1. 24 1st December 2015
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P
ortico are a fascinating
group. They came onto the
scene as a fresh, contempo-
rary jazz quartet and were im-
mediately lauded as potential saviors for
the (statistically) least-appreciated genre
in music. After three albums of technical-
ly stoic, atmospherically brilliant instru-
mentals,theformerquartetisnowsimply
Portico. Looking to solidify themselves as
anelectronicbandwithexperimentalten-
dencies to match their past efforts, saxo-
phonist Jack Wyllie explains his humble
rise, and how this has led him to pursue
an altered form of musical expression.
SMS: What’s up?
Jack: Literally right now, sat at a café
on the Thames. Generally, we’re writing a
new album and doing a rehearsal tonight
By Ross Devlin
@BossDevlin
for our tour. Hopefully we’ll release an al-
bum next year.
Who performs the vocal parts on your
last album, Living Fields, live?
Withlivestuff,there’saguycalledJono
McCleary who sings a few on our album.
He sings all the other songs from the al-
bum live. There’s three singers on the al-
bum – Joe, Jono, and Jamie – and Jono
sings Joe and Jamie’s tunes, so there’s
four of us going out on tour.
How is your approach to song writing
different now that you’re a trio?
It has changed. Everyone’s got their
own influence on how the process works
and their own input. I suppose more of a
change came about when we moved from
being a “live” set up to working with sing-
ers and writing [songs] on a computer,
and that was a huge change for the three
of us. We went from being a live band
that based all our songs around saxo-
phone, double bass, and drums, to all of
us writing lots of different parts, and also
producing it more; having a much more
variedpaletteoftexturesandinstruments
we worked with. Recording into a com-
puter and figuring it out digitally before
we played live. It’s been a really big shift
in process.
Are you still a live band in the sense
that you try out new ideas live and flesh
them out on tour?
We’re generating a lot of ideas by play-
ing live and improvising, which is what
weusedtodoalot,actually.There’sgoing
to be some saxophone, and more acoustic
instruments. But we’re also trying to inte-
grate some of the more electronic sounds
[...], but from ideas that we’ve generated
from playing live. It feels a bit more dy-
namic, I guess. We won’t really be playing
that live on tour, but it will be played live
when we record it. And then there will be
additional production work done after-
wards, but the crux of it is live.
Do you think the attention you re-
ceived as a “new, contemporary jazz
band” has had a positive effect on the di-
rection you’re taking now?
It was great in a lot of ways, because
it’s great to be known as… that [a modern
jazz act], and we felt like it reflected what
we were doing. It was kind of a comple-
mentarydescriptionofthemusicwewere
making. Now that we’re doing something
else there’s a bit of weight to that. It’s
“Cannonball” “Satchmo” “Duke” “Bleedin’Gums”
quite hard to get people to not contextu-
alise it like that when they see our music.
We still get reviews saying we’re a jazz
band. We still get booked for jazz festi-
vals, which is fine, but it also means it’s
difficult to break out of that. I think in the
past year we’ve made people understand
that [Portico] is a different thing.
Now that you’re using more electron-
ic manipulation on your saxophone, do
you feel like you can express yourself
more musically, maybe in a more indi-
vidual way?
I felt for quite a long time that the sax-
ophone is such an idiomatic instrument.
It’s so jazz. [...] It’s quite hard to play sax-
ophone and not sound like you’re playing
jazz music, regardless of what you do
with it. People broadly understand it as
being in that genre [...]. I guess we kind
of went outside of it [...]. But it’s very
heavy with connotations, and it’s quite
nice not to have that now – to make mu-
sic that I felt reflected me a bit more, and
what I was listening to, and what I liked,
rather than a specific genre or history of
certain music. In that sense, it was really
exciting switching over. And it’s not like
I don’t play the saxophone anymore – I
love the saxophone and it’s a beautiful in-
strument,butIdidfinditquitedifficultto
play it and have an original voice in some
ways.
It’s almost paradoxical - the more you
can disguise your instrument, the more
you can reveal yourself through it.
Yeah, I think so, by disguising it, or lay-
ering it up.
You’ve named yourself after a portico
you played under in Italy once. Have
you played any other interesting venues
on the jazz festival circuit?
It’s a mix of playing jazz clubs in Ger-
many to a bunch of 50 year-olds, which is
a lot of how the subsidised music in Ger-
many and France works. There are lots of
art centres on the outside of town – they
payquitewell–andwe’llgoandplayfora
slightly older audience. It’s great, but not
very vibey. We’ve also played a handful
of really wicked festivals. [...] One done
by Giles Peterson [Radio 6 DJ]. [...] A
festival in Marsaille, and we played in a
Roman amphitheater that was sort of set
into the side of a cliff. [...] It was pretty
special. Croatia, at Dimensions Festival,
which was in a large amphitheater as
well, I reckon about 5000 capacity, and
we opened for Bonobo.
What are your plans for the new al-
bum? Are there going to be more guests?
We’ll see. We might try to do a bit of
singing ourselves, and maybe have some
more sax and melodic lines in it. We’re
trying to keep it in-house at the moment,
but that might change. I could see us do-
ing one or two songs with other people. If
we did use singers again, I reckon it will
be the same people [as Living Fields].
We’d like to give it more of a “band” feel,
and less like a song that happens to fea-
ture a singer in it.
IMAGE:AMAZON
“Bird”
T
he Doormats have per-
formed as part of exciting
showcases like the Liq-
uid Rooms’ ‘In Limbo’
and Summerhall’s ‘Neu Reekie.’ On
the 25th, they played Henry’s Cellar
By Megan Wallace
@EdStudentMusic
Bar, promoting $CR*P, a zine cu-
rated by students at the Edinburgh
College of Art. I caught up with
them after the gig, by which point
any chance of a normal interview
was ostensibly out of the question.
SMS: You define yourself as “experi-
mental”; what does this mean to you?
The Doormats: Asymetric in both
sound and look. There’s a range of
haircuts.
In terms of your experience with
venues, have you been affected by the
council’s crackdown on noise?
Our career as a band has been
plagued by noise complaints. The only
times we’ve not had a noise complaint
are when we’ve played in Glasgow or
London.
What kind of musical backgrounds
do you all come from? Both in terms
of training and your personal music
taste.
Jack: I used to play orchestral
percussion but now I restrict myself
to just the tambourine — and I have
no official training on the frying pan.
Oscar: Yo La Tengo, Half Japanese,
Steve Malmaus, Pavement,
Joel: I went to Trinity Music College
for three weeks.
Silas: Blues rock with my brother,
but now he’s gone in a more
management consultant direction.
Experimental Frequencies...
The Student interviews two bands that mix jazz and funk rhythms with their own secret ingredients
Do you have specific ideas about
your sound and look that you
cultivate or is it more of an organic
process?
With the sound yes, but it tends
to miss the aim and go in a different
direction. Our look is just very
incohesive.
Speaking of style, who’s the
fashionable one of the group?
Well, Big Daddy (Jack) is like the
Bono of the group. Often seen wearing
charity fun run t-shirts.
Do you see music as your vocation?
Resident assistancy is my
profession. Music can’t be my
profession.
How would you describe your
band dynamic?
We need one another to live, so
there’s no choice in getting on.
How is the the album you’re
working on different to your EP?
It’s a bit more full band-y. It’s also
less stripped back, the vocals are more
present.
As a final question, how do you
create your music? Is it lyrics first?
Or music? Where do you get the
inspiration?
Lyrics recently, but in the past it
was music first. What inspires it is
Big Daddy…people inspire me. Or
sometimes I lift lines from places…
from books. Renaissance Poetry on
occasion.
A mixtape compiled by the
Doormats :
Cobaya by Magma
Parliament Funk
Woody Guthrie
The Fool
Gun Club
Fourtet
John Donne’s complete works on
audiobook
King Crimson
Oh Sweet Nothing by the Velvet
Underground (“for when the credits
roll”)
The
Doormats
Portico