‘Toby Arrives’ (reviewed here) is the debut album from the Koch Marshall Trio, an instrumental band featuring guitar legend Greg Koch, his son, Dylan (on drums) and Toby Marshall on the Hammond B3 organ. The trio deal in heavily improvised instrumental jams, a number of which (as Greg is proud to point out) were captured spontaneously during the very first session the trio played together. As such, listening to the album is listening to history in the making, and there’s no faking the crackle of electricity as the band spark off one another in those formative jams. I was able to catch up with Greg shortly before the release the album to discuss the nature of making instrumental, improvisational music – read on and discover the back story to the amazing ‘Toby Arrives’.
I’m always really interested in the way songs are composed, particularly when it comes to improvised music, and this record includes, I believe, music from the very first time you were in a room together…
That’s right. Tthe first few tunes, especially, were the very first moments that we were playing and then, like a week later, we recorded the rest.
Improvisational music is something really special and I guess that part of the skill is not only knowing how to respond to the other players but also knowing how to self-edit so that the track is a journey that the listener can respond to…
Right, yep, absolutely.
Without really knowing about Toby’s strengths and weaknesses… I mean, I knew he was a Hammond player, my son spoke highly of him, so I knew he was going to be good; but a lot of times you don’t know how jazzy someone’s going to be and how… err unjazzy [laughs] in terms of knowledge of harmony and all that other stuff. Then there’s also just how well people listen to each other. You usually find that out within the first few seconds of starting to play, you know what I mean? You’re like “OK, this is gonna be good!”
So, the very first tune on the record, those are literally the first moments we played together. I started out a little bit more cautious, just laying out the dialogue in a very sparse way, and then, as the tune rolls on, it sees the comfort level established early and then the conversation just rolls from there.
For me, speaking for how I like to approach it, you know if you go too crazy right away, it’s not of any interest to anybody. I like to think in terms of a conversation. It’s great to have a good vocabulary, but if you roll out of the gates using hundred dollar words every other word, it becomes… “I can’t talk to this person! I need a dictionary! What the hell is this?!” If you start with a dialogue that’s engaging and so on and so forth, then you can use fancier vocabulary for the exclamation point, and then it’s really much more impactful. That’s the way I approach it and, it turns out, that’s exactly the way Toby approaches the way he plays as well. So, it was kind of a perfect match for me, and Toby has a similar set of influences too. There’s jazz in there, but if it was any more jazz, it would ruin it because it would have gotten too be-boppy. There’s enough understanding of harmony, but still kind of a blues / gospel / funk approach to playing as opposed to being too overtly heavy and jazzy.
One of the things I really enjoy about the record is that it’s not so much about what you and Toby are playing all the time so much as the spaces you allow to develop between the notes so that the conversation becomes very open. There can be a tendency, perhaps, to fall on technique, but it’s more interesting when space is allowed to grow…
Absolutely, yep, I totally agree and that’s what we tried and that’s what ended up happening. You know, it’s an interesting thing. When I play in trios which are guitar based, then it’s a little easier to fall into that more verbose way of playing because you’re kind of having to carry all of it, you know what I mean. But in this scenario, not only from what I am improvising, but also because there’s just such a nice pad of glorious organ in the background that I don’t feel the need to fill all the space. The whole approach changes as a result of the particular instrumentation that we have.
The third element is that you have your son on drums, and it’s wonderful when you get that close, familial bond that ties in with the musical ability you both so obviously share…
Absolutely. I mean, it’s one of those things where it’s…. you’ve got to be careful, and it can’t be easy coming into it from Dylan’s point of view, because there will always be people who think about him as “the son of…” and that it’s nepotism… but Dylan really knows how to play and he’s got a lot of ownership of this thing because he’s the one that suggested Toby in the first place and it was kind of him and his insistence that we get together and play. Then the fact that he’s more of a groove-oriented player and pop oriented. There’s a lot of strange, telepathic moments between him and I. A lot of times we’ll go for a certain place at a certain time – not that there’s any kind of pattern… we’ll just literally tap into a pattern, so, of course there’s the fact that he’s my son and he’s involved and that whole glorious thing, but there’s also this, I don’t know if you want to say as a result of…. Certainly as a result of the environment and of us listening to a lot of stuff and of him listening to me play when he was a kid. But there also just seems to be some kind of a bond where there’s kind of a uni-mind thing happening which is really cool.
