A Conversation with Gregory Rogove – HuffPost 1.23.12
Mike Ragogna: Gregory, let’s start with a little background for everyone. You grew up in Pennsylvanian Amish Country, born to Jewish parents, right?
Gregory Rogove: Yes. Well, my father is of Ukrainian-Jewish origins and my mother’s side is a mix of English and French. But my mom converted to Judaism when I was born.
MR: And you also spent a year in India on a year-long scholarship?
GR: Right. When I was 18, I went there to study the North Indian classical drum, or the tabla.
MR: And from there, you also went to Singapore, Mali, Mexico and China where you visited the Peking Opera, right?
GR: Yeah. I was mesmerized by those gongs that can be simultaneously beautiful and nauseating when they’re repetitively banged in your brain. (laughs)
MR: Later, you graduated from Wesleyan University in 2002 and was a recipient of the Pecora Award, correct?
GR: Yeah. That was more of a surprise than anything. That award wasn’t something I was thinking about or planning for, it was something I got in the mail. I didn’t think anything of it, really. I thought it had something to do with Indian food. (laughs) I thought maybe it was some kind of joke until I did a little research on the award. I was so pleased and my friends who identified themselves as actual composers were a little upset at that. I’m not sure how it happened, but I was very happy to get it.
MR: From there, you immediately formed the band Tarantula A.D, which later became Priestbird, right?
GR: That’s right.
MR: Plus you’ve even had the opportunity to play with Beck and tons of other hugely talented musicians, and you even bonded with Paul McCartney, right?
GR: Well, to be honest, that’s a bit of a stretch. I met Paul McCartney for a second, which was a lifelong dream for me. my mom was a huge Beatlemaniac. When she found out I met him, she cried tears of joy. (laughs) But that was only a brief, really embarrassing meeting. That’s another story entirely, though. As for Beck, I played a show with Devendra Banhart in Reno in a God-awful casino. We did one Devendra song together and the Beck’s drummer said that he thought I should do the song, so I played the drums with Beck’s band as he sang with Devnndra.
MR: And let’s not forget Megapuss.
GR: Good ol’ Megapuss. (laughs) Before we even made any music, Megapuss was a band that Devendra and I put together while on tour. The name came from a bunch of confusing texts that I got from a very sweet Swedish girl. She was very innocent, but she ended all of her texts with phrases like, “…puss, puss, puss.” Well, one of them was, “Megapuss,” and I had no idea what she was talking about. I told Devendra and he thought it was awesome, so we had a band name. Turns out that the word means “kiss,” so she was just sending me a mega-kiss via text. (laughs) We started writing titles of songs before we even had music, and we had a rule that we quickly write a song before a show so that by the end of the tour we had about 20 song sketches. When we got home I crashed at his place for about two months and we finished and recorded a record. We invited Fab Moretti from The Strokes to come in and sing a song. He’s a great friend and a beautiful artist.
MR: Your new album Piana album focuses on John Medeski as the featured musician. Can you tell us about how that came together?
GR: Well, I spent a little time in Mexico writing these pieces. I wrote and recorded a version of all of the songs myself. When I got home I was working on some of the mixes and thought that I was extremely happy with the songs, but I’m not a trained pianist. I feel comfortable writing for the instrument, but I don’t have the touch of someone who has an intimate relationship with the instrument. At that point, I had known John Medeski for a few years, though not very well. The drummer in his band was a very close friend of mine and my teacher’s for a while. So, I reached out to John and asked him if he’d be interested in playing all of the pieces and he said, “Sure.” I was so excited because he’s such a master. I also thought it would be very interesting to have him do it because he’s a virtuosic improviser and these are short, simple composed pieces. I thought it would be very interesting to have the tension of someone who wants to just paint with notes ad hoc and have that be restrained. He did an amazing job, but you could tell that the whole time, he just wanted to burst out of the strict composition structure, though we had one semi-improvised piece where you can really hear him shine. It’s called, “Young Mountain.”
