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Mike Rivard and Club d'Elf finally rehearse
- JON GARELICK | October 4, 2006
The scene was not atypical for a Thursday night at the Lizard Lounge: a mess of instruments including guitars, electric and acoustic bass, the three-stringed Moroccan instrument called the sintir, trap drums, and percussionist Jerry Leake's tablas set off in a little Plexiglas crib (to prevent audio leaks and feedback), and in the middle of it all Mike Rivard, alternately playing the acoustic bass and stage-directing. The music has been building for several minutes, an impossibly complex lattice of cross-rhythms, and now he's gesturing to guitarist Randy Roos on his left and electric-mandolinist Matt Glover on his right. What does he want them to do? Trade fours? How exactly do you count four bars in the midst of all this? Soon, though, with Rivard plucking running counterpoint, Roos and Glover are trading and overlapping lines and call-and-response riffs and the music continues to chug to a final bowed Rivard cadenza.
"That's what happens when you don't rehearse," Rivard says about his impromptu stage-managing. "I just wanted them to play together." And what was that crazy meter? "Four/four . . . well, really 12/8, it was that Gnawan rhythm I was telling you about." Oh, yeah, the Gnawan rhythm. Where the accents are all in the wrong place and it's impossible for a novice to find the "one."
Rivard has been making complex, grooving "unrehearsed" music more or less every other Thursday at the Lizard since the summer of 1998 with a large rotating cast of characters. The core has included Leake, keyboardist John Medeski, pianist Alain Mallet, oud and dumbek player Brahim Fribgane, violinist Mat Maneri, guitarist Gerry Leonard, DJ Logic, and drummer Erik Kerr. That night last month had saxophonist Tom Hall and drummer Dean Johnston. Next Thursday, October 12, Rivard is expecting Kerr, Medeski, guitarists Duke Levine and Dave Tronzo, and turntablist Mister Rourke. The occasion will be the celebration of Now I Understand (Accurate), their first-ever studio album. The double CD As Above was recorded at the Lizard and released in 2000, and three double CDs of various concert recordings were released by live-disc specialists Kufala in 2004. But Now I Understand was a chance for Rivard and Club d'Elf to rehearse, to try and reject ideas, to record multiple parts for a single tune and pick the best, and for Rivard to shape the material compositionally in a way that he doesn't have an opportunity to do on alternate Thursdays with that rotating cast of all-stars.
And all-stars they are. Club d'Elf have to be one of the most fluent polyglot musical aggregations on the planet: straight-ahead and avant-garde jazz, Indian, African, Moroccan, blues, funk (always funk), pop. Rivard says that one of the challenges of creating Now I Understand was to paint as varied a canvas as possible while sustaining the unity of a "concept" album. So even though the original tracks were laid down not long after that first gig in 1998, he found himself continually adding and subtracting. There are now two other completed volumes in the can — one that delves into dub versions of old blues, another that's predominantly Moroccan and "world" music in its feel.
Now I Understand, he says, is the "darker," side, indulging the band's taste for cyberpunk, sci-fi, and comic pranksterism, with a subtext of political protest. It starts with a scratchy old sci-fi narrator: "The world is under attack at this very moment by the most powerful forces man has ever seen!" Sustained organ tones and spooky mellotron enter, and then Erik Kerr's fierce drum 'n' bass–style patter. When the melody returns, it's in an oscillating theremin voice (Medeski's keyboards again). Throughout, Rivard smoothly varies texture, meter, and tempo. One of his most effective devices is to alternate Kerr's double-time snare with passages of Jay Hilt's half-time John Bonham stomp. There's Maneri's uncanny channeling of early-'70s Miles Davis in a wah-wah voice that conjures both Miles's electric trumpet and guitarist John McLaughlin. The one vocal feature, "A Toy for a Boy," an old William Sanford tune sung here by Jenifer Jackson, could with its allusions to Chinese scales and Duke Levine's smooth blues guitar be a lost Steely Dan track. There's Beat fellow traveler Michael Brownstein reciting his paranoid poem "Monologue From the Top," and, to wipe away all tragedy, a charming dub-reggae closer built on a sample of one of Kerr's kids saying, "I was just kiddin'!"