I think you said at the beginning of this interview that there were a couple of sessions for the recording – obviously the first track ‘Toby arrives’ kicked everything off. Did you… after you got that first session down, was there a kind of way that you laid out themes for tracks still to be cut, or did you leave it to be spontaneous?
Well, the very first day, the first two tracks that ended up on the record were just two jams that we made up on the spot. Then, in that same session, I showed Toby a couple of new tunes that I had, or tunes that were kind of lurking, and we did do a couple of takes of them and they were actually… we could have salvaged them, but there were a few moments where we thought we would have edited this or that… what it did tell me, as soon as the guy who engineered the session gave us the tapes… later that day we all had the tapes to listen to of what we played and it was immediate, like “holy shit! This is really something!”
So, I decided right then and there that we would reconvene and I was half tempted to include those two initial patterns of what would be ‘let’s get sinister’ and ‘heed the boogaloo’ – we’d done those that very first day as well, but we re-recorded them, I guess it was two weeks later that I bought Toby back in. And that’s when I bought the film crew in as well, that filmed those sessions.
I had sketches of tunes that I didn’t give real detail to – I had a bunch of tunes that were done a couple of years ago when I went on a song-writing jag with a buddy of mine who’s a real good singer-songwriter and, even though I had done plenty of material in the past when I’d written lyrics, I just didn’t want to deal with writing lyrics at that time and this guy’s really good, he just comes up with really good stuff, really fast. So, we got into this song-writing relationship where he came up with about seventy songs and then, of that seventy, there were a bunch of other things that I had demoed for him that he never ended up using. So, I’ve got all of these ideas that are pretty fleshed out, you know chordal passages with little grooves that I’m doing, where I’m playing drums on the table and then melodic ideas on top, so, ‘let’s get sinister’ and ‘heed the boogaloo’ were tunes, one of which was a demo that was done with the song-writer guy who never wrote a lyric for it and ‘heed the boogaloo’ was something that was a vocal tune, but I liked the melody and stuff so much as an instrumental, that we just proceeded to do it that way.
We’ve got so much material and now we’re coming up with stuff so that, every time we come together we’ve got a new tune. So, for that next session I knew that we were going to readdress ‘let’s get sinister’ and ‘heed the boogaloo’ and then, the boogie song and ‘enter the rat’, those we just ran up on the spot – I just said “let’s do an up-tempo thing and then I’ll go into a boogie at the end.” So, that was just made up on the spot and then, the one that we added as a bonus track if you will, ‘sin, repent, repeat’, that one’s a little more structured in the sense that there are a lot more parts to it that we had to learn. But Toby really liked that tune because it’s really gospel and I had that one sitting around for a little bit and I couldn’t wait to unleash it, so we’re glad that we got it on the record. And that was actually recorded at an entirely different session later on. That was later.
On a lot of albums you can hear the work that has gone into making them sound right, so it’s really cool to hear something that’s so organic and on the spur-of-the-moment and there’s a freshness to the music and the dialogue between the musicians that’s very different to much of what is coming out at the moment…
Yes, I would agree. That’s one of the reasons why, when we got together and did that first session, I kind of realised right then and there that that’s the way it should be. There shouldn’t really be any overdubs, it should just be kind of approached from, for lack of a better term, a jazz thing where three people get together, the recording light goes on, you play and whatever happens, happens. It’s very liberating for me because I hear every mistake – every musician does you’d like to think – but I’m my own worst critic and, left to ruminate and given the opportunity to repair… you know what I mean – I’ll go in and repair everything! So, this was really liberating for me to just say that the whole approach was going to be that we’d go in, we’d play and – yeah, we’d do a couple of takes – but that’s it. What happens, happens on the spot. I think that’s where a lot of the magic comes from, so I’d agree. It’s a cool approach and a liberating approach and I think, as a result of that, there’s a real freshness to it. It doesn’t have the life squeezed out it, it happened as it did and that’s it.
