Dragoș: Mostly Other People Do The Killing worked only with
Hot Cup Records, your label. Is it better nowadays, for an American jazz quartet, to work only with one label?
Moppa: The jazz world is really bizarre right now; nobody is making any money, making records, anywhere. And at this point, there’s very little advantage to be on an established record label, but making more money or getting more visibility it’s just kind of silly at this point. But I guess people have reasons to do it, but not really the good ones. So when we started out, I just put out the first record myself, just because we wanted to do it, and we did it; it’s super cheap now, you can do it whenever you want, and put it on the Internet. We approached some labels, over the years and it never really made sense and I’m glad we just keep put it ourselves, because that’s why we are able to do exactly what we want to do, nobody is telling us what to do, which is best.
Bogdan: How did you approach the labels? Sent any demos?
Moppa: Yeah, we made a demo and email people. People we’re getting back and saying that’s interesting, but not really. You produce an entire record by yourself and you’re giving it to a label, and they are like ‘thanks!’. Why the fuck are doing that for? You made the record, put that shit out yourself and that’s fine. Everybody is buying shit on the Internet, downloading, anyway.
Dragoș: Did any label approach you?
Moppa: No. Nobody really cares, that’s an important thing.
Bogdan: This is just the right time to introduce Diana; she’s a young violin player. She needs a lot of advice about approaching labels and stuff like that.
Moppa: Hello Diana! Ok. Nothing really begins if you’re not doing it yourself. And this is where there’s a big break down between Americans and Europeans. I don’t know about Romania. Actually I’ll assume it’s not Romania. But places like Scandinavia, Germany, France, where there’s huge state support, especially France, where you play a certain number of gigs a year. In Europe it is really easy, in a certain sense. To us, there are a lot of European great musicians that we know, but there are a lot more kind of not very good European recordings made, you’ve probably noticed. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there’s no risk, you know what I mean? It’s like, ‘well, I write this, I get this money, I make this record and I’ll see you next year, do it again’. And because that’s so easy, I feel like people don’t think hard enough about what they’re actually going to do. So you make this record, what it this record? Is this going to be like another free bop record? Do we really need one of those? Is your free bop record going to sound any different from the 4000 I already have?
In America, we have no money and nobody is going to give us any money, anyway. Though we all just make exactly the music we want to make and fuck everybody else.
Bogdan: Fuck all y’all!
Moppa: Yeah, fuck all y’all! And I think that’s really good for the music. It’s obviously bad economically, we would all be a lot more confortable if we didn’t have to worry about money, constantly. But the good side of that is that we have a lot more freedom and there’s a lot more of yourself invested in what you’re doing. So I know all of us, anyway. Made like constant decisions to just make exactly the music we wanted to make and not pay any attention to what anybody else told us ever, and put it out. I always think, when we started out, we were playing in a shitty basement, for ten of our friends in New York and nobody cared. The music was really fun and really good. And for a while, it didn’t really peak up very fast, and luckily all of a sudden lots of people like it and we kind of get to play here for you guys, and that’s great. But we never changed what we were doing to trying getting this. Even if nobody gave a shit, I would still be like riding the same tunes I ride now and like if I would still playing for like ten of my friends in a basement, I’d be playing for ten of my friends in the basement. The music would be exactly the same. I am really happy that other people like the music that I write and the way it is played, but that wasn’t the goal. We didn’t sit down and be like ‘oh man, how do we make some crazy free jazz and everybody is really going to love and travel’. It was like ‘here’s theses songs I wrote, let’s play them and have fun’. We’re just doing the thing that we do, so we are kind of really lucky that other people like it.
Peter plays a lot of solo music, solo improvisations. He just started playing solo concert wherever he could do them, in empty churches, shitty people’s lofts, squats, abandoned buildings, whatever. He made a recording and sent it to
Evan Parker. And Evan Parker was like, ‘hey, this is really good, I’ll put it out’.
Diana: He’s Santa Claus.
Moppa: Yeah, to Peter is. That was really great, yeah. So Peter developed a way of playing the trumpet and it’s awesome that other people really like it, he’s an amazing trumpet player and so that works. But we are just like going exactly what we want to do. A lot of times is hard to figure that out; thinking a lot what you want to do is pretty challenging. But I mean, part of it is being really self aware and listening all the other music is happening and thinking really hard about why you’re doing what you’re doing. You know? Which I think most of the people don’t do.
Every time I buy a record by a bunch of …like… doesn’t matter who they are, it could be really famous, or really good or really not and it’s a bunch of songs rehearsed in the studio and recorded, I’m just like…’why would you do that?’ This is nothing. And I think that happens a lot, you know? The really good music that I hear now is all from people who have really thought hard about what exactly they’re going to do and they just did it.
Don’t worry about what anybody else thinks. It almost doesn’t matter what you’re doing; if you’re doing it with total conviction and it’s honest, it will probably be good. I feel like a lot of musicians in music school, get all these skills, they could play giant steps and on toes or whatever, but nobody really cares about it. It doesn’t matter at all. Then, they have all these skills and they don’t know what to do with them. They’re like ‘oh, I’m really good at
playing over chord changes, I’m just gonna play over chord changes.’ Everybody can play over chord changes! How you’re going to do that? Make it interesting!
Bogdan: There’s no creativity.
Moppa: Right. But that’s not just like creativity; it’s just like …awareness. It’s like ‘oh right! Everybody plays over chord changes, ‘how could I do that differently? I could play weird over chord changes’. Cool! Do that! Get into really complicated harmonies and play over that, like some people do; and there’s some great music made that way. Or really simple chord changes with crazy meters. Fine. Go really deep into that. Or you don’t really like to play over chord changes, and you just want to play hour-long drones with overtones on the top of it. Cool! Do that!
Thinking about how it fits into the big picture, I think this is important and I don’t think people do that. That’s a really rumble answer to a question I don’t remember.
Bogdan: So you think that, the way is in Europe right now, for example.. First you have a door opening for you and then you have to create. It’s not really encouraging your creativity, right?
Diana: It can be a restriction.
Moppa: Right. And to my ears it is. Just because in any given year, the music that I really liked, tends to be made by obscure Americans, or really crazy Europeans, like
The Thing, or whatever. Or, I guess like other Evan Parker people, like
Axel Dorner, you know him?
Bogdan: He played here.
Moppa: Right. His trumpets are like choouuuuuu, like white noise to the trumpet for an hour. Now we’re talking. That is a thing. So I feel like that’s the stuff that it really catches my attention. Is that making sense?
