Break Out the Floor Speakers: Kip Hanrahan
Cutting to the heart of the muse
Trying to give Kip Hanrahan a job title gets a bit sticky. He plays a little percussion, but he's not primarily a musician. He writes or co-writes most of the songs on his albums, but he’s not simply a composer.
The best word to fit Hanrahan’s career may be the cinematic “auteur” — Hanrahan’s projects are a distillation of everything he does. He selects the musicians. Chooses the songs. Plays a little. Writes a little. Mostly, it would seem, sets a mood. A mood that lets the others’ creativity take off. A mood that encourages and nurtures. Probably angers and annoys at times, too.
Whatever it is he does, the results are wonderful, and have been throughout his career, which stretches back to the early ’80s.
But trying to describe that music is as ultimately doomed as trying to describe the man behind it. Words don’t seem a big help. Complex, multi-layered, dark, moody, shifting, polyrhythmic. All can fairly describe the music on Hanrahan’s projects without ever really capturing it.
In a way, a simple list of the musicians on any particular Hanrahan album can provide as accurate a snapshot of what you’ll find as any review or prose.
His 1985 release, “Vertical’s Currency,” for instance features former Cream vocalist/bassist Jack Bruce, Latin percussionists Milton Cardona and Puntilla Orlando Rios, avant-garde saxophonist David Murray, drummer Ignacio Berroa, jazz bassist Steve Swallow and keyboardist Peter Scherer. And when you listen to the swirling, funky and poetic “Shadow Song,” well, yeah, the above roster makes as much sense as anything outside of actually listening to the disc.
Or perhaps the best way to capture the sense of on atypically typical Hanrahan effort is to quote from his free-form liner notes off of 1987’s “Days and Nights of Blue Luck Inverted”:
He once loved this woman. And they made love so hard the walls would sweat. And the bed would beak to pieces and the light would fall away. He didn’t know if she made love that way out of anger or joy, and the way he didn’t understand it was the way he was driven to love her so hard.
Okay, we’re not really making sense here and still haven’t managed to get across what a Hanrahan disc is like.
What he does is find really talented people — jazz pianist Don Pullen was a particular favorite, as were singers Jack Bruce and Sting — and put them together with unlike others who are equally talented and see what percolates out of all that.
He records under his own name, mostly. Sometimes he calls his band Deep Rumba. When he records music to accompany the poetry of Ishmael Reed, he calls the band Conjure.
But it all comes from the same wellspring.
Hanrahan.
With everything Hanrahan touches, there is the clavé, that Latin Caribbean beat with deep African roots that gets to the very heart of the music and centers it, providing not so much an anchor as a magnetic pole to hold the music together.
His 1998 release under the name of Deep Rumba, “This Night Becomes a Rumba,” is rumba like you’ve never heard it. Rumba, perhaps, like it’s never been played. Rumba like the darkest, blackest cup of coffee you’ve ever tasted. Rumba like Hemingway might have found at some café in Havana. Rumba like rumba would sound in your deepest dreams.
In 2004, he released the soundtrack to the documentary film “Piñero,” a look at the life and work of Puerto Rican poet and playwright Miguel Piñero which came out in 2001.
While Piñero was Puerto Rican by birth, he was Nuyorican by affirmation, and Hanrahan’s palette is absolutely New York in attitude, in color, in atmosphere.
And so the music is New York — smart and sophisticated and dark and seedy and ebullient and tired and hard and sentimental, all at the same time. With a beat, always a beat, because New York is a city that lives to its rhythms.
Milton Cardona and Robby Ameen and Horacio "El Negro" Hernandez provide much of the rhythm, a thick, smoky, sweaty rhythm with a relentless meter that gets under your skin and into your shoes and even if you’re whiter than Al Gore you’re swaying to the groove while Chocolate Armenteros or Jerry Gonazalez lay down a serpentine trumpet passage with a high mute that sounds like Miles in his latter years.
Then it can all change direction in a second; the rhythm is muted, implied. Yomo Toro on cuatro sounding like a harpsichord from Bach’s time, maybe, or Alfredo Triff’s violin adding a shimmer to the sound.
This is powerful music, the sort of sounds that bring visions both beautiful and troubling, music that needs no projector to create images, music that lives in your deepest dreams.
The third of his Conjure sets, 2006's “Bad Mouth,” is more in a funk vein. As with all good funk, the music here is loose. And like Reed’s poetry which it undergirds, it pulses with subconscious energy, cellular energy, molecular energy. There are ideas here that cannot be thought, but only felt; concepts that cannot be expressed, but only dreamed, perhaps, or described by a poet.
Or played by Conjure.
Reed’s poetry, Hanrahan’s clavé, they hold this music together, allow it to dance, to flicker, to stab into the darkness.
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