1X1
John Shiurba stuck
a fork in the strings of his first guitar and set off on a journey
that's taken him from punk and Eskimo to Ebola Soup, Spezza Rotto,
and his current obsession, 5X5.
By J.H. Tompkins
JIMI HENDRIX ASKED , "Have you ever been experienced?"
on 1967's "Are You Experienced," and all I had to offer
in return was, "Search me." Thirty-seven years later,
I'm still finding out. –I secretly considered this while sitting
in a north Oakland house talking with guitarist-composer-Bay
Guardian lifer John Shiurba about his band Spezza Rotto, formed
in 1998 with Eli Cruz, Tom Scandura, and Morgan Guberman. I smiled
to myself when Shiurba, helping me locate Spezza Rotto on the sometimes
fiercely contested map of the local creative music scene,
explained that the band isn't "a commercial project,"
as he phrased it.
The truth is, Shiurba's commercial instincts are wanting. Earlier
that day he described his first guitar. "I was about 11, and
really excited," he said. "About the first thing I did
was put a fork in the strings to see what it would sound like. My
mother said I probably shouldn't do that. I don't think either of
us knew what to expect." Along those same lines, he laughed
when referring to his former band Ebola Soup as the most hated group
on earth. "I wanted to do a commercial project," he said
with a slight grin. "It just came out funny."
Things come out funny in Spezza Rotto, too – at least it seemed
so to me. "The name means 'completely broken' in Italian,"
he explained, and I wasn't surprised a bit.
John Shiurba was a founding member of the band Eskimo, which was
born on the UC Berkeley campus and battle-tested on Sproul Plaza
before the curious, the jaded, the disinterested, and the insane.
Eskimo displayed the kind of off-kilter tendencies that bring a
band life (exploration and growth) and death (unfamiliar sounds
kill commercial prospects). Eskimo moved from Sproul to house parties
to clubs. The band got better and its vision more complex ("The
Beefheart thing just came out," Shiurba told me recently. "Besides,
when you have a marimba and a trombone, you can't really do anything
straight"). Eskimo waxed and waned during the early '90s, reformed
in 1996 when Les Claypool's Prawn Song label released its Further
Adventures of Der Shrimpkin, and then disbanded for good. As
Shiurba's biochemistry degree gathered dust, his ambitions and vision
grew, and he moved deeper into music's margins, collaborating with
artists like Myles Boisen, Gino Robair, Dan Plonsey, Scott Rosenberg,
and Matt Ingalls, joining the Molecules, and cofounding Ebola Soup.
He's played at out-of-town festivals and worked with prominent figures
like Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith, and Eugene Chadbourne. In 1998
he formed a record label, Limited Sedition (see www.sfo.com/~shiurba),
and today, along with Spezza Rotto, he leads John Shiurba's 5x5,
is active in the improv scene, and is a musician with the
Merce Cunningham Dance Company.
The edgy assortment of musicians and malcontents who use traditional
instruments; instruments of destruction; objects; toys; attachments;
high, low, and DIY technology; and what-have-you to create and control
sound is often shoveled together under the inscrutable rubric "creative
music." The name says nothing, but exposure to artists like
Shiurba allows the listener to move beyond force-fed definitions
of music, to hear unfamiliar music, to hear familiar music
in new ways, and to develop a new context for all sound – a
violin string faintly brushed, a cricket's chirp, a car horn, a
squall of feedback, the infinite possibilities lurking in a the
everyday cacophony. Relatively few people explore this world, and
my own exposure was largely a matter of chance, in particular a
long-standing work friendship with Shiurba, who had the patience
to open doors, push me through them, and explain what was going
on once I got there.
I apologize to those who find conflict of interest in an article
I have written about a coworker. The truth is that it was through
Shiurba that I came to know his part of this scene – he put
up with many more phone calls and hours of conversation than I would
have had the temerity to impose on a stranger. To my apology I'll
add this: I take pains not to privilege Shiurba's talents above
those of other musicians -- he is one of a number who contribute
to the scene's health and well-being. If he receives significant
financial gain from the exposure he receives, it will be something
of a milestone for the undercapitalized creative music community.
And, if this leaves you still unsatisfied, boycott all Shiurba-related
events from now on. But by all means, make sure you attend the performances
of the many other musicians who perform regularly – you won't
regret it.
Shiurba was weaned on first-generation punk rock, and his earliest
bands played his favorite songs in Sacramento living rooms in the
early '80s. "When I was 15, I knew in my core that the entire
world needed to hear the Clash," he said. He was also a fan
of Captain Beefheart (a sign of the future – there's no question
where his allegiance lies today). The fact is that, and I mean this
in the best possible way, Shiurba's perspective on normality is
not particularly normal.
