William Hooker vs. DJ Olive
by Brian DiGenti
In the Wax Poetics tradition of looking back on music, and digging up previously published articles, we present a series of stories written by our Senior Editor during the mid- to late 1990s. Turntablist DJ Olive met drummer, composer, and poet William Hooker during a jam at the Cooler in New York. Olive recalls how intimidated he was on stage for a session with players he grew up listening to: Mike Watt (of the Minutemen and firehose) and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. “Afterwards, they all kind of ignored me,” Olive says. “Except William, who was the only one I hadn’t heard of. William came up to me and said, ‘Olive, I heard you. I heard you out there.’” From that point on, the two have worked together on and off. Most recently, they embarked on a nationwide tour, with each stop hosting a different soloist. Mindfulness(Knitting Factory Works) was recorded at Slim’s in San Francisco, with saxophonist Glenn Spearman sitting in. As a club DJ and studio producer of jungle, Olive was in new territory working within Hooker’s free-jazz aesthetic, but soon gained a “broader understanding about the relationship of musicianship to electronic music and working in the studio,” he says. “The two appear almost diametrically opposed to one another, and originally this was a conflict for me.” Not only did Hooker school Olive on jazz history and various deep musical concepts (such as how electronic instruments destroy the tonal center of a drum kit), he also encouraged him with respect. “I’ve played with a lot of musicians who didn’t really take me seriously,” says Olive. “William was the first person to say, ‘Hey, this is actually valid: How can you push yourself more?’” Turntablism grew out of hip-hop and has always been based on skill and technique, on creating sounds that can’t be achieved any other way. Olive carries that ethos forward. “I really love hip-hop techniques in the standard way that people cut and scratch,” he says. “I don’t really feel like I can add to that vocabulary very much. I’m trying to create a different dialect. I search for records from the ’60s and ’70s of early electronic music. I can use isolated sounds and work them across the needle and use effects so that, in a way, I’m speaking with the turntable the way that a free-jazz horn player speaks. I can take a record like Sounds of the Hump-Back Whale—a cliche ambient record—but I can find those whale sounds and turn that into something that sounds a lot more like a synthesizer.” In fact, on Mindfulness’s 10-minute duet “How,” Olive offers up a surreal atmosphere of echoing voices of the hump-back whale, progressing to a final score of bizarre chirping—as Hooker seemingly searches through the sounds and propels the track forward. For Hooker, the use of turntables in a free-jazz setting is nothing new. “I used to do this at the Kitchen when I first got to New York, when turntables were really just a part of the whole experimental scene,” the drummer recalls. “I don’t think it has anything to do with the whole phenomenon of hip-hop or ‘illbient’ or any of that. I really have chosen Olive because I like his contribution to my overall music. I don’t even know anything about turntables or turntable people.” Although DJs have played with live jazz musicians for years (e.g. Courtney Pine, Branford Marsalis, et al.), in Hooker’s setting, the turntables don’t merely paint sounds over the beat or add samples to the rhythm. Instead, Olive’s contributions are an integral part of the entire composition, and have a direct effect on Hooker. “I wouldn’t be listening to [Olive] in terms of the particular individual he’s spinning,” Hooker says. “That’s meaningless to me because while I’m playing. I’m not focusing totally on what he’s playing as a listener. I have to concentrate on where my own physical body is going at certain points. I listen to things, and I hope that those things can make me and my body and mind flow into a place where I can get an improvisation out of it. The more textures I can feed off of, the more sonic directions I can go in, and deal with other tones, timbres.” How does that relationship play out on the road, night after night? “It’s hard,” says Olive. “It’s almost like he’s this animal that I haveto feed. So I’m feeding him colors and textures and landscapes, and he devours them as he moves through them. At a certain point, he’s ate that texture, so I can’t keep feeding it to him. It can get really hard to keep up with him because he’s just ferocious.” On the recording, Hooker and Olive trade off one another to build a more potent whole. For the dream-like “Archetypal Space,” Olive chose a large portion of Uzezt Plaush’s “For the Falling Dream” as a backdrop for Hooker’s cymbal-led excursion. Then, Olive utilized turntable number two, manipulating snippets of warped-sounding electronica that seem to induce Hooker’s tom-tom barrage. On “Living Organ—Parallel Planes,” Olive sounds like he’s consciously competing with Spearman’s horn, egging him on, then finally backing off to allow Spearman’s solo to take flight. Both Hooker and Olive agree that the process behind Mindfulness was very different from free-improv. They stress that this was more structured and involved greater contrasts. Yet, to hear Hooker’s bit of inspiration to Olive before a gig is to see the similarities in spirit: “The idea is to build a bridge to the ether,” Hooker told the DJ. “And we all have to build our own bridge. I can’t tell you guys how, but I’m gonna go out there, I’m gonna build my bridge. Now if you can build your bridge, I’ll see you there.
