“You Can’t Close Your Ears,” the second cut on New Haven musician Zach Rowden’s TASKED, is a growling exploration of one note. Rowden moves through the possibilities of tone for that note like a dentist’s drill moves through a cavity. But there’s another side to it. Other properties begin to emerge, overtones, textures. It’s one note. But it’s a lot of music.
“So, that was an upright bass, to start off simply,” Rowden said in a recent interview on WNHH’s “Northern Remedy.” “It was off of a tape I put out in January on a label called XKatedral, from Stockholm. I did a tour on it, but those two tracks on that tape — those two long slabs of things — are the most updated solo bass thing I’ve done.”
“How I started even playing the bass in this context, outside of school, is that I started playing alone — because I didn’t have anyone else to play with,” Rowden added. “That’s usually everyone’s biggest fear: ‘oh my God, I have to play solo.’… So it’s this giant block I’m constantly chipping away at. I’m always thinking about the next solo thing, and trying to shape this thing.”
But Rowden didn’t do a lot of fussing for the recording. “It’s a gross high-pass filter that sounds like trash,” he said. “But that’s how it sounds live. I play through gross PAs and bad amps, because it’s about making the bass, and drone music, kind of evil again.”
“You Can’t Close Your Eyes” and the history around it also happen to be a good encapsulation of what the New Haven-based Rowden is up to. He’s a searching musician who plays relentlessly and tours a lot. But he’s also always making connections with people, from across the country and the world, visiting them from here and bringing them to the Elm City to play.
The 26-year-old Rowden grew up in Setauket, N.Y. and then moved to Richmond, Va. in middle school. His mother decided that all of her children should play a musical instrument. His older sister began playing the cello and Rowden figured he would do the same. But when the family moved to Virginia, the youth orchestra already had a lot of cellos. Rowden switched to bass. “And then I basically faked my way through middle school and high school orchestra, because you’re playing an instrument that nobody cares about, and your parts are super-easy, but no one can hear you because you don’t actually have to project,” Rowden said.
He was also becoming a big music fan. “I grew up listening to punk and hardcore,” he said. “I was fan before I was a performer.” He started going to punk shows in Richmond in the seventh grade. By the time he was in ninth grade he was going to the “illegal ones,” he said. “This culture was ingrained in me from before I even went to music school. You go to a show. You pay for it. You buy records. That’s how you find out about music.”
But “I really don’t count playing music until I got to college,” Rowden said.
That was Shenandoah Conservatory in Winchester, Va. Rowden had applied first in the school’s therapy program, “which is the only reason I got in,” Rowden said.
But it didn’t take. “It was the third day, it was a Friday, and I’ll never forget it. I was wearing a Bathory hoodie — you know, this black metal band — and it’s got a big Satanic goat head on it. It was guitar class, acoustic guitar, and we started singing songs like “Down in the Valley” and “Kumbaya” … and I remember just freezing. ‘I don’t belong here,’ is what popped into my head. ‘This isn’t my zone.’”
He switched to music performance. He got interested in experimental composer Morton Feldman and the jazz scene in New York that spawned the likes of John Zorn. “I was like, ‘I’m going to be a musicologist. I’m going to write a book on all this stuff,” Rowden said. “I started writing papers and giving presentations.” But then, in his junior year, after playing his junior recital, professor Donovan Stokes — “one of the most amazing teachers, players, friends, on the planet,” Rowden said — said to Rowden, “yeah, I can’t really let you go to musicology school,” Rowden recalled. “You got to go to school for performance.”
He applied to the Hartt School of Music and got in. “And that’s how I ended up in Connecticut, and that’s how I ended up in New Haven,” Rowden said. He studied with bassist and professor Robert Black. He learned a lot, but had mixed feelings about the culture he found himself in. “Going to classical music school, no one tells you to be creative. They’re like, ‘you’re bad.’ That’s the whole thing. You’re like, ‘I’m bad. I could never be in the New York Philharmonic.’ So you graduate and you think, ‘I’m still really bad. I need to go to grad school.’ And then you’re like, ‘oh my God, everyone’s better. I’m still super-bad. I need to get a doctorate.’ And then you get out of your doctorate and you have no jobs.’”
Rowden didn’t do that. While at Hartt, he started setting up house shows akin to the ones he had been to growing up in Richmond, booking people through the network of musicians he was already a part of from his days in Virginia. And “I used my loan money that I got for school to come to New Haven to take lessons with Joe Morris, and then used it to drive to Providence and New York and Western Mass, and just go to shows and meet people.”
“I have needs,” Rowden added with a laugh. “I have needs for live music in my life.” He got connected with Carl Testa’s Uncertainty Music Series and met the New Haven experimental music scene. When he graduated from Hartt in 2016, he moved here. Part of the reason was its proximity to New York, where he played some shows and went to more. But a lot of the reason had to do with New Haven itself.
