Hartford native Xenia Rubinos remembers the Monday Night Jazz concerts in Bushnell Park as events that might have happened in a previous lifetime, but they were important.
After graduating from Berklee College of Music, Rubinos moved to New York and got busy: “Black Terry Cat,” her second LP, draws from jazz, hip-hop, funk, punk and progressive rock. It feels alternately like eavesdropping on late-night studio players and — on polished cuts like “Lonely Lover,” “Right?” and “Mexican Chef” — glimpsing a Google Street View of her Brooklyn neighborhood.
Rubinos and her band will perform at New Haven’s Cafe Nine on Feb. 17 at 9:30 p.m., with Olive Tiger opening.
Q: Tell me about growing up and making music in Hartford.
A: I went to public schools for most of my childhood. I went to high school [Northwest Catholic] in West Hartford. I discovered jazz music at a summer program. It was run by the Greater Hartford Arts Council, and it was called Neighborhood Studios. I was 13 or 14. It was incredible. It was free music instruction. We would spend the whole day listening to and making music.
The director [Michael Gatonska] had us building instruments out of found materials. We were all at different levels. At that point, I knew how to read music. I came into the program already knowing a little, but that was my first time ever thinking about composition. We were building our own instruments, and [the director] was encouraging us make compositions using visual scores. Instead of writing music notation, we were inventing our own music notation, thinking about form, what should happen in a piece of music. That was a really formative experience for me and ultimately informed a lot of what I ended up doing. That was the first time I ever heard John Coltrane and Miles Davis.
I began falling in love with jazz music. I’d heard jazz at Bushnell Park, the Monday Night Jazz concert series. I used to go with my mom. Anyone who could go to the park could hear the show. You didn’t have to have a lot of money or be a certain age. I have a lot of jazz-related memories of growing up in Hartford and listening to music.
Q: On “Black Terry Cat,” you seem to prefer guitar/bass riffs and synth lines rather than chordal instruments, which opens up a certain amount of space.
A: It’s minimalist, in a way, in that I’m not breaking things out in terms of thick chords. There’s harmony that’s implied, of course, but it’s not necessarily spelled out. I like to write in layers. That’s maybe borrowing from a hip-hop approach, building and stacking things on top of each other, starting with the rhythm and then adding different melodic lines on top of it. I’m a fan of working with unison parts and singing unison with a keyboard line or a bass line.
Q: You performed a solo version of “Laugh Clown” during your NPR Tiny Desk Concert, accompanying yourself on the bass.
A: The Tiny Desk Concert is a challenge. It’s supposed to be an acoustic performance, but I don’t generally play acoustic shows. My music is not really acoustic music. It was a challenge, with the other songs with the band, to play quietly. The only mic that’s used is one room mic. People need to be able to hear me singing, but my drummer, Marco, still needs to be able to play.
For “Laugh Clown” on [“Black Terry Cat”], it’s me playing bass and singing. The whole song is built around my performance. It’s just me in the vocal booth singing and playing bass, and then we stacked everything around that. I didn’t play to [a] click [track]. We didn’t start by layering drums or anything like that. That’s what the song really is, so I felt like [Tiny Desk] was the perfect place to present the song like that.
That’s not how I play the song live. I’m not very comfortable playing bass in front of people. I don’t consider it to be my instrument. I did write a lot of this record on bass, but I noodle. I guess I have my own technique, but I can barely get by. It’s definitely frightening for me, but that’s where that song came from. It was the best way to let people see the soul of that song, just me singing and playing the bass.
Q: I read that you went out and bought a bass when a bass player didn’t show up to a recording session.
A: Yes. I did end up keeping that bass. I wasn’t expecting to keep picking it up when I was writing the album; I usually write music by singing, playing the keyboard and improvising, just stacking things on top of one another. But I kept picking up the bass and having fun with it, just noodling around. That ended up informing a lot of songs on the album.
“Lonely Lover” was the first full song that I wrote on bass for the album that I finished. From there, there were a lot of other sketches: “Laugh Clown,” “I Won’t Say,” “Just Like I.” … It was really fun, because it added this physical element of wearing this other instrument that I’m not used to. I liked the physicality of wearing it. It changed the way I was singing and ideas I was having, and also just being out of my element with that instrument. I don’t know where anything is on the bass, so I’m just depending on my ear and what I’m hearing, patterns that are happening that are different than what would happen on a keyboard.
Q: You can hit a note by accident, and that might lead somewhere.
A: Sometimes. Recently, what I’m meditating on is the feeling that you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re panicking, and you’re thinking, “I can’t do this.” I always remind myself: That’s the moment before you figure it out. You have to keep going, when you feel like you can’t do it. You don’t know how, and you’re frustrated. That’s the minute before it actually happens. That’s how I felt on the bass: “Hey, I can figure it out.” That’s something easily applied to our everyday. I’m trying.
Q: There are two bass parts on “Lonely Lover.” You’re not afraid to use whatever instrumentation you feel is right for a song. But at the same time, you don’t hear a thousand different instruments on “Black Terry Cat.” You hear certain tone colors.
