Interview by Joe Montague
Joyce
Cooling has long been considered to be one of the funkiest, smoothest and most
creative guitarists and songwriters on the music scene and the Bay Area
resident, along with Jay Wagner, the other half of the dynamic songwriting team,
have struck gold again with the fabulous
Global Cooling
album.
Global Cooling opens with an up-tempo
“Grass Roots,” showcasing Cooling’s delicious guitar playing, as she bends a few
notes, and featuring Buddy Rivera’s undeniable funky bass, Bill Ortiz’s sweet
trumpet and Roberto Quintana on percussion.
Over the years, Joyce Cooling has become a friend to this magazine and we continue to be attracted to the Cooling / Wagner arrangements, because of the imagination the duo demonstrate in the creation of songs such as “Cobra,” which fuses jazz with Indian percussion.
“I
have always, always, always loved Indian music, the classical music, as well as
the pop. I don’t know much about it. I am not a musicologist by any means, but I
love those scales, those ragas (melodic moods used in Indian classical music).
There was one in particular that I always loved and every time that I heard it,
I would always run over to my guitar and try to play with it, improvise with it.
That is the scale (the raga) that you hear in “Cobra.” I wanted to keep who we
are; it is still a contemporary jazz CD, but I have always loved sounds from
around the world, so in “Cobra,” we threw in a little sitar and tablas, and of
course that exotic scale that I love. Jay came up with this really cool rhythm
track that I love. We wrote a melody and I am still (trying to find) the words,
because it is contemporary jazz, with the little slight sound of India in there.
It is a little beam of light. Is it slam, dunk traditional Indian music? No, not
at all.
It has that whole vibe to it.”
Cooling once described a previous album,
Revolving Door
as being earthy, with salt and minerals, and she describes the current album
Global
Cooling as, “It is not world music by any
stretch, but you can put it on and you can take a trek around the globe. For
example, we talked about the song “Cobra,” and the song “Red Rose,” is not a
real, authentic Tango, but there are elements (in it), with some of the scales
that we used and some of the percussion. Some things are borrowed from the
groove of Tango, to make it feel like Tango. “Grass Roots,” is by no means a
down the pike reggae tune, but we borrowed little vibes out of reggae, little
slices of things. You are in the
Because she is a guitar
virtuoso, it may surprise some of Cooling’s fans to learn that their heroine was
first attracted to the use of percussion in music, many years ago. “It was a
conscious decision to have (more percussion) on the (album) because I have
always loved percussion. At one stage, early, early in my career, I thought that
I wanted to be a percussionist. I got into the whole West African music from
Ghanna. I wasn’t a professional musician yet. I was meeting a friend for lunch,
who was a student from the Uof C Berkley and we met on campus.
There was a classroom window that was open and
the most amazing grooves were coming out of it. Do you remember the old cartoons
where someone puts a pie on a shelf to cool, and the aroma from the pie is
wafting out and the cartoon character gets a whiff of this coming out of the
window? The cartoon character starts to float towards the aroma and the scent
turns into a beckoning finger, as the cartoon character follows it through the
air. That is kind of how it was. It was mesmerizing and I fell into a trance
almost. I stood outside the classroom and would just listen.
I found out that the class met twice each
week, so I would come back twice each week. I wouldn’t miss it for love or money
and I rearranged my work schedule. Then I got bolder and I crept into the back
of the room and I was working out the rhythms on the side of my chair. Everyday
I would get a little bolder and I would creep closer to the front of the class.
Then the teacher said, ‘I know that you aren’t a student, but I can see that you
love the music, come on,’ and he handed me an axatse, which is a gourd covered
with a net of beads. You hit against your leg, with the leg and hand bouncing
between each rhythm.”
Our conversation then takes a
side trip, as Cooling educates me, concerning different types of percussion
instruments. “There is a pecking order, you start with the axatse and then you
graduate to the bell, then there is a little drum called the kidi. You can’t
graduate to the kidi drum until you have really gotten how the axatse and the
bell fit in with the rhythms. It’s not just playing the groove, it is a
repetitive pattern. The axatse and the bell do not vary, they are static and
someone may say, oh how boring, but it is not boring, trust me, because when you
start tuning in to what the lead drummer is playing and what some of the other
parts are playing, that will throw you. It will throw you right off of your
part. The first step is you almost block everything out and just keep your part,
then you can slowly let in your bell part and your kidi part. You can let them
in with your mind and you play one with one hand and one with the other, to see
how they integrate. By the time that you can play the bell and let in the whole
drum part, which is part improv and part like a classical piece that is very
sophisticated and polyrhythmic. That stuff will throw you off and you have to
let it in slowly. Then once you have mastered that and you let in the most
sophisticated part in the pecking order, you are ready to move to the next
instrument, before you start the process all over again. I was just floored with
it and I am nuts about it,” she says.
Cooling lends her vocals to a few of the songs on
Global Cooling,
including the fun and forward looking “What Are We Waiting For?” and “Chit
Chat,” a satirical comment on society, with words like, “Floyd
hits the void – watches TV / Til he goes to bed / Jane rides the train –
tabloids fill her brain / As she nods her head,”
and then a verse whose lines were inspired by an conversation that Cooling
overheard, “Talk
at supper – gossip at work / who’s the bride – who’s the groom? / Chitter chat
chatter – what does it matter / who broke up with whom?”