“I’d much rather live here. I can have my cake and eat it, too,” Rowden said. “I get to travel internationally about four times a year because my overhead is a quarter” of what it would be in New York. Meanwhile, he landed a job at the Tri-Centric Foundation, dedicated to the music of Anthony Braxton, and dug in deep.
“It’s this strange breeding ground,” Rowden said of New Haven’s appetite for experimental music. “I’ve made more music in this town than I’ve ever made anywhere else. Live, recorded, collaborations — it’s not that you’re allowed to, it’s that you have the ability to. There are spaces. I have a house. I live in a house with a driveway and a basement, and a room that I can have four people playing in and we can record. That’s how I viewed it before I even saw the history of it.” As he got to know local legends Anthony Braxton and Wadada Leo Smith, he began to appreciate that New Haven’s legacy of experimental music was a couple generations old, born in free-jazz church shows and house concerts. He got interested in helping keep it going.
“Because of the community here, it’s so much worth the fight,” he said.
He started setting up house shows in New Haven, which he still does. “I don’t make any money on these shows,” Rowden said. All are run as suggested donations, and any funds go to the musicians. “I will host, I will make the event, I will organize all these other people, and we’ll take nothing from it, because one, I want to see these people play, and two, other people in town need to see this. We’ve all been there, in the tiny back room of a restaurant, with four other people, and had our minds blown… I’ve had my brain totally altered in the funniest, stupidest places, with very few people, and it cost five dollars, and nobody even knew it really happened.”
Among his most recent collaborations has been one with saxophonist Paul Flaherty, who “is one of the best-kept secrets of American free-jazz history,” Rowden said. A house painter in Bloomfield, he has also had a decades-long career as a composer and performer. “He’s always been on this way of creating his language through free jazz that is totally him, in so many ways.” His respect has been hard won. Early in his career, Rowden said, “he would show up to a jazz jam session and everyone would stop playing when he would start soloing. He had to deal with that hard-edged jazz-vibe-bro thing.” So he made his own music. “I’ve listened to so many Paul records. It’s always him. He’s never backed down from playing his music…. It’s amazing playing with Paul because he is actually free when he plays.”
Meanwhile, he and fellow musician Henry Birdsey formed a project called Tongue Depressor, which grew out a few years of Rowden connecting with where he was from — touring internationally, he suddenly felt American in a way he hadn’t before — and developing a friendship with Birdsey. “That’s what kind of started my wheels turning,” Rowden said. He began listening to a lot of old Appalachian music, and decided to learn to play fiddle. “Henry and I met through a piece he did for his thesis up at Bard,” Rowden said. They began helping each other record their material, and one day decided to try experimenting with each of them playing just a violin. “We made this total trash music, amplified, prepared violins,” Rowden said. “Just really abstracted stuff. We kind of laughed about it. But that’s in turn what became the first Tongue Depressor tape.”
Birdsey shared Rowden’s obsession with Old Weird American music, and together they fell down the rabbit hole of learning about traditions of snake handling and other practices in the South, and how they connected to drone-based music. They began getting together regularly, and recording a lot, weekly. “This happened in America and no one’s actually accepting it,” Rowden said of the religious practices. “This is a huge narrative about being American that I’m interested in and he is as well…. the idea of an American drone, or the American trance state, is totally different than Tibet, or India, or wherever you think meditative drone stuff usually comes from. Like a shape-note tune — you hear 80 people sing something, and that’s the loudest drone you’re going to hear, ever.”
They began to dive into the sound of fiddle music, though “we didn’t know how to play fiddle. We learned on stage, touring together,” Rowden said. “We’re playing with ancient tuning systems,” and “everyone knows what a fiddle is.” But he and Birdsey “have created our own language,” he added. “We’re familiar with this material but we’re going to change it.”
“I feel like my ears jumped fifteen levels,” he said, “because I was playing with somebody else.”
In a larger sense, though, Tongue Depressor, and his solo output, and his collaborations, are a form of coming full circle. “I grew up listening to a lot of drone music,” he said. “It’s always been there…. but it wasn’t until I started listening to music from different cultures” that he realized that “everyone has a drone.”
“You zoom out, you can make a Brahms symphony two notes,” Rowden added. “The slower you go, the closer you get…. I am attached to it. I can’t get away from it. It’s all coming back to sustain in some way,” he said. “I’m in for the long haul.”
And he has started teaching. He is taking on students and conducts workshops. “You’re not going to play music that makes people want to listen to it unless you like listening to music first,” Rowden said. He tells his students to follow their interests, their passions, their curiosities. He hears that same passion in all the music he loves, whether it’s the most experimental free jazz or traditional music from a far corner of the world.
“All these people just did it because they wanted to,” Rowden said.
To listen to the full interview with Zach Rowden on “Northern Remedy” and hear some of his music, click on the file below.