A: I tried to thrive in my limitations, in the instruments that I have in front of me. I like to have fewer options. I can concentrate more on the idea, which is ultimately what I love: What is the melody? What is the bass part? A lot of people get inspired by the sound of something. I’m the opposite. I’m more inspired by a melody, and then later I’ll assign the sounds. That’s why working with [drummer/producer] Marco [Buccelli] is so great: He is inspired by sounds. He fills in that gap for me. I’ll come to him with this idea for a fully fleshed-out song and an arrangement, I’m explaining to him this and that. He’s like, “OK, but are you going to play this entire song on seven different keyboards?” I like working with as little as possible, so that I can focus on what’s happening.
Q: You added a number of segues and transitions between songs on “Black Terry Cat.” Why?
A: I was getting into J Dilla and mixtapes and hip-hop culture when I was making this album. I was working on the track listing: which songs were going to make it on the album, how to thread them together. I like the idea of having motifs that came back throughout the record. “Lonely Lover” became my palette for the whole record, when I actually finished it. I was like, “OK, I have an album now.” I could go back and finish everything else. That song comes back throughout the record.
The album starts with “Romeo,” which was an alternate introduction to [“Lonely Lover”] on one of the first demos that I made, so I broke that off. There’s another interlude called “LL,” which is kind of like a jam, almost like an alternate bridge to that song. I like the idea of pieces of that song coming back. I also like having moments that were scrappy and unpolished, sort of like live playing, that were happening throughout the album.
An interlude like “5” was just about getting in the room, just me playing that pattern with Marco, just Rhodes [electric piano] and drums. There’s another interlude that’s very short, a snippet of a live session we played at 3 a.m. with a friend. I like these things that break into your listening experience that are about improvising, about making music off the cuff, and having that flavor on that album. Compared with my first album, my intention was to have songs that were more tight and more polished than anything I’ve done before, but I didn’t want to lose that live, unfinished touch.
Q: The last three tracks, “See Them,” “Now Ur Being the Girl” and “How Strange It Is,” struck me as super-experimental. They’re stacked at the end of the record.
A: It was challenging to come up with a sequencing for this album. Sometimes I think my very, very first sequence was the right one, and it didn’t make it to the final cut. It was a sequence where the album never stops, just one song to another. It was incredibly quick. It felt as though you were listening to this mashup of stuff, and maybe that was the right one, or maybe not.
A lot of it had to do with the physicality of the vinyl, which I find really interesting and frustrating sometimes. You’re basically limited to this physical object: You can only have this many minutes on Side A, this many minutes on Side B. If I try to cram too much on any side, it’s going to sound bad. When the needle gets to the edges, whether it’s the beginning or the end of that side, it’s going to sound bad or skip.
Then there was the idea of front-loading the album with singles, which generally I don’t like. If I’m going to make an album, I should just make it and not think about how nobody wants to listen to albums. I really liked ending the album with “How Strange It Is.” It was almost like this dot, dot, dot… To be continued, a feeling of something I was working through, figuring out what would come next, like a foreshadowing.
Q: Listening to “Mexican Chef” recently while reading the news of the day felt difficult. You recorded and released the album before the election. Is there a resonance now in this batch of songs that wasn’t there before November?
A: I did write this album before much of the Trump presidency was even a glimmer of anything that was possible. The album came out and kind of found itself in this climate. A song like “Mexican Chef” ended up resonating with people in a way that I didn’t foresee, that I couldn’t have expected. The kinds of conversations I was having with people, even in the press, or at shows, were things I hadn’t expected to happen. I didn’t set out to make an album that was political, and I sometimes resent when people say, “You’re so political.” I’m just observing and saying what I’m living and making stories and music, just my vantage point of the world. Where I come from and who I am: that makes me political all of a sudden. Another artist may be telling you about their life and their time, and they’re not going to be considered political. It’s frustrating.
It’s very in-style right now to protest. It’s very fashionable. That’s not a bad thing. It’s great that everyone is suddenly very engaged, and we should be. In terms of music-making, there’s a level of anxiety or stress or pressure for every artist to find their cause and rally behind it, which could be a good thing. But ultimately what we need to focus on is making great work. It’s not about, “I need to be a political activist in my music now, or else I’m not going to be relevant.” That’s missing the point greatly, and a little bit of a danger for anyone to approach their work that way. I’m going to keep focusing on ideas and trying to get better at writing music and performing. Of course, I’m really curious to keep learning and finding ways to be involved in my community, to work on making things better. On a personal level, that’s something I’m doing.
I just finished reading James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” He says, “I know that what I am asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is the least one can demand — and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general and American Negro history in particular, for it testified to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.” That’s one of the closing lines of this book. It’s asking us to not focus on being helpless, just keeping focusing, working on the impossible. We have to keep hopeful, even when it seems impossible.
XENIA RUBINOS plays Cafe Nine in New Haven on Feb. 17 at 9:30 p.m., with Olive Tiger opening. Tickets are $10. cafenine.com.