One of the paradoxes of Club d'Elf has always been Rivard's adaptation of the studio techniques of electronica and hip-hop to live musicians playing in "real" time. So the d'Elf crew are impersonating sample effects that were in turn drawn from live musicians to begin with. Rivard: "It is kind of an ode to that old-school way of doing things while still trying to incorporate all the influences we have with DJ culture and electronic music. Because that's all now part of the musical vocabulary, like learning Coltrane solos. For my bass playing, looping and electronic music have been as influential as Dave Holland or Mingus."
He describes himself trying "to sound like a loop, where I imagine a dub producer like Bill Laswell or Lee "Scratch" Perry, and I'm moving my fader like they might be at the helm, dropping out for a couple of bars, so you still have the line going through your head, and then I come in for maybe a note. It's sort of about thinking like a 'meta producer' ". Rivard isn't bitter about a changing musical landscape that has put a lot of live musicians out of business but also allows him to trade files with a player in Lithuania or Morocco. "However I do miss that feeling of sitting in the same room together". And rehearsing.
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AudAud
Club d’Elf - Now I Understand - Accurate
- Paul Pelon IV
Eight years on the assembly line and Club d’Elf finally grant us what we’ve been waiting for, a studio release!!!! With a mixture of DJs, Jazz, Rock, Soul and solid groove artists, Now I Understand is more of an announcement now than it ever was. Is this Free Jazz? Not sure, but Mike Rivard does his best to let the improvisation lead us to believe so. Some tracks were performed as you hear them and others were pieced together later.
Even the cover art on this album snatches my attention! Just holding onto it and looking at all the details made me think instantly, this CD kicks (it’s a good thing), and I haven’t even played it yet! The Boston based core group is made up of 3 super musicians; Mike Rivard, Erik Kerr and Brahim Fribgane. The counter musicians list is LONG but worth the mention, as most of these should be recognizable to most audiophiles; John Medeski, Reeves Gabrels, Joe Maneri, David FUZE Fiuczynski, Marc Ribot, Sam Kininger (Soulive) , Jennifer Hartswick, Josh Roseman, Aron Magner, Lamine Toure, Hassan Hakmoun, Said Hakmoun, Mohamed Tbizi, Hassan Bouhmid, Abdlatif Benani, Lotfi Tiken, Boujemaa Razgui, Stan Strickland, DJ Logic, Mark Sandman, Billy Conway, Dana Colley, Roger Miller and Binary System, Spooky Ghost, Danny Blume (Liminal Lounge) , Bob Moses, Kenwood Dennard, Andrew Barr (the Slip) , Brad Barr (the Slip) , Jamey Haddad, Dr. Didg (Graham Wiggins), Jay Bellerose, Shuman, Steven Bernstein.
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'The music of dreams' is finally a reality
Club d'Elf's first studio album was an 8-year project
- By Jonathan Perry, Globe Correspondent | November 5, 2006
Eight years. Ninety players. Hundreds of shows. Infinite possibilities. That, in a nutshell, is what Club d'Elf bandleader Mike Rivard was facing when he began sifting through tapes to assemble the celebrated Boston collective's first-ever studio album.
"In a lot of ways this project was insane," says Rivard of the debut, "Now I Understand" (out as a joint release between Cambridge's Hi-N-Dry and Somerville's Accurate labels). "It defies logic." Making the album, he says, "wasn't done with any sort of eye on the marketplace, or any sense of what radio station's going to play this or what format we're going to fit into. It's uncategorizable."
Uncategorizable it may be, but ever since Rivard -- a Berklee-trained bassist who's performed with everyone from Aimee Mann and Shawn Colvin to Morphine and Velvet Underground drummer Maureen Tucker -- launched d'Elf in 1998 as a free-floating instrumental enterprise keen on unfettered improvisation and genre-obliterating exploration, an expanding group of listeners has embraced the d'Elf sound (as if there was merely one). Rivard prefers to liken the group's transmuting tones and fluctuating tempos, and the intuitive, collective unconscious among its players, to "the music of dreams."
