CAA: Dave Pavkovic interview

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Dave Pavkovic

Hold on one sec. I just want to show you one thing.

So I have 7, 8, 9,10, 11, I have 12 DAT tapes that are me and Tatsu, and me and Tatsu in various configurations. It says Tatsu Aoki and Dave Pavkovic Live at CCTD, August 31st, 1994. And CCTD is Cook County Theater Department. So this is the space, the theater space that I worked in. So Tatsu and I, that’s where we first, Tatsu and I, started working together. So this is August 31st, ‘94. This is Tatsu and Dave at the Hothouse on July 10th, 2001. This is Dave and Tatsu at Cook County Theater Department. July 21st, ‘94. Oh, here’s one: Tatsu and Dave at the Knitting Factory in New York. We played the Knitting Factory twice. And this one is marked September 14th, 1996, so that was Dave and Tatsu, Actual Music live at the Knitting Factory.

GUIDING QUESTION – 1:34

Can you tell me about the beginning of your playing and recording with Tatsu Aoki?

Tatsu bought that DAT player in the early ‘90s, maybe ‘93, ‘92. I just remember, I mean, he went to Japan a lot, and I remember he came back with – one of those trips he came back with a DAT player and a tiny one. And I was like, at the time. I think you could only get that in Japan. I don’t think you could get that in America. I mean, DAT was brand new, and the idea that a portable DAT machine, with a built-in microphone that was really good quality for what it was? That’s like, unheard of.

All of my tapes were recorded on that. There is also in this – so Tatsu and my duet was called Actual Music. And we put out a CD in ‘94 called Actual Music. I think it was ‘94. I’m sure there’s information about that online. It was a big seller, as you might imagine. I think we self-produced, well, we did self-produce it, and I think it was, maybe we did 100 CDs, I don’t know. Sold them at shows throughout the years. Still have at least 10 in the garage here in Austin, Texas.

And then the other thing in here is Dave, Tatsu and Elijah. So Tatsu and I played with a great singer, Elijah Levi, who was, he was a professional jazz singer, and he performed with, he was like, in one of the later iterations of the Ink Spots group. So I mean, he had, like, a voice, like, like, genuinely, like silk, not even, like, hypothetically. Not even, what’s the word I’m looking for? Yeah, he just had an amazing voice. And so somehow Tatsu connected with him, and then we had, kind of like a standard jazz quartet with Elijah. And we would gig. I mean, I gigged with Tatsu for years with Elijah, and then sometimes with this guitar player, Moto Makino, and then also with the piano player Ron Surace. And so this quartet with Elijah, we would play a lot. We would play at, you know, standard jazz clubs, like Pops for Champagne, Bop Shop.

GUIDING QUESTION – 4:13

How did you and Tatsu meet and come to play together?

This is an interesting thing about me and Tatsu, and there’s some really great recorded evidence sitting right here that kind of tells this story. So, when Tatsu and I met, we met through Lynn Book, who was a performance artist who did a ton of work at ESS and was very good friends with Lou Mallozzi, which is how I learned about ESS, and learned, you know, met Lou, was through Lynn book. And so Lynn and Tatsu had a duet, and then I saw them perform at the Blue Rider Theater on South Halsted. And that must have been like the early 90s, like maybe ‘91, ‘92 maybe, maybe ‘93. Because then I started from that performance when I first saw those two, I just thought Tatsu was amazing. So he was doing really cool stuff with Lynn, and at the time, I mean, he was working with a digital delay pedal, a Boss Digital Delay pedal, I believe it was. And he was just doing really cool shit with it. And it just made my brain so happy. And I was like, I would love to play with Tatsu.

So somehow we connected. And then I know the first times we started playing together were at the Cook County Theater Department, because I was either living there then or I was just working there all the time. The theater company that I was a part of was very active from ‘92 to ‘97, so I was basically there all the time. So I know that when we first played, I was like, why don’t you come to this space I have because we can make a lot of noise here. So I would play drum set, and then he would play bass, and it was basically drum, drum/bass, improvised, avant garde improvisation, music duet. And those were recorded. So those recordings are here, and maybe those are ‘84 so maybe that’s right around when I met him.

