sharp, it was loaded with some kind of anger…
Will: The “Collideoscope” period was a time when the band was only just coming back together, kind of getting into gear after a break. We had a different label back then, terrible management, so those were circumstances that made the album darker, more loaded with anger and disappointment. To get to “The Chair In The Doorway” we first had to deal with situations that weren’t exactly friendly, and “Collideoscope” was made under those circumstances. With that album we squeezed through the eye of a needle. We had to make it. At any cost, no matter that so many people were throwing sticks in our wheels and plenty of people let us down.
RockLine: What was your first contact with music, and what drew you to becoming a drummer?
Will: I’m the youngest of three kids in my family. My father was a big bebop fan. As a ship’s captain, he brought home all kinds of music. From Harry Belafonte’s Mighty Sparrow to Russian and Chinese music. I listened to all of that at home at full blast, and my favorite magazine back then was National Geographic. Those two things fascinated me the most at the start. The younger of my two older brothers was six years older than me and luckily just as open-minded. He played drums too, though he quit at nineteen, anyway, he brought home music like, say, Emerson, Lake And Palmer (ELP), Kansas, Earth Wind And Fire, Led Zeppelin, Van Halen, Miles Davis. So there was zero tolerance in the house for albums coming in. They were all welcome. No matter the genre. Even if somebody who came over to visit remarked: “But that’s a white artist!” I’d shoot back: “So what?” My mom had more conservative taste. She listened to a lot of religious or gospel music, Mahalia Jackson. But I was lucky to grow up in an incredibly progressive neighborhood that produced two of my biggest drumming favorites. One of them is Steve Jordan, the other is Pumpkin, who in my opinion is responsible for hip hop becoming interesting to the music industry. In the Bronx, where I come from, it was totally normal, when my brother and I were walking around, for a whole bunch of musicians to be playing different instruments, different music in the park. My brother played in at least twelve different bands and dragged home all kinds of crazy instruments that echoed through the house. And the funny thing is that during that period I didn’t even want to become a musician.
RockLine: When did you get hooked on manipulating sound? Onstage, for example, you don’t just use drums, but a whole host of different gadgets that create various sound effects, Drumwave,…
Will: Two years ago I released a solo studio album, “Native Lands”. The music on it sort of covers my travels over the last ten years. Among other things, that’s where I stopped believing in musical genres. All I wanted was to focus completely on sound. So I started putting sound first. The sound of water, fire, wind, for instance,… Suddenly it no longer mattered what time signature I’d play the drums in, what rhythm I’d use. The structure, the skeleton of the song, wasn’t important anymore. So I expanded my basic drum kit, added pedals, percussion, electronic effects, and stretched it to the point where it takes me wherever I want to go. Where I just dive deep into the sound. So discovering that I can, say, play guitar effects through the drums became totally irrelevant.
RockLine: Vernon and Doug use a similar philosophy, am I wrong? Onstage you complement each other phenomenally in these things.
Will: Thanks. You know how it is with Living Colour. We’ve got a song, we’ve got a sound, we’ve got a band. But on top of that we need a huge room for improvising. And if you want to command a room like that, you need weapons for it. These devices and rigs are connected to one another. Onstage, while we play, we’re connected to each other through them. Say I’m playing some rhythm, but Vernon doesn’t want to jump into it with the guitar, he just wants to accent the sound of the drums differently. So he hits a button on his machinery, which is hooked up to mine. That kind of emphasizes the atmosphere in the song, widens it sonically, and the whole thing sounds even more “out there”. So we’ve got this idea of keeping something like 40% of the space untouched, even though the set list is decided in advance. And then we use that space during the performance itself. When an idea hits you in that space, you push a button and it kicks off some new quality…
RockLine: That’s exactly why your shows are so spectacular. Often you don’t have a clue what’s going to happen next.
Will: Believe me. We don’t know either, ha, ha, ha…
RockLine: I caught you a few times in Velden, Austria, at the Bluesiana club, when you played with your projects Unified Presence and Headfake…
Will: Oh, really?!?! Did you see Unified Presence with Victor Bailey, or with Jamaaladeen Tacuma?
RockLine: With Jamaaladeen
Will: Oh, with Jamaaladeen! That was so much fun, ha, ha, ha… You know, at Bluesiana the owner Gundi (Gudrun Koffler, ed.) is a special person. Music means everything to her. I mean, man! It’s unbelievable. When you get there, it’s like walking into your aunt’s house. She cooks meals that I think are going to make me burst… The whole place is like a music museum, she’s got an antique gramophone and stuff like that in there. A place dedicated to music, a one-of-a-kind ambience. Of course it can’t boast the best sound system, but it’s simply full of positive energy and love for music. I love playing there and to be honest I already kind of miss that place. Thanks, man! We played there with my band Aza too. Everybody in that club is so relaxed, calm, they don’t stress about how good the sound is or whatever… They just come to enjoy themselves and give in to the music. You know, that’s not usual in this business, but every now and then you run into a miracle like that. A local promoter like her, who actually believes in the music business, actually loves music and music really means everything to her. “Gundi” is the best. Make sure you type that up! Every musician who plays at that spot and that I talk to later tells me the same thing. I know people from Los Angeles who come back and go on about how Gundi spoils them, how she made them steaks and how they played at her place until three in the morning. I think Gundi should organize her own special festival every year.
RockLine: Earlier you mentioned there were actually more songs than you managed to fit on the new album. So can we expect a new Living Colour album to follow “The Chair In The Doorway” soon?
Will: Actually, yes. It’ll probably be a year and a half or so before we have a new album out. I’ve got some ideas of my own for a new studio album, which will be different from “Native Lands”, and the future is already revealing some exciting new musical projects heading our way. But above all, I want us in Living Colour to get down to recording a new CD after that. Sometime by the summer of 2010 we’ll sit down at the table together for the first time, where everyone will lay out their ideas for how we’ll approach recording the next album. Then, of course, comes total focus on the product and making sure we gather the right people around us to help us get the album out there.
RockLine: Let me ask you one more thing, what can tonight’s crowd expect from Living Colour’s show in Ljubljana?
Will: Love and joy.
RockLine: And spontaneity.
Will: Definitely some of that too. Let me answer your question concretely. We’ve got a new CD out that we’d like to play as well as we possibly can in front of an audience. People here have already seen us, they already know us, and we’re really looking forward to presenting our new album here tonight.
RockLine: So tonight will be your fifth time playing in Slovenia.
Will: And the first time with songs from “The Chair In The Doorway”. We can’t come here and play the same songs over and over. That wouldn’t be fair to the audience, ha, ha, ha… Besides, there’s nothing better than playing for an audience you know likes your music, and on top of that with totally new material.
photos: Kristina
*Thanks to Roman and Ana from the agency Master Of Metal, who made the interview for RockLine possible.
*You can read the concert report from Living Colour’s show on 11/24/2009 in Ljubljana (Kino Šiška) HERE.
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