Billy Beard, a drummer who also books music for the Lizard Lounge and its sister club, Toad, remembers giving d'Elf its first show -- and being thrilled with the results. "From the first couple of gigs, it became clear that this was a fantastic match of art and venue," says Beard via e-mail. "Any time you have truly gifted players who, beyond all of the ability, talent, and expertise they possess, have mastered the art of listening to each other, you are bound to have something special happen."
"Now I Understand" does a great job of capturing and reining in most, if not all, of the group's polyglot influences. (To experience the full spectrum of d'Elf's sonic universe, you'd need to check out its seven double-disc live sets, available at clubdelf.com).
The new CD, whose material will get a live airing when Club d'Elf visits its favorite haunt, the Lizard Lounge, Thursday, is an intoxicating, mad-chemist mix of the organic and electronic: dub-dosed acid jazz spiked with elements of trance-inducing traditional Moroccan Gnawa and Berber music; psychedelic rock excursions set to looped beats and deep dance-floor grooves.
It's an ambitious work, of course, but eight years? Rivard knows this sounds like the timeline of either a world champion procrastinator or an obsessive-compulsive perfectionist. "I was trying to get a meta-d'Elf, the ultimate snapshot of what the band is about, with as many people who have played with the band as I could get on there," he says. Rivard eventually settled for including two dozen of nearly 100 players who've passed through the group's ranks, among them high-profile heavyweights such as Medeski Martin and Wood keyboardist John Medeski, Moroccan oud player Brahim Fribgane (who's worked with Peter Gabriel among others), and David Bowie guitarist Reeves Gabrels .
Then there was the question of how to treat the material. The eight-minute "Vision of Kali," for instance, is an exotic collision of East and West that integrates nearly a dozen instruments, including oud, dumbek , electric viola, clavinet, and Hammond organ. "Each of these tracks could be mixed a million different ways, and there were so many different elements that to have them all would overwhelm the listener," says Rivard, who produced and arranged the tracks in nine recording studios. "A lot of [the work] was editing and moving things around, saying goodbye and weeding things out. You've got to leave space for things to breathe. I didn't have a record company that I was doing it for, so I didn't have anybody breathing down my back or presenting . . . deadlines, which was both a blessing and a curse."
The eight-year project produced much more than the 67 minutes of music represented on the new disc. "This CD is only the tip of the iceberg," Rivard says, adding that he's got enough music in the can to release at least a couple more studio albums. Those may include some of the last recordings made by his late friend and former d'Elf collaborator , Morphine leader Mark Sandman.
Despite the care with which Rivard has compiled a studio album that documents what Club d'Elf is and where it's been, the stage is truly where the collective flourishes and draws inspiration. On any given night, it is the place Club d'Elf calls home, where just about anything can happen, and often does -- the setting, Rivard says, where an almost "supernatural" or "spiritual" simpatico takes over. "There's a tacit understanding that everybody checks their egos at the door," he says. "Everybody's there to contribute, like a musical salon, to have a conversation. There's a real give and take, a lot of listening, a lot of laying out. And then, when the time comes, it's about stepping up and blowing like there's no tomorrow. Like it's the last gig that we'll ever do."
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The persistence of Club D'Elf
The Wire - Oct 18, 2006
Eight years in the making, "Now I Understand" is surrealistic music for the macabre Club D’Elf’s debut studio CD is the sound of a Dali painting. Turntables chirp under the surface of churning and hypnotic bass and drums. Electric guitars, horns, voices, acoustic instruments, synths, organs and who-knows-what weave into a beautiful, surrealistic mess. “The world is under attack!” warns an AM radio voice on the album’s intro. “Creatures from space! Monsters from the depths of the Earth! And criminals operating right within our own cities!” the voice says. “They must be destroyed before they destroy the world!”
It’s eclectic, funny, technically impressive and, well, just awesome.