MR: It’s a beautiful song. So, you’re on the Knitting Factory label.
GR: Yes, that’s right. The label started in New York and they have a history of putting out a lot of the downtown, avant-garde musicians. Then the label changed hands, I believe. I don’t know the whole history behind it. Anyway, they’re back on the scene and putting out a really fantastic array of music. They have the entire catalog of Fela Kuti, who is a huge hero of mine. That was actually one of the selling points to me for the label. (laughs)
MR: Right. They also allowed you to do a companion DVD with distinct images that go along with this album. What’s behind the concept?
GR: After I had all of the pieces in the can from Medeski’s performance, I thought it would be really interesting to pass each one of the pieces on to artists that don’t usually work with this material and try to rearrange it. The piano music stands alone, but it’s so often a springboard for other music. So, I thought it would be interesting to send something with more of a classical lean to a folk artist or whatever. I started passing it out to musicians, but I also have a lot of friends who are visual artists who thought it would be interesting to do a multimedia project along with it. What if I gave it to painters or visual artists or sculptors to link sounds to these compositions? So, that’s what I did. Everything kept rolling and rolling and eventually, I had each piece remixed and rearranged musically and reinterpreted visually. So, the DVD comes with a visual and musical reinterpretation of each song.
MR: And personally, I think the presentation was very unique.
GR: Thank you. The whole concept seemed so simple at first. Of course, it’s always more complicated than you may think. But in the end, I’m very happy with the way that it turned out.
MR: Now, you drew inspiration for these pieces from French impressionists?
GR: Yeah. I’ve been playing the drums since I was 10 years old. It’s kind of where I feel most natural. But I always loved writing songs and all kinds of music, so when I was 17 or 18, I came across Erik Satie’s music and was completely taken with it. Of course, that led to Ravel and Debussy. But Erik’s pieces in particular are so simple. I thought to myself that I could probably play those pieces if I just sat down at a piano long enough. I started teaching myself the pieces and just kind of kept hanging around the piano with those pieces and writing my own. All of that left an indelible mark on my perspective of music and writing. Over the years, I had a bunch of sketches like the ones on this album, but it didn’t make sense for Megapuss or Priestbird or any of those bands. I really wanted to have a solo piano record because that’s some of my favorite music to listen to as you’re going about your day. It enlivens the world and I wanted to make an album like that.
MR: Right. Where was this album recorded?
GR: I wrote the songs in Mexico, but when the stars kind of aligned for us to record it with John Medeski, the plans changed. I had a kind of busy Fall when I needed to record, as did John, and we both happened to have the same two days off when we were both in New York. So, I shot up to Woodstock where John was incidentally starting to make sketches for his own solo piano record. We recorded in one day in this little wooden shack where John used to live in Woodstock, NY.
MR: Who’s idea was it to put the apes in tighty-whities?
GR: That was a stop motion animation experiment that my girlfriend, Diana Garcia, and I did. We came across a studio that was allowing people to rent a bunch of studio equipment for free. It was sponsored by Levi’s and when we saw all of the equipment, we knew we had to write something to produce. So, I wrote a little something and when I showed her she was a little crestfallen. She thought it would take our entire lives to film. She wanted to take an afternoon to film it and it ended up being about three weeks straight of animating. The story, I think, came from an idea I had while reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s novelExtremely Loud And Incredibly Close. It’s an image of our ancestors walking arm-in-arm through the savanah. It’s kind of romantic – these Australopithecus creatures enjoying love the same way we know it now, back then. Then the sun burns out and there’s a bit of chaos and they lose their clothes and are forced to leave the city and enter back into the wild. They no longer had the tools to live in that environment.
MR: Gregory, what advice do you have for new artists?
GR: I hear this from my heroes all the time, and I think it’s so true: Do something original. Do something that stretches your boundaries and makes you uncomfortable, but that excites you.
Transcribed by Evan Martin