"We write the lyrics in English, then we go to the Altavista
site and get them translated into Italian – it's pretty funny,"
he said, explaining the concept of Spezza Rotto. It's also amusing
to feed the Italian back into the translator and see what happens
then. I wrote 10 very different sentences with the name of the band
and its guitarist. No matter what I tried, he came out with handle
"Broken John."
Shiurba is a familiar face in the creative music scene, which doesn't
need hype as much as it needs an accurate exposition of the delights
within. Big-time pop is pre-scripted, right down to behavior and
fashion. Small-time pop is often worse – like vacant real estate
in the Financial District. Meanwhile, the creative music scene is
bursting with unplanned surprises and cosmic weirdness, and it's
peopled by bohemians, laptop virtuosos, inventors with homemade
instruments, and deviant philosophers exploring scary pathologies.
I've floated around the edges of this world for years, as a music
editor trying to keep up with things, for fun, and friends. What
I discovered is that the Bay Area creative music scene isn't much
different from any music scene anywhere: good nights, good clubs,
good artists, good fans – and their opposite numbers as well.
The crucial exception is that creative music in its many guises,
exists beyond the crushing grip of a popular culture that only comes
alive in the marketplace. Practically speaking, it means an improv
musician is free to mic a saxophone, throw it out a 10-story window,
and beat on a snare drum when it hits the ground – making a
recording of it that can be sold on the Internet. The flip side
comes – or better put, doesn't come – with the audience.
It's not much of an exaggeration to say that the musicians themselves
are the fan base – for which they blame the media, the music,
the audience, or (they're good at this) each other. The creative
music posse boasts internecine feuding that's almost as bad as the
S.F. poetry war of the '80s, which cooled out only after a posse
of thugged-out verseniks beat down a Language poet on a corner in
well-heeled Noe Valley.
My interest in what Shiurba has to say grows in direct relation
to the rate at which the world is sliding into the grip of fear
and violence. As much as I love popular culture, I resent its unyielding
grip. The problem is evident in my musical taste – I'm
a groove addict, a prisoner of musical certainty. I'm so far gone
that I don't want to be free. Shiurba's projects – the ever
evolving 5x5 (five musicians performing five of his compositions),
Spezza Rotto, Ebola Soup, the once freewheeling Eskimo – in
the main bear only the weight he places upon them. Popular
culture – so pervasive that it is, for all practical purposes,
American culture – is burdened by the lies, excuses, and rationalizations
of the forces it serves. There are days when a person just wants
to get away.
Like that day I visited Shiurba, for instance. He played a Spezza
recording, which filled the room with sinewy instrumental melodies
so subtly off-center that the slight tension in the music was almost
entirely unfelt. The tempo was slow, but the music was neither quiet
nor laid-back. Dispassionate guitar figures moved deliberately into
the room and then paused, dangling like so many snakes from a damp,
moss-covered tree. I was tense and expectant, as if an untrustworthy
acquaintance was about to stop by. Down the block a siren wailed
as an OPD cruiser barreled through the neighborhood. Inside, over
music that had thickened and assumed an aggressive edge, Shiurba
was talking, and then suddenly the oncoming wail created an unnerving
din, from which a confounding voice emerged. It gyrated like a downed
power line, bounding, a quick surge as traces of Smokey Robinson,
of Yma Sumac's four-octave Hollywood heaven, and of a blues for
the institutionalized, which were anchored by an oddly familiar
operatic parody that has long flourished on middle school playgrounds.
Shiurba delivered carefully considered insights and observations
about music, popular culture, and art in the cultural margins with
understatement and modesty. He emphasized that his opinions were
his own, and as we talked, we both hoped, I think, that he would
be able stir in me some measure of his passion for the surprises,
challenges, possibilities, and rewards of the music that inspires
him.
"When I was 20," Shiurba said, "I thought, 'This
is great. I'm going to be a musician, and someone's going to put
out my records.' I didn't necessarily think I'd make a living off
it, but I had a different expectation than I have now." These
days Shiurba is busy with 5x5. "I came to a point two years
ago," he said, "where I felt like pure improv wasn't what
I wanted to do. I got sick of the concept of Sunday night at Acme.
I wanted make my music go somewhere, to push it in a direction,
to put a name on something so people can remember it." He reached
for a pile of paper and removed the scores he'd written, explaining
the notation and offering thoughts on leading a group.
The room had darkened as the day slid toward evening, and Shiurba's
head was silhouetted by the greenