Brad Farberman is looking for a gig. “If any indie rock band needs an edgy, weird, auxiliary guitar player, just give me a call,” he says, maybe half joking. “I am ready. I am ready to take that indie rock check, and feed it into the studio to make more weird funk records. It just has to be someone who’s established, and I need it to be a really famous band. I am waiting for the call.”
Farberman lives on the fringes, which isn’t as lucrative as you’d expect, and an indie rock gig would go a long way. He’s been at it since the mid-zeros, and his curriculum vitae includes work with bassist William Parker, composers Rhys Chatham and Jason Kao Hwang, and many others. He also leads his own projects—and has released three albums on the legendary indie, Ropeadope Records—which include a trio session he organized with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Carter and drummer Billy Martin, as well as his out-ish funk project, Middle Blue, which often features drummer Mike Clark of Herbie Hancock Headhunter’s fame.
Farberman has a foot in the music journalism camp, too—he’s the guy who wrote about Sun Ra in Rolling Stone—and writes about jazz for a number of outlets. His focus has shifted over the years, and depending on what’s going on, his writing has at times taken precedence over his playing. “In 2015, I flipped it around again,” he says. “Since then, I have been a musician who writes a little, rather than a writer who plays a little.” He’s also been making the most of the pandemic, listening his way through the entire Sun Ra catalog, and 10 months in, has heard about 10 years/30 albums worth of music, and still has decades to go.
Needless to say, we had a great conversation. I spoke with Farberman from his home in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and talked about his early experiences with experimental music, booking shows in New York, the benefits of working a steady gig once-a-month for five years, releasing albums on Ropeadope—and how that’s an unconventional homecoming of sorts—and mastering the art of the float.
What went wrong? How did you get into outsider music?
I grew up on Long Island, just over the Queens line. That meant that even though Long Island was boring, I had an amazing growing-up experience because I could hop onto the train into the city and see concerts. Pretty quickly, I sniffed out the underground. What made me the person I am today—or as I sometimes describe it, what ruined my life—was that I was going to Tonic when I was 17 [Tonic was a small club on the Lower East Side]. I went to see Medeski Martin & Wood at Tonic, two nights in a row, which was like a formative experience for me. Medeski Martin & Wood were already too big to play there—Tonic was little—so it was like an event when they played there and you scored tickets. I went, I knew their records, which are really cool and funky, but Tonic has the Zorn association, so it was an avant-garde place. I think the concerts were 90 percent improv. The way I remember it was they maybe played a song at the end of the show, to remind you that they could do it. Not that you doubted them. That was a revelation to me, that you could just play music, you didn’t have to do anything, and you didn’t have to have songs. That’s one thing that ruined my life, that at 17 I realized you could be weird. You could just make it all up.
Was their audience receptive?
Yeah. They knew what they were getting into. I didn’t exactly know what I was getting into, but my mind was open, and instantly I was leaving my body.
Did you go home and start making noise?
I was playing guitar and I had a high school band. I already loved jazz and instrumental music. We were trying and failing miserably to do Herbie Hancock, or Medeski Martin & Wood, or Jimi Hendrix, or something. I was a few years away still from playing avant-garde music or being professional on any level. But fast forward four or five years, and I was at U Mass Amherst.
In 2003, I went to U Mass to get my BA in journalism, but of course my BA ended up being in jamming. That’s what I spent four years doing, although I was also writing for the school newspaper and getting my degree in journalism. In Western Mass, they have the five colleges—University of Massachusetts plus Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges—and after you’re there a year or two, as a student at one of the colleges, you can then explore the other ones. The classes that continued pushing me on my course were the ones I took at Hampshire College. For one semester, I was in Marty Ehrlich’s class. He’s an amazing teacher and an amazing horn player. His class was for just one semester, but it totally changed my life. We were playing Mingus tunes and his tunes. It was a large-ish ensemble. We were learning to play jazz, but learning to play jazz with someone who was on Tzadik Records. There’s a difference learning from someone who plays in the corner of a restaurant to someone who’s playing the next night at the Stone. There’s a difference in seriousness. There’s a difference in experimentalism and exploring the avant-garde. Taking a class with him did a lot for me. He’s done stuff with Marc Ribot, and I knew that. My favorite anecdote was—I thought I was being really slick—he said, “Brad, do this on guitar,” and I said, “Like Marc Ribot?” And he said, “No, like Brad.” Not only was it a humbling moment, but also, for someone who’s so serious and amazing, to encourage you to do it like you, that meant a lot to me. He wasn’t saying it because I was so amazing, but he was just encouraging me to be myself.
One other class at Hampshire college was with a woman named Margaux Edwards [Simmons], who is a flute player. She had studied with Cecil Taylor. It was also a performance class, but much smaller and there were only three or four people in it. One day, no one showed up to class but me. it was just me and Margaux Edwards, the flautist. She said, “Should we just play free?” I had never done that before, but I had really wanted to. Now, someone told me that I could, so I did. I don’t know what the date was, but I can pinpoint it to that one class session where that was the first time that I played free jazz, or experimental music, or avant-garde music, or whatever you want to call it.
In both of those situations, a teacher had given me permission to be myself and permission to try new things and to explore. To do things, even if I wasn’t ready for them. They gave me license to go for it. When you’re young and you’re excited, and then someone opens that door for you, you just go right through. You don’t wait. You don’t even think about it.
When did you move back to New York?
Right after college. I moved to Manhattan in 2007 with a couple of roommates and started playing music. Started gigging a lot. At the same time, I started getting my masters in jazz history at Rutgers with Lewis Porter.
Were these creative music gigs or more like weddings and other ways to make money?
These were creative music gigs. Right away, I fell in with the Vision Festival people, and that was really huge for me. In those first few years, I did a few gigs with William Parker, which was incredible. Being on that scene, I met a lot of people. There was a bar on the Lower East Side, on Houston Street, called the Local 269, and through the Vision Festival—I was working for them for a while—I started booking music there. At first I was booking shows—the Vision Festival is over the summer—and these were year-round shows. I was doing it with Fay Victor, the vocalist. She’s amazing. Eventually, they didn’t want to do shows there anymore, and I kept doing them myself.
Would you find venues and set them up?
Yeah, I was putting on shows. Originally it was once a week, and after that it was once a month. After the Vision Festival no longer wanted to be a part of it, I kept doing a monthly show for a year. I would play every month, and I would book some other groups on that night. That was a way that I not only got a lot of experience playing, but also met a zillion people.
Did you also do some stuff with Rhys Chatham?
I did work with Rhys Chatham, but I won’t tell you that I know Rhys Chatham. I was one of his 200 guitars for a performance at Lincoln Center. That was a mind-blower.
Was it in one of the halls at Lincoln Center?
It was outside in the big area, which is called Damrosch Park. It was 200 electric guitars, and it was really serious music. We rehearsed for multiple days. We were chopped up into 50 person sections with section leaders. It was wild. That was another early transformative experience, getting to be a part of something that had its roots in real downtown New York.
How did you get that gig?
You had to apply. It was cool. I was also in an orchestra led by Jason Kao Hwang, which was all-strings and all-acoustic. It was violins, cellos, upright basses, and acoustic guitars. It was an actual orchestra, and we were doing shows around New York.
You were writing at that time, too?
I was writing, but I wasn’t writing a lot. But then, around 2012, I felt really burnt out about music. I was playing free jazz in New York City, why wasn’t I rich and famous and successful? That’s an exaggeration of why I felt burnt out, but I decided to stop playing music professionally for a few years and to focus on writing instead. That’s when a lot of cool writing stuff happened. I did some writing for the Village Voice, Time Out New York, JazzTimes, and Down Beat. I did that for a couple of years. I was mainly freelancing for all those places I mentioned. There were two-plus years where I just focused on writing, and then I didn’t. In 2015, I started Middle Blue, and I flipped it around again. Since then, I have been a musician who writes a little, rather than a writer who plays a little.
What’s Middle Blue?
Middle Blue is a bit of a collective. It’s me on guitar and writing the music. We have Jeremy Danneman on alto saxophone and clarinet, Dave Sewelson on baritone sax, and Danny Tamberelli on bass. When we can get him, Mike Clark on drums. He is the drummer on our first album, and also half of the new live album. We have a lot of drummers who are great, like Tim Kuhl is one, and Dave Miller is another. Jessica Lurie on sax. We started playing at a bar called Troost, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where I was living. We played there every month for five years until the pandemic started. Through that monthly gig, we were able to become a band. Even though the personnel is often changing, that opportunity to work on music together every month for five years, you can’t replace that.
What did the band become?
We were able to mold this sound. It’s funk, but it’s avant-garde. If you say funk, people might think, “James Brown,” but it’s not tight and rehearsed like that. If you say avant-garde, people might think the outest stuff possible, but it’s not quite that either. It’s some weird middle ground. We didn’t come up with the idea, but we feel no allegiance to any genre or any side of anything. It can be funk and it can be free and it can be inside and it can be outside. It can be mellow and it can be crazy. We strive to do all those things in a single night.
How did you get Mike Clark? Does he live in the neighborhood?
He lives in Harlem. Part of my adult life as a musician has been when the moments seems right, to reach out to my heroes and see if they don’t say no. I just emailed him. I sent him some music. I said, “Herbie Hancock’s Thrust is my favorite album ever.” I just invited him to play with us, do some gigs, and he was down. That ‘70s Herbie Hancock music is so influential on me. Certainly if there’s no ‘70s Herbie Hancock, there’s no Middle Blue. And there’s no ‘70s Herbie Hancock without Mike Clark. In some ways, we are the children of Mike Clark.
Did you tell him that?
I don’t know if he would agree with it, but I think so [laughs].
Your new album, Weird Funk in Small Bars, has a lot of guests. Why is that? Was it just music taken from different nights?
Yes, it was from different nights. This has been a hard year for everybody—I don’t want to say this has been a hard year for me because I am healthy and my wife is healthy and my son is healthy—but if you roll back the layers, one hard thing for everyone this year is that being an artist, there are no gigs and no hanging out and jamming. I thought that this is a year where we can’t be together in little bars playing weird music, and we can’t hang out with our friends and heroes. I wanted to put together an album that had all that stuff. Periodically, over these last five years, I invite someone I look up to or think is incredible, and sometimes they say yes. One track is with Ben Goldberg recorded live at Troost, and that one I am really proud of. That’s just an improvisation, it sprang up from the ground or air. To me, it sounds like a fully-formed song, and then towards the halfway point it ends up being something weirder. Another song recorded at Troost is with Claire Daly, who’s an amazing baritone sax player. One track is with Jamie Saft, who’s incredible. We’ve had the pleasure of playing with him twice. He lives upstate and we were doing an upstate gig, so I reached out to him. That’s at the Falcon, which is a cool venue upstate, and we’re playing one of my compositions.
Do you record all your shows?
I record every show I remember to record.
Do you set up mics?
No. I have a Zoom for my iPhone. A couple of the songs on the new album are from a Zoom, and a couple are from an iPhone. It’s lo-fi, and I don't feel bad about it. It’s not the best quality, but then I thought, “But the music is great.” To me it is. That wouldn’t have stopped my heroes, like Sun Ra for example, why should it stop me?
Did you clean it up at all?
Yeah. I had someone mix it. I am not that stupid. I wouldn’t just release an iPhone recording into the world. But I would get an iPhone recording mixed and throw it out into the world [laughs].
You also did an album with Daniel Carter and Billy Martin.
I’ve been playing with Daniel Carter for a long time. That goes back to my early years in New York. I was playing with a lot of the Vision Fest people—he’s mixed up with all those guys—William Parker, Matthew Shipp, and everyone. Daniel is an incredible person, amazing conversationalist, and plays so many horns. Daniel is also the most committed musician I’ve ever met. You’ll ask him to play any gig—like on top of a mountain at one AM for three people—and not only will he come and be so into it, but he’ll show up with two saxophones, a flute, and a clarinet all dangling off him. He’s like a superhero. And Billy Martin has been my hero since I was a teenager. I interviewed him once, and kept in touch with him a little bit. At that point I had released the first Middle Blue album on Ropeadope, so I thought that maybe they would release this, too. I just put it together. I floated it. That’s one of my favorite things to do. I love meeting people organically. I love letting things happen. But I also love the float. The art of the float.
The serendipity?
No, the float. Being like, “Hey, let’s do something, man.” Sometimes people say, “I don’t want to do that.” And that’s cool. But I love reaching out to people and suggesting doing something. I love collaboration. One idea that got the green light was doing a recording with Billy Martin and Daniel Carter as a trio. Billy was nice enough, and we recorded it at his home studio in New Jersey. We got together for one afternoon, one day, and jammed. I really love the record. It was all improv. The only thing I did is set it up. It has all three names on streaming services. That was a beautiful day for me. I felt nervous, but I had been playing with Daniel for many years at that point, off-and-on, and I had been listening to Billy at that point for 15 years or something. In a way, I was ready to play with him.
What’s your relationship with Ropeadope?
They’re a small indie run by Louis Marks. It’s a beautiful experience working with them. This is what I was saying before, it’s a bunch of things from when I was 17 or so. A bunch of obsessions at that time put me on my path, and ruined my life for the rest of my life. In the earlier days of Ropeadope, there were a lot of groups on there who were huge influences on me who I really loved. Like Charlie Hunter, Marco Benevento and Joe Russo’s duo, Sexmob, which is Steven Bernstein’s band. It was a lot of these groups who one day, I wanted to play like, and then I did. I feel like Middle Blue is coming out of a lot of these groups that were on Ropeadope a long time ago. That was formative and influential for me. Somehow, all these years later, we’re on Ropeadope. It is the right place for us.
Do you do physical releases with your albums, too?
I did cassettes for the first Middle Blue album, but I haven’t done physical for the others, because I think there’s no need. I love vinyl and I have a lot of it—hundreds of records—I would love to make vinyl, but I think it’s also ok to say, “This is 2020, and it can just be digital.” It’s not a digital album. It’s just an album.
That’s the format.
I am just trying to acknowledge the times and not waste money.