Club D’Elf is a large band. Comprised of a rotating cast of more than 70 members—over the band’s eight years, they’ve included John Medeski, Marc Ribot and Morphine’s Mark Sandman, among others—the players cycle through the lineup under the leadership of bassist/ringmaster Mike Rivard. After years of patience and hard work, their first studio CD, “Now I Understand,” is out and available to the band’s many fans. They’ll be bringing it to The Stone Church this Saturday, Oct. 21. Tickets are $7 in advance and $10 at the door, and the madness starts at 9 p.m.
Rivard first booked the project almost ten years ago to hold down a regular night at The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge, Mass., just to have some fun and make a little dough.
“I was playing a lot in a bunch of different bands in the area—The Hypnosonics with Mark Sandman (and Morphine’s saxophonist Dana Colley), The Story (with Jonatha Brooke and Jennifer Kimball), and I was doing a lot of session work at the time,” says the soft-spoken Rivard of the band’s beginnings.
“I think I was kind of bugging Mark. He was always busy with Morphine, and I’d always try to get him to book Hypnosonics gigs, and finally he said, ‘Rivard, you’ve gotta put your own thing together man,” Rivard says, impersonating Sandman’s legendary deadpan cool.
The Hypnosonics, a funk group with an avant garde and improvisational twist that predated Morphine, created the roots of concepts that Rivard would later bring to Club D’Elf—namely, using repetitive basslines and rhythms as the basis for compositional improvisation. Electric Miles and some of the stuff from that early era of fusion music, along with bands like Weather Report and Zappa’s groups at the time, also factored into Rivard’s vision for Club D’Elf.
“The idea was to draw upon electronic music and the DJ culture. Remixing. Where you start out with one set of musical scenes, and then you know, mix it up. Maybe it will have this element, maybe it won’t. (We wanted) to at least have the underlying rhythmic foundation pretty solid and have different people come in and improvise over grooves we had worked out ahead of time.”
Rivard and longtime drummer Eric Kerr do indeed provide the perfect stage on which the other members shine on “Now I Understand.” John Medeski’s Mellotron and Hammond swirl and mix with Kerr’s electronica-influenced drumming and Rivard’s repeating acoustic bass part on the moody instrumental “Bass Beat Box.” Craziness ensues. The distinctive sounds of David Tronzo’s brilliant slide guitar work greet the listener on “Hungry Ghosts.” He and electric viola player Mat Maneri trade lines as turntablists DJ Logic and Mr. Rourke take turns connecting the breaks in Eric Kerr’s easy hip-hop beat. An exotic collage of rhythms converges on Mr. Rourke’s turntables on “Just Kiddin” as an amusing loop of a child’s voice gives the track its title.
Rivard’s repeating sintir (a Moroccan acoustic bass) and electric bass draw you in as guitarist Randy Roos dresses the song up like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Roos, Rourke and Tronzo join Rivard and drummer Dean Johnston for the Stone Church show.
Not to be forgotten amidst the dreamy and sometimes dark music is humor. Humor definitely lives in Club D’Elf. Like the name, for instance.
“Well, if you say it a particular way it sounds like ‘clubbed elf,’” says Rivard, chuckling. “I think that appeals to a macabre sensibility that I and some in the group have.”
As for elves? None of the members seems particularly short, and no known photos exist of them making toys or wearing especially pointy shoes.
“At the time I was starting the band I was reading a lot of Terrence McKenna,” Rivard says. “He was talking about psychedelics and states of consciousness and he talked about these hyper-dimensional elf-like entities that one would come across in these particular states. That appealed to me, this other parallel universe going on out of sight and invisible to this one.”
“Also, E.L.F. stands for ‘extreme low frequencies.’ I ran (the band name ideas) by Sandman, and he just kind of listened with his quiet laconic nature, and he just smiled and nodded,” he finishes with a proud laugh.