GUIDING QUESTION – 6:43

What made Tatsu’s playing unique? What was special or different about the music you made together?

So Tatsu, yeah, I mean, when Tatsu and I first played at the Cook County Theater Department, I just remember, well – I think seeing Tatsu with Lynn and hearing what he was doing layering sounds with his delay pedal. Like that definitely kind of expanded my mind of like…to me, the cool thing about what Tatsu was doing, and what I think I really connected with is, it wasn’t just…how is this going to sound? I don’t know. I’ll just say it. It wasn’t just avant garde. It wasn’t just weird, it wasn’t just free, it wasn’t just noisy or discordant or difficult. There were parts of that, and that’s great. Those are great tools. But it wasn’t just those things, and I think that’s what I connected with the most is – Maybe in that regard, his palette was really wide. And this is going back to the early 90s. So it was him, his bass, and a delay pedal, and doing really, just, cool things with it.

I would also say a huge, huge part of my kind of aesthetic at that point was what I was doing with the Cook County Theater Department. And that was, I think maybe very much like what Tatsu was doing on his bass, which was: we were making nonlinear theater. That was also, we were very clear and intentional about our idea that we specifically did not have goals for our audience. There was nothing that we were trying. They were not – We were not trying to give them something that they would say, “oh, okay, it’s this,” or “I’m going to walk away with this.” But, at the same time, it was kind of pedestrian and non sequitur, nonlinear, but also not discordant, and not necessarily, not only that. It had all sorts of layers to it.

GUIDING QUESTION – 9:10

How did you and Tatsu approach making Creative Music?

So I was bringing all of that stuff to when Tatsu and I got together. And yeah, I mean, it was just pushing me to like…I mean, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted, kind of what I was going for. So I would use traditional drum set, but then I would supplement it with a lot of instruments, and then I was also using a CD player. So I think what I wanted to do was, if I had money, I would have used a sampler, and I would have used maybe drum pads to trigger samples. But that would have only gotten me part of the way there, because I would have wanted to manipulate the samples at the same time, which I couldn’t have been doing necessarily based on, at least my financial capabilities. But also my technical capabilities at the time were not such that I could have, like, pads tied to a sampler that I would somehow be able to manipulate in real time while playing the drums. Like that was not in scope for me at the time for various reasons. But, what I had was a CD player. And I could press play, and I could press pause and I could press…So I would use sound effects CD, and this is all, this is all recorded, so you can experience it for yourself. But yeah, I mean, I would play a track on a CD, and I would just put it on repeat on a single track. So it would be like, I remember one of the tracks on the CD was ice clinking in a glass like, *clink, clink, clink*. So I would just like, put that on repeat, and then it would go, *clink, clink, clink, clink*. And it would just be like an atmosphere. And then I would play some drums and Tatsu would play some drip bass. And then the CD player I had, I could press fast forward, and it would just play it really fast, and it would repeat it so it would go *bluba, bluba*. So that was like another sound I could do. And then I could let it go, and it would go *bluba, bluba, bing*, you know? So kind of rudimentary manipulations of a CD player is what I was doing.

But also, at the same time, I was playing drum set. I remember just in rehearsal, like, oh, wait, I’m going to swap out this cymbal with this cymbal. So like my hi hat, which was, you know, like a standard hi hat, I remember putting a different cymbal on the top, like a super like, it was a thick cymbal that would just ring forever and ever. And when I played it normally, it would just, instead of going like a *tsch sound*, it would go like, *sweeping upward sound*. And I was like, that’s cool. I’m gonna keep that. So like, and it was just that kind of experience over and over again, of like, playing with Tatsu, expanding the palette of my drum set sound, working with the CD player. And then Tatsu, kind of obviously us just inspiring each other and building off of each other.

