Kip Hanrahan
Plenty of titles you could hang round his neck...
by Jason Gross
(December 2010)
There's plenty of titles that you could hang around Kip Hanrahan's neck. We can start off by calling him an aritst and on his releases, it's easy to also nail him down as a composer and producer. Beyond that, he's a label-head since American Clave is his own invention, putting out his own work, among other things as we'll see. But maybe what makes him most interesting is the part of his work that goes beyond himself.
His albums aren't made up just of his own input but scores of other artists too. Any solo artist can claim the same thing for the albums that they put out but Hanrahan makes it into art, assembling and crafting interesting bands and combinations of musicians almost the way he crafts the tunes themselves. The idea to coral musicians from all of these traditions into various combos isn't just noteworthy but also laudable: as such, in Hanrahan's universe, bassist/singer Jack Bruce, New Orleans musicals stalwards Leo Nocentelli (The Meters) and Charles Neville (Neville Brothers), jazz sax legends Chico Freeman, John Stubblefield and David Murray, alt-rock gadfly Anton Fier (Golden Palominos, Pere Ubu, the Feelies), jazz guitarist John Scofield and a host of Latin musicians can all appear side by side on the same album (in this case, Drawn From Memory). Other visionaries like Fier, Miles Davis in the 70's and Carla Bley (who would also record for Hanrahan) would have the courage (and maybe insanity) to try to make music out of such diverse backgrounds but also realize that there are some common threads worth exploring (more recently Damon Albarn would also do this successfully in Gorillaz).
On the current American Clave site, this is how the webmaster describes the label:
"American Clavé is a label (a label? a record company? a form? a box?) of music colored by my friend Kip Hanrahan, whether produced or directed or written by or with some rather remarkable fellow artists (artists made somehow yet more remarkable by the mere presence of Kip's unique take on things), the music is deep, intelligent and always passionate ... deeply passionate. Perhaps in the same way that Kip's conversation tends toward a stream of consiousness, a stream of images, a myriad of rhythms, voices and sound somehow unite in some truly profound and meaningful way."
And later AC is said to be "a music company, a record company, an anthology of musics (sequences of angers, passions, sexualities made audible and intangable by music)." All of which is a nicer, much more poetic way of putting across what I was trying to say.
But AC was much more than just Hanrahan's albums themselves- it encompassed other artists as well, creating an interesting little discography. The label was pioneering not just in the breadth of material it released but all the quality of the albums and the way that it propelled certain artists into a more mainstream consciousness. During its 80's heyday, AC released albums by no-wave heroes DNA (which I did a reissue of later), Miles Davis producer Teo Macero and Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla. For many years, the DNA record was the only thing besides their rare singles that was available on the market. For Piazzolla, though he had toiled for many years previously, it was the AC releases (done towards the end of his life) that brought him recognition in the West. Then there were an intriguing series of album which were done as musical tributes to poets, such as Ismael Reed (three albums worth), Paul Haines (who also worked with Bley) and gritty writer Piri Thomas (author of Down These Mean Streets). In addition, the label also released albums by a number of Latin musicians (many of whom also appeared on Hanrahan's albums), including trumpeter Jerry Gonzalez (later immortalized in the movie Calle 54), percussionist/band-leader Milton Cardona, Grammy-award wining drummer Horacio Hernandez and violinist/composer Alfredo Triff. That's not even mentioning the soundtrack to Soviet film-maker Dziga Vertov's Enthusiasm, a 1931 experimental film that combined industrial sounds into a musical realm decades before Einstürzende Neubauten popularized the idea.
Sad to say, much of this iconic work is now out of print- the AC page points to some other websites where some of these albums can still be found. But the ideas and the spirit of American Clave live on through the artists themselves and the multi-genre experiments that they participated in there. Chalk it up as some kind of pyrrhic victory for Hanrahan as such.
Jason is founder/publisher/perpetrator/maintenance-engineer of Perfect Sound Forever (established 1993; one of the first online music publications). In addition to Perfect Sound, he's produced reissues of Delta 5, Kleenex/Liliput, Oh OK, DNA and Essential Logic. In his few free seconds, he's been known to freelance for a variety of publications (Village Voice, Time Out, Spin, The Wire, Relix).