It’s really hard, as a song-writer I think, that the longer you have to sit and listen to a piece of music, the more you hear every little slip and it’s probably stuff that no-one else will ever hear or notice. So, the temptation to get the pro-tools out and erase the note or shift it slightly… it’s there but it kills some of the vibe of the music and the ebb and flow.
I agree, absolutely.
So, with regard instrumental music, it’s a very different dynamic to music composed with lyrics in mind because, as an instrumentalist, you have a lot of space to fill and I guess it can be intimidating in some ways to produce an all-instrumental album?
Well, certainly. You know, I was just having a conversation with somebody the other day and I was saying that my favourite instrument is the Hammond organ… of course I meant *after* the guitar [laughs] and the guy I was talking to was a guitar manufacturer and he said that the greatest instrument is the human voice. And I said “well… here’s the problem…” I meant it facetiously… I said: “you know 99% of what comes out of people’s mouths is bullshit, right?!” I was obviously just being facetious, but the problem is that, when you’re vocalising… first of all, I think there’s nothing more polarising than the sound of a singer’s voice. Certain singers that I really like, that I think are great… like, as an example, my wife she’ll hear something and she’ll say “oh I hate that, why do you even use that person to sing?”
Or in the way that I sing… I sing OK, I can deliver a song, but to me it’s not as totally… let’s put it this way, it’s not to the level of my guitar playing in the way that it has an impact. So, to me, music often gets judged by the quality of the vocalist and not by the overall passage. To me, in the past, it’s been kind of… people always concentrate on the vocals and they don’t really listen to the whole thing in general and they always concentrate on the vocals, whether they like them or not… and secondly on what they happen to be saying. Most of the time, in the blues genre, it’s talking about some kind of horrible happening, or some kind of inane relationship thing or, you know, hell hounds or some kind of supernormal, demonic activity or whatever the case may be. And that’s all very well and good, but you’re kind of locked into the meaning of those words and sometimes, with an instrumental recording, and I’ll remind you that this is as a result of my trying to sell and instrumental record [laughs], especially in the case of this particular music – we’ve got the Hammond organ and the way that it contextualises the music, it disarms people, for whatever reason, from the prejudices that they would have if it was just another type of music. I don’t know what it is, I’ve played this thing to people who’ve heard my stuff since time immemorial and they’re like “yeah, OK, whatever!” and, you know I’m talking about family members and stuff who are, let’s just say, over me! But, I put on that first tune and they’re like “oh my god, I don’t know what this is, but I love it! What is this? What’s going on here?” and it’s one of those things where I think, because it is not a shred-fest or whatever the case may be, it’s this groovy, organ-driven… the guitar is contextualized in a certain way and I think the instrumental thing works in a way that, under normal circumstances it wouldn’t… does that make sense? I just think that it was easier to come up with an instrumental package in this particular environment that spoke to people who are non-musicians just because of the format and the approach, I guess is what I’m trying to say.
So, this album is coming out as the debut release for the new Mascot imprint, the Players’ Club – did they approach you to spearhead this new imprint?
Well, it’s an interesting story. So, I guess the day we got together last year, the first kind of unexpected session that ended up as the first two tunes on the record. That was March 23rd of 2017, and I had another record that was in the queue to come out, like the next month. I put out a Greg Koch record called ‘unrepentant’, and I wasn’t really intending on releasing anything, it just kind of came to be and I just realized the power of it right from the get go, so, I had planned on just releasing it myself, and so I had the artwork done, I’d sent it off to the printing place and I did a pre-sale through my website for a release on Sept 9th. But as I was working on this, I had an agent in Europe who books gigs for me, mostly in Central Europe and Italy a little bit, he was booking a tour and I said I really wanted to bring this band over, and he said what are we going to do with the B3 and how is it all going to work, so I started to think about the logistics of touring and I started thinking that this really deserves more of a push.