Along the same lines, the album’s title goes back to a long-time inside joke between Rivard and an old bandmate. “We would enjoy playing the most outside, weird, twisted stuff that we could find for each other,” Rivard says with an audible smile. “Then, one of us would get this far way look and say ‘Now I understand, I need to kill my whole family.’”
Even if the jokes don’t get you, the music will. It’s unique and fun, and the chops are second to none.
“I think what we’re really trying to do, as corny as it sounds, we’re really trying to touch the heart,” says Rivard earnestly. “There’s a desire to connect with that trance realm, to have a shared event between band and audience. Every show is an event between band and audience. We try and take as many risks as we can.”
The radio churns out the same old swill, but real music that pushes on the walls of genres does exist. It’s on the fringes, a bit off the highway and maybe a little into the woods. You’ve just got to go and find it. Perhaps it lives mostly in other dimensions, but it will also be at The Stone Church on Saturday in the form of Club D’Elf.
- Written by Jon Nolan
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Defining Club d'Elf
Jambands Nov 21, 2006
- Mike Greenhaus
Club d'Elf may technically refer to collective of likeminded musicians, but, when boiled down to its essentials, the group is in actuality a personification of Mike Rivard. Since organizing Club d'Elf for a series of gigs at Boston’s Lizard Lounge in the 1990s, the bassist has played with a striking number of noted musicians, including John Medeski, DJ Logic, Billy Martin, Reeves Gabrels, Mat Maneri, Duke Levine, Gerry Leonard, Alain Mallet, Adam Deitch, Aron Magner, Mister Rourke, Tom Hall, Jerry Leake, Jere Faison, and Erik Kerr, among others. Along the way, Rivard has also brought a number of his collaborators into the studio, the results of which are documented on Club d'Elf’s first studio album, Now I Understand. Below Rivard clues Jambands.com onto Club d'Elf’s evolution, his longstanding friendship with John Medeski, and the reason he thinks lyrics are sometimes distracting.
MG- After so many years of recording why release this album in 2006?
MR- I came to the realization last April that if I was going to release this album I should do it soon. CD stores are going out of business---Tower just closed---and even the concept of the CD going away. Everything is going to mp3 and iTunes. I love albums, the tactile feel of them. I loved dropping a needle onto a record and hearing that sound. Some of that experience transferred over to the CD. iPods are great, but there is an exchange that’s missing. There is something to be said about listing to one album, so I was tried to tie-up these loose ends and master Bill Laswell’s contributions and MMW’s material. But, even when it was mastered at the end of last year, we were still in the studio. Recording is an ongoing thing for us and will continue to be. So, I have these collected tracks and now I am trying to get them out.
MG- The material on Now I Understand was recorded over an eight year period. What was the process of sifting through these songs sketches and, ultimately, finalizing the album like?
MR- Well, this is actually the first of three different studio albums we plan to release, so the first thing we did was sort of organize each disc by genre. This disc has a lot of improvisational songs, some dub, trance, and these dark textures. The next disc spotlights [oud player] Brahim Fribgane and has much more of the Moroccan sound which has permeated our music over the last few years. Brahim brought in some songs he has written and we also did some traditional Moroccan music. He also introduced me to this band called Nass el Ghiwane. They were kind of like the Moroccan Beatles. Not that they played pop music, but that they were as popular as the Beatles. They were kind of the first Moroccan band to use indigenous instruments and play folk music from around the country. Their music is really politically charged. The third disc is not that dissimilar from Now I Understand, but there is a master drummer from Ghana on it and we added some more pop elements. Some of the trance elements are there too since it was recorded around the same time as Now I Understand. It also still has Medeski on it and some of the other guests from Now I Understand. If I had to describe it, I’d say it is a little lighter than Now I Understand, which is kind of like the dark side. We thought we’d hit them over the head with the dark and then, ah, give them the light.
MG- How permanent is Club d’elf’s current touring lineup?
MR- It’s always kind of every changing, but whenever possible it features Erik Kerr (drums), Brahim Fribgane (oud), Mister Rourke, and, occasionally, Adam Deitch or Eric Kalb. I am really the only who one is guaranteed, for better for worse [laughs].
