They do things differently in Chicago. Ever since The Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians was formed in the mid1960s, there has been a thriving alternative scene, a parallel universe of experimental musicians who don't exactly fit. These days, Chicago is still pushing through its musical boundaries, but the difference is that many of today's acts are reaching a significantly wider audience. Thanks to indie labels such as Thrill Jockey, groups such as Isotope 217 have helped create a quite extraordinary flourishing of the weird and the wonderful, bringing such scary notions as free jazz and post-rock to a whole new audience.
This particular wing of Chicago music is at its most interesting when it collides with the underground rock scene. In its use of easier rhythms and its often soothing sounds, electronica has produced a music which, while still experimental, is entirely listenable - artists such as Jim O'Rourke, Gastr del Sol, Sea and Cake and especially Tortoise even manage to get a certain amount of radio play. Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker, who also plays with Isotope 217, is considered very much on the cutting edge of the Windy City avantgarde scene, but it's reassuring to know that he hasn't always been teetering there. After all, even an avant-garde musician has to come from somewhere.
"I always loved music when I was a kid. My father was an amateur musician: he played some percussion, and I remember he took me to a rehearsal when I was about seven years old. I guess it was funk - something like Sly Stone - and just hearing the sound of the music and hearing the musicians interact with each other. It was then that I decided that I really wanted to play music."
Growing up on the Atlantic coast of Virginia, Parker was first drawn to the funk and r'n'b bands he heard on the radio: Earth Wind and Fire and The Gap Band. As a member of the African-American Episcopalian Church, he was also taken by gospel music, and he sang with gusto in the choir. The first music he played, however, was funk guitar and bass - his first musical hero was Stanley Clarke, the experimental virtuoso bassist. "It appealed to me more intellectually. It had denser harmonies and different sounds, and it opened my ears a lot. I don't ever remember ever getting actually bored playing music before that, but I was open to new sounds. The only time I really did get bored was when I was playing a lot of jazz - with jazz musicians. You have to really immerse yourself in jazz because it's so technically challenging and, as a result, a lot of jazz musicians don't really have open minds. So I looked for other musicians that I could do something different with. That's when I met a lot of the musicians I'm associated with now, like the guys from Tortoise."
And so Parker got involved in the Chicago experimental scene. It's an openminded affair, with everybody playing in everybody else's bands and with numerous affiliated projects on the boil at once. After the release of TNT in 1998, Tortoise toured, not only in their own right, but also with the Brazilian composer, Tom Ze. At the same time, individual members were involved in further extra-curricular gigs, with Parker, for example, working with both Isotope 217 and The Chicago Underground. On paper, it all seems like a good, old-fashioned co-operative. There is generous mutual support and, musically speaking, there will always be someone around who is ready to collaborate.
"There has always been that underground, especially in America. People are always going to do what they want. What we do is wide open, and I guess the easiest way to explain it is that we have come to look at things just as sounds. For us, before it is actual music, we just see it as sounds. And when you look at things like that, you can be influenced by everything from the traffic on the street and rustling leaves to Wagner and John Coltrane. I think musicians have always looked at things in those terms, but it's the way that it is translated which is different. John Cage was more into exploiting the possibilities of actual sounds, whereas we're more into writing actual melodies and songs."
It's perhaps not surprising the music remains indescribable. Any search for a suitable label is a vain one as, in one form or another, the musicians in question tend consistently to confound the listener. While TNT is a melodic and largely electronic affair with little or no improvisation, the new album, is much more organic and considerably noisier. Little wonder the term "post-rock" was invented to cover all the angles.
"I don't really know what post-rock means," says Parker, "especially as the bands they say are post-rock are so broad - Labradford, Isotope 217, The Rachels - they are all very different. It mostly comes down to marketing. I know our music hasn't really been embraced in mainstream jazz circles, but that's the tradition of jazz. When people started doing something different from Louis Armstrong, like the swing guys, there were people who said that it wasn't jazz. And then when the be-bop guys came along, they said that that wasn't jazz. That's just the way it goes, but then time passes and eventually it's incorporated. But I'd say Tortoise works more as a rock band than anything else."
The new album, Standards, is the fourth full-length Tortoise album. It's a fairly immediate record (once it gets going), and it's a rare mix of acoustic, electric and synthesised sounds. As they see it, Standards is a simple studio recording, whereas TNT was a recording where the studio itself was treated as another instrument. Perhaps that's why Standards is such a different and quite fascinating record - not so much post as para-rock. But whatever it is - it works.
"I can remember Doug McComb saying, `Man, we need to make a punk rock record'. So that was kind of the idea behind it. It doesn't sound like punk rock, but punk was an attitude after all. We wanted to make a record that explored heavier sounds and heavier textures - shorter songs with more distorted tones going to tape. I guess we just write these songs and try to play them."
Standards by Tortoise is on Warp Records.
Tortoise play the Olympia, March 2nd