I thought Mascot would really be the one because, if you’re a guitar player, they’re the best gig in town. Without question. They have worldwide reach, they have an infrastructure for touring. Their roster is a bunch of my buddies who are well-known guitar guys, so there’s plenty of opportunity for collaboration; it just seemed to make a lot of sense. And I had had a couple of records out on Provogue in 2003 and 2004, so I knew them and we were considering doing something a couple of years ago, but it never happened just because I didn’t follow it up and I ended up releasing it on my own, because you get to a certain point where, through social media and all the different avenues in which I have to sell stuff, I can release a record and make money. So, at some point it was like, how much do I really need a label, especially in this day and age. But for this particular act, I needed to get the word out in the way that really, only a label could do and I knew Mascot was the best gig in town. So, I decided to reach out to Ed, so I sent him at an email basically just saying “hey Ed, long time no see. I have no idea if you’re interested in taking on any more bands, but I’ve got this really unique project with my son on drums and this great B3 player, and I sent them two videos that we had done of us tracking the record the second time we got together (so, after our initial session, two weeks later we got together and I had a video crew come) and we had two tunes that were edited of us recording in the studio, so I sent them that and a little file. They got back right away saying it was absolutely perfect for this new label called Players’ club and that they wanted to make a deal, so it just happened that way. It was astounding. So, I honoured the people who purchased the pre-release and then I just stopped selling them. I sent out the initial batch, so there are people out there who have the… I think I capped it at 350 of the presale and they were signed copies. So, this next version was remastered and we added ‘sin repent repeat’ as a bonus track as well. And of course, we’re having vinyl as well and so on. So, that’s how it all came together, so the fact that we were the first band on the label was really cool, but it was just timing. It was dumb luck and it worked out great.
The last question is more to do with logistics – obviously your son is very busy and Toby temporarily retired from music – so how much potential is there for touring and moving forward?
We have every intention of touring as much as we can with this line up. One thing that is very interesting is that this deal, unlike every other deal I had, is that all three of us got signed. So it’s not just me, it’s the band, so we’re in it for several records, so we all want to tour and prioritise this thing as much as possible. So, it’s going to take a little while for this thing to ramp up, in terms of… one of the things the label really wants to do is to put us together with somebody else on the label, some higher profile guitar guy or whatever the case may be, where both of us would be, as a package, a good draw and then we could play gigs all over the place, so that’s the aim. So now, we’re playing selected shows in the States until April, when we plan to come to Europe for about three weeks. Mostly Italy, Germany and even a sojourn to Lithuania of all places, and then I believe what’s going to happen is that we’ll come back later in the year. I need to get to the UK and play, it’s been ridiculous that I haven’t. I did a quick thing for Andertons last year in November, when I came in and did a thing at their store in Guilford, which went on the internet and it was really, really popular and I can’t believe how many people have watched that episode so far… but we really need to come with the band and do a tour of the UK because one of these things is that you listen to the record and I’m glad you dig it and so on and so forth, but when you see the band live… it’s a pummelling! It’s not like a guitar, not to put it down… it’s not like a sausage fest when we play… I mean yes, a bunch of guitar players like to come and see us, but people of all stripes dig the band because it’s groovy stuff. When we start playing, and I’ve been playing for a long time and mostly vocal stuff, although there’d always be the instrumental tunes that we’d play, but once you see the instrumental band, by the time we’ve done, no one’s coming up at the end to ask why we didn’t sing any songs, because we are singing, just without words. There are some really good rocking tunes in there it’s funky and there’s some blues stuff… I have no doubt in my mind that once you start seeing it on the road, it’s going to be great. And I knew that the first time we played together. I was not even worried about this line up – all we have to do is show up and play and not be assholes! I’m just really looking forward to getting out there and causing trouble and I hope to get to the UK sooner than later.
‘Toby Arrives’ is out now via The Players’ Club.
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