MG- John Medeski is one of the group’s best known satellite members. How did you two first connect?
MR- I met him in ’87 when he was studying at the New England Conservatory and I was at Berklee. We were both in saxophonist Russ Gershon’s Either/Orchestra and toured around the country, bonding on various trips and have been friends ever since.
MG- As you mentioned earlier, your bass is the one consistent element to Club d’elf’s sound. What role does your instrument fulfill onstage?
MR- I started out playing rock-and-roll and was inspired by bassists like John Paul Jones, Jack Bruce, Jack Cassidy, and Phil Lesh. Then I started getting into jazz and stated listening to various people who had played with Miles Davis, Charles Mingus, and, over time, I started listening to Tony Levin, King Crimson, and more avant-garde material. Bill Laswell has been a more recent influence. I have always been attracted to bassists who are really part of the song’s foundation and really play the groove. I mean I love to hear players who push the limits and play more solos, but what I connect with is more foundational. In our music the bass is almost like a constant loop throughout a song.
MG- One of the most noted engineers on the album is Scotty Hard. Can you talk a bit about your sessions together?
MR- He mixed a bunch of different sessions, some dating back to these sessions we did at Q Division Studios in ’98. We went into the studio and recorded live with up to seven different people including DJ Logic and John Medeski. They’ve been mixed in with so many different tracks it’s kind of like an architect digging through ruins, piecing together what is from each session [laughs]. He kind of came in at the end and mixed a few tracks, including “Bass Beatbox,” “Quilty,” and “Vishnu Dub.” We’ve worked together in the past where he has been a little more involved on the ground level, but, on these tracks, he worked his magic on the material after it was already committed to tape.
MG- Describe the process of melding these tracks together?
MR- Well, part of what took so long was piecing these tracks together. I could probably release a whole CD of different mixes of each of these tracks because, when you have as much information or as many people as are featured on this disc, I could make a different mix of a single song highlighting Medeski’s organ or Brahim’s oud. So, I really explored a lot of these different possibilities. I spent a lot of time listening to each track, combining different tracks, and finding a thread of continuity. If something needed to be changed, I’d raise the level of one instrument, so it was kind of like building with Legos---seeing what fit, what didn’t, and trying out different possibilities. The end result is what’s committed to the disc.
Some of the album’s tracks were also part of the live show already. “Bass Beatbox,” for instance, we had been doing for a number of years. That and “Now I Understand” we put out on a live CD a few years back. But a track like “What Would Cthulhu Do?,” on the other hand, came out of a improvisational studio session. In between takes we’d kind of fool around. Brahim was playing around with his oud and we improvised around that. We went down to Brooklyn to record with Medeski at his Shacklyn space. I said, “play whatever you want,” and he put down a mellotron track and then Mister Rourke added some scratches to it. So, it was almost like a musical chain letter, with this rhythmic core idea which people added to. Then I took the tapes and sifted through this material until I came up with the final product.
MG- One of the albums’ best tracks, “A Toy For A Boy,” is also one of the few lyrical numbers in Club d'Elf’s repertoire. Do you generally prefer instrumental music over lyrical songs?
MR- Don’t get me wrong, I love singers and good lyrics, but with this group words are almost a distraction. So, usually, I don’t want to incorporate words into our songs, unless they really stand out to me. “A Toy For A Boy” is actually an old tune from the Ray Charles Singers, which I heard it on a mix tape many years ago. When I first heard it, I thought it was written for me. There is disconnect between the music and lyrics and it immediately resonated with me. On the next record there are some old Moroccan and spiritual songs. If I can understand what a lyric is it’s a let down. That’s what I loved about Led Zeppelin’s lyrics. They were more about the lyrical sound, which allows you to imagine what a song is about. I think [Robert] Hunter is also a great lyricist, who evokes some great imagery, but Club is more abstract.