I think the other thing that Tatsu and I were really big on, and I think… so I studied composition, and he studied film. Very, very, you know, complementary fields of study. So we were both really big on beginning, middle, and end. And I mean, it’s so basic, but it really was grounding for us of, like: Beginning, middle and end. And we loved finding endings in particular, we loved finding endings. And also we just got to the point, and we’re still like this, because we did a recording, I think it was 22-23 for FPE records. I came into Chicago, and we did a recording. And still, just like, immediately, it was like, well, we’re gonna find an ending. And we barely, we didn’t, barely talk to each other. We just did it. So anyway, so that was another big part of us. And I think that was also how the work was grounded and kind of formed, which was maybe different than, at least to my mind, was different than what I was, how I was interpreting what I was hearing in the improvised music scene. So I would say that we were – my interpretation. We were parallel to the improvised jazz scene.

GUIDING QUESTION – 14:13

Do you remember when Jeff Parker came into the mix? How did your trio, Tricolor, come to form?

So I had known Jeff. So I’m pretty sure I met Jeff before Tatsu did. So when I came back from college and I wanted to have basically an avant garde jazz group to play my compositions, I started a group called the Ensemble of Non-thought. But yeah, we had this band, and I made really goofy charts. I didn’t barely know what the hell I was doing, but I got this pretty remarkable group of musicians to rehearse with me and play my charts. And it was okay. It was okay. I wouldn’t say it was freaking great. The musicians were great, but the charts were okay. But I connected with Jeff, and so I just stayed friendly with Jeff.

So I might have known Jeff for a couple of years before I started working with Tatsu, but I do know that I’m, 85% maybe even 95% certain that I was like, I think I was the one who said, “Hey, let’s get Jeff and me and Tatsu together.” Because they’re both such fascinating musicians, and I’m lucky enough to be connected to both of them and playing with them in various scenarios. But boy, it seems like it’d be really powerful if the three of us could come together. And I do also distinctly remember that I did come up with the name Tricolor. And I also distinctly remember asking both of them, “Would you be okay if we called this group tricolor?”

Because I’m the white guy, so I need to ask y’all if you’re okay with this. So that, that was way back in the day. I don’t know when we did that. That was a while ago, ‘95 maybe ‘96.

But yeah, so Tricolor was really great. And the thing, the thing that I loved about Tricolor, and I think Jeff’s approach to Tricolor, we’d have to ask Jeff for sure, but my interpretation of his approach was: Jeff would bring his – he had two, at least one, if not two, Moog pedals. Moogerfooger, I think, was one of them, and maybe even had another one. I’m not sure I know. He had a Moogerfooger, which I think is a filtering pedal, and then he had a digital delay. And I remember Jeff for the Tricolor gigs would use those a lot. And I think my interpretation was, Tricolor was his opportunity to really dig into those, or to use those in ways maybe he wasn’t using them in other settings.

More from Dave Pavkovic:

Dave Pavkovic currently perform under the moniker Gentlebutterfly, and released a vinyl EP in 2024. You can follow his socials at the links below.

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gentlebutterflymusic/
• Bandcamp: https://gentlebutterfly.bandcamp.com/album/filmic-ep

Recordings Referenced:

1. Actual Music (1996): Tatsu Aoki and David Pavkovic
   Recorded 1994-1995 at The Cook County Theater Department, 2255 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago IL.
2. Tricolor: Mirth +Feckless (1999): Jeff Parker, Tatsu Aoki, David Pavkovic
   Recorded at Sparrow Sound Design and Truckstop Record Studio
   Info on Discogs.com
3. Tricolor: Nonparfticipant + Milk (2001): Jeff Parker, Tatsu Aoki, David Pavkovic
   Recorded Live on March 7, 2001 at the Hothouse on Balbo in Chicago
   Info on Discogs.com
4. Finally Elijah (1998): Elijah Levi, Tatsu Aoki, Moto Mokino, David Pavkovic, Tim Odell
   Info on Discogs.com
5. Actual Music, Actual Music Now (2021)