Hazmat Modine

Just another multi-tasking post-modern jug band, says leader Wade Schuman. Jamie Renton nods wisely.

Let's hear it for multi-taskers, dabblers, those with fingers in more pies than is logical. Wade Schuman is one such: exhibiting artist, Department Co-ordinator at the New YOrk Academy of Art and (most importantly for our purposes), leader, singer, harmonica player, and guitarist with New York-based roots surrealists Hazmat Modine, a band with a unique global outlook on old0time American music. Their debut album, Bahamut (Geckophonic/Zpsygoat), is a skew-whiff sound collage of western swing. Middle Eastern folk tales, Jamaican rhythms, Hawaiian guitars, Romanian cimbalom, a pair of harmonicas, a group of throat singers and a whole lot of roughhouse barroom blues. Where most so-called 'Americana' looks in on itself and churns out the same old strum, HM look outwards to the world and welcome it in with a nod and a chuckle.

Wade can talk. Give him an hour and he'll solve the world's problems. Give me an entire magazine and I'll fill it with what he told me during our Transatlantic telephone conversation. He grew up in Ann Arbor with an older brother who introduced him to pre-war blues, Balkan music, and rock. Having worked as a sideman for all kinds of people, he settled in New York, with the aim of forming his own band, just for fun, just to explore the one aspect of American culture he unreservedly loves--music of a roots persuasion. Hazmat Modine take their name from an abbreviation of 'Hazardous Materials' and a brand of industrial heater! They've honed their sound through a seven-year residency at a Bleaker Street blues club. How would he describe the music they play?

"I think of us as a post-modern jug band (!), because jug bands played any instruments. They played waltzes, blues, fake jazz, Tin Pan Alley tunes. The point of a jug band was that it was entertaining and it was like a jukebox. It wasn't some kind of orthodoxy. I think unfortunately people fall into orthodoxies. So within 20 years of the creation of idioms such as bluegrass and blues, there were these orthodox priests of the music saying, 'It has to be done this way or that way', which to me goes against the spirit of the music, because the whole oint of the music of those eras was that it was this incredible kind of creative synergy between different things."

He clearly doesn't want to just create some kind of retro recreation of sounds gone by. "I'm interested in where the spirit of that old music leads me and using things that came from other places." One example of this is his use of the cimbalom. "It's just such a cool instrument, but of all the old world instruments, it was the one that never got here. I suspect because the goddamn thing is impossible to move and impossible to tune, so it would be hard to take it in a covered wagon out to California! But you've got this Romanian instrument that's perfect for a lot of American fields, it has such a great texture, so I wanted some of that in there. That's how I do it. I hear things and think, 'That's cool, I want some of that in there'."

Wade makes no claim to be an expert in any global musical genre. He's never studied, just absorbed, whereas other band members bring knowledge and exprience from their chosern style (avant-garde jazz, Cuban, etc.) and the band's sound has emerged from this unforced collaborative hotchpotch. The core of the group is two harmonicas, two guitars and two drums, with different horn players coming in, as and when they can. Further guests popped  up on the album, including Tuvan throat singers Huun Huur Tu, whom Wade was introduced to over a decade ago by a Russian conceptual artist friend. He ended up playing harmonica with them on their New York show and has kept in touch ever since.

"Their music has a lot in common with American music. They're cowboys basically. They're like rock 'n 'roll guys. They've updated Tuvan music in a lot of ways, whilst staying close to their idiom. But I'm always concerned about world music kitsch and I think specifically there's a use of overtone singing as a shtick. But those guys are such amazing musicians that they never overdo it."

The band recently got their first bad review. "The reviewer said that it was an amazing CD, but 'This is blues music and I expect a certain soulfulness and these guys are just New York hucksters!'. Now blues music is serious, it's about sadness and racism. Some people think humour is a lesser feeling. I absolutely disagree. I think humour can be a brilliant and telling thing and I like it a lot in music. It can have tremendous pathos and it's a huge part of the blues tradition. My view is that if you're a white guy coming out of a black idiom and you're playing a cheap toy developed by Germans to play German folk music and you don't have a sense of humour...you should be in another business."

One of his biggest influences is Fanfare Ciocarlia. "It's not that I want to play their music. It's to do with the way they make it. They play Latin music, theme songs...but they're from a living tradition. Romania didn't kill all their Gypsies, unlike in Hungary there they did. So that groups from Hungary are always a folk revival thing and therefore more purist, whereas when you hear Fanfare, they're Gypsies and they can play anything they want, because they're the real thing. So when they play a Latin song, it sounds Romanian. I'm interested in doing the same thing. I'm playing American music but taking influences in the way that they do. I still think that I approach it as an American musician. It's not that I'm playing other world music forms. I'm just playing American music with world music food in there."

Hazmat Modine's Bahamut will be released worldwide by Piranha Records in spring 2007. www.hazmatmodine.com.