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newsreview.com - Oct 12, 2006
Club d'Elf: Now I Understand (Accurate Records)
- By Miles Jordan
The psychedelic cover art and the brain-like maze image on the disc itself alert one to the fact that this is an unusual record. Indeed it is. Club d’Elf is the brainchild of bassist Mike Rivard, who enlisted a pile of talent for this recording that took eight(!) years to complete. The only name I recognized among the 15 musicians (including two turntablists) in this Boston-based collective was John Medeski, the keyboardist in Medeski, Martin & Wood; however, most of the others have worked with such artists as David Bowie, John Hiatt and Peter Gabriel in one capacity or another. With seven live recordings in hand, Rivard was finally able to realize this complicated studio project that utilized numerous overdubs to create what the band describes as “live dub-trance-groove excursions, incorporating electronica, hip-hop, funk and free jazz as well as Moroccan and West African trance traditions.” Occasional passages reminiscent of Pink Floyd, Red Krayola and the electronic musings of Morton Subotnick also pop up. The “Moroccan tradition” comes courtesy of Brahim Fribgane, whose oud and percussion work complement this electronic trance music. Put it on and go for a ride.
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The Run-Off Groove edition #126 - Sept 25, 2006
Club d'Elf Now I Understand (Accurate Records)
- John Book
If you want to hear a band who does it right, may I suggest Club D'Elf, whose Now I Understand (Hi-N-Dry/Accurate) is an album where you do not know what's coming next, even after three or four listens. The group, based out of Massachusetts, has (according to their MySpace bio) 80 or so members. On stage, they may have at least four to six members who are the core of the group, but each show may have its own set of variables. Now I Understand comes across as a puzzle game, where various pieces are thrown into the box to see what comes up next. Now, I should say that this isn't "just jazz" although its members hold true to their jazz roots. There's some hip-hop styled repetition, some gritty funk, and acoustic electronica, only for them to throw in something from the jungles of Brazil. And that's just in 30 seconds, as you will hear in "Hungry Ghosts". If it sounds like Combustication-era Medeski Martin & Wood, you would be close, and the album features Medeski, Martin, and DJ Logic (who had been MMW's DJ during the late 90's) as guests. There are some incredible down-tempo funk jams ("Quilty"), or some tranquil jazz ("A Toy For A Boy"), maybe they'll throw in some African percussion and take you to the motherland ("What Would Cthulhu Do?"), these guys refuse to stay in one place at any given time and it's a joy to hang on and see where they take you next. Even with all of the divesity with the music and the musicians, it's not scatterbrained or disorganized at all. They are very confident in what they're doing, and that shows throughout this album. It's about unity, it's about community spirit, it's about one world, one music. Club D'Elf must have discovered some good hash somewhere, because once they hit that high, they thrive on the buzz and allow themselves to weave through it. All on one puff.
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Listen Up Denver
Club d'Elf Now I Understand (Accurate Records)
- Sept 28, 2006
The brainchild of Boston bassist Mike Rivard, Club d'Elf is a genre-shattering collective that merges jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, worldbeat and more with the help of collaborators ranging from DJ Logic to onetime David Bowie associate Reeves Gabrels. Now I Understand is both instrumentally compelling and utterly uncategorizable. The future starts here. -- Roberts
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Alibi.com - Dec 6, 2006
Club d'Elf Now I Understand (Accurate Records)
- Amy Dalness
Smooth jazz is a genre in need of a major image makeover. Now I Understand is like the final episode of "What Not To Wear: The Music Edition." Club d'Elf enter the show as simple jazz musicians and leave glowing with a new, hip sound atop the straight eights they're comfortable with. If "bland" is the first word that comes to mind when considering smooth jazz, Club d'Elf would like to add the words "funky," "experimental," "electronic" and "new age" to your lexicon. Now I Understand could be the cure for common ambient café music and boring breakfast nooks.
