Tribeca
Incident At The Metropolis
© 2005 Granada Music (837101075909)
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Sophisticated, lush progressive pop with jazz elements recalling Bacharach, Steely Dan, Tears For Fears, XTC, Ben Folds, Rufus Wainwright and Blue Turtles-era Sting. For those who wonder what happened to the spirit of originality and compositional divers
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On the stereo, Wilco's "Any Major Dude" is playing. Dave English, singer/keyboardist for Los Angeles-based Tribeca has put it on as he pontificates on the role of jazz in 'alternative' music. "The great pop writers like Bacharach have always owed a debt to jazz-nowadays it's Rufus Wainwright and Ben Folds, and we're carrying on that tradition. I've actually had musicians I've played with call 7th chords 'fag' chords. But one can't deny the genius of cross-over writers like Fagan and Dream of the Blue Turtles-era Sting. We live and die by the 7th chord."
Tribeca's compositions on their debut album INCIDENT AT THE METROPOLIS are as accomplished as the choice team of musicians bringing its intricacies to the stage. Bassist Jeff Novack is a former musical co-conspirator of Norah Jones and multi-instrumentalist Blair Raker divides his time as a touring member of Brian Setzer's notorious army of horn players. Saxophonist Jack Chandler fronts the Ice Age Jazz Quartet. And if that weren't heady enough, English happens to hold an Ivy-League degree in Economics, which "will come in handy when the band is called upon to solve the crisis in Africa, Bono-style."
Modern composition collides with world-class chops throughout the LP most strikingly on "Monument Today", where Malkmus-inspired vocals lurch through clean, atonal piano riffs. Drummer Dave Salinas, opening for Dave Matthews recently, observes the ongoing acceptance of hybrid textures in pop music: "In a way, Matthews' Under the Table and Dreaming introduced a whole generation to the influence of jazz, and at this point I don't think there are 2 styles of music that haven't been combined-nothing's sacred anymore."
English traces the band's name back to its logical NYC roots: "When I began writing these songs, I was living with a group of chess-playing graffiti bombers in an old recording studio across from a garbage incinerator in Brooklyn. I was writing obtuse piano scores for NYU Film students, and on breaks, listening to DJ Shadow with these guys while being extolled on the virtues of the intellectual-thug-life, a sub-culture I was hitherto unaware of. Under those circumstances, the city literally makes an impact on your style."
"The album explores tensions that thrive in the extreme in the city--rich vs. poor, capitalism vs. socialism, art vs. commerce, framed in the context of personal struggles with identity and alienation. Let's face it, the history of the world is the history of cities. Ninety-five percent of the world's significant cultural developments occur in urban areas, because true innovators are also curiosity-seekers, attracted to the energy of the city. The thing that united us all was coming of age in one metropolis or another, where there's so much of the best and worst of everything at arm's length, your ambition becomes difficult to manage. Most of what you see is behind glass, though, and it takes a while before you really have the resources to know what you want and how to get it."
Appropriately, the geography of the LP's compositions read like a young traveler's wishlist-New York City, Los Angeles, Paris, San Diego. Guitarist Dave Hill, an in-demand jazz sessionist in LA, tries to sum up: "In our more pretentious moments, we see ourselves as appealing to an alienated, urban intelligentsia who wonder what happened to the spirit of originality and compositional diversity that the Beatles paved the way for 40 years ago."