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Transform Online / Now I Understand
- Ben Taylor
With a multi-faceted, genre-spanning album like this, it’s hard to know where even to begin describing it. For starters, Club d’Elf is the Boston-based collective lead by bassist Mike Rivard aka Micro Vard. He’s done time with all kinds of folks ranging from The Either/Orchestra (big band avant-jazz), The Story (folk), Paula Cole (singer/songwriter chick rock), Natraj (raga jazz), and the inimitable Morphine. The guy’s been around a few different blocks more than a few times, and for the last eight years he’s been convening a rotating cast of characters in a dark subterranean room in Cambridge for bi-monthly throwdowns, heavy on the groove and improvisation.
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Club d'Elf
Now I Understand
- Michael Brodeur
Dig - Boston's weekly
Mike Rivard’s Club d’Elf has been steaming up empty pint glasses in the confines of Cambridge’s Lizard Lounge off and on for nearly 10 years now, incorporating a seemingly endless roster of collaborators and tunneling indiscriminately through the foundations of every musical genre known to man. So the idea of committing any of this into a representative studio debut is preposterous—hence the seven live albums that preceded this—but we mean good-preposterous. Bounding from funk to soul, swimming through every temperature of electronica, and mining the talents of DJ Logic, Mat Maneri, Jenifer Jackson and John Medeski (to name a fraction), the Club’s proper debut is nothing short of, um... kaleidophonic
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Club d'Elf
Now I Understand
- Sean Westergaard
All Music Guide
After seven double-CD releases of live material (!), Club d'Elf finally drop their first studio album, eight years in the making. They're still plying their patented world fusion/avant-garde jazz/dub/trance chillout music and the m.o. is still basically the same, but the studio aspect allows for greater options on a number of levels. Club d'Elf's Mike Rivard can draw from an unbelievable talent pool (close to 100 players have been "members" of the club), but the live shows are constrained by who can physically attend the gig on any given night. With the studio, Rivard can put together any band he wants, whether they could all be in the same room at the same time or not. The studio also allows for a lusher, more layered sound, multiple overdubs, and detailed production touches that just can't be pulled off live. For example, "Wet Bones" was purely a studio construction built around a Billy Martin solo drum track (released on Illy B Eats, Vol. 1) and has Rivard playing a couple basses as well as sintir and effects. You can't do that live. Other tracks, like "Bass Beat Box" and "Now I Understand," have been part of the live show for years, but benefit from the added production. Great performances litter Now I Understand, but John Medeski and Mat Maneri deserve special mention (just check the Mellotron/electric viola feature on "Bass Beat Box") for their near ubiquity on the album. Guitarists Duke Levine, Dave Tronzo, and Reeves Gabrels are also on board for a track each. Brahim Fribgane contributes some earthy oud playing in several spots, and both Mister Rourke and DJ Logic turn in some nice work on the turntables, with Rivard anchoring the proceedings throughout with his big fat bass grooves. Now I Understand isn't an improvement over the live d'Elf shows; it's a different side of the same organism. Consider it the polished gemstone to the uncut diamonds of the live releases. Excellent.
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Tom Hull on the web: Now I Understand
Club D'Elf: Now I Understand (1998-2006 [2006], Accurate): I can't say as I understand, but at least I'm intrigued. This is a Boston-based group, with a core membership of one (bassist Mike Rivard), three (website also lists drummer Erik Kerr and oudist Brahim Fribgane), four (website photo) or five (insert photos, none identified). The website also lists lots of "special guests" and "rotating cast" and "occasional conspirators" -- some of each show up now and then, plus there are a few others on the record but not on the website lists (complain to the webmaster; especially the two Kerr girls who make the irresistible closer "Just Kiddin"). Name droppers will recognize John Medeski, Billy Martin, Mat Maneri, DJ Logic, and maybe the Your Neighborhood Sax Trio. Jere Faison, Jerry Leake, Jay Hilt, Randy Roos, and Mister Rourke appear with some frequency, and the writing credits include a name that doesn't show in the performing credits: Jeff Misner (I suspect turntablist Mister Rourke). The music is long on world fusion grooves, layered pretty thick, with "Vishnu Dub" typically self-explanatory and exemplary. Jenifer Jackson gets a feature song. The brief "Introduction" could be by MF Doom. It took them eight years to record all this, so I'm not about to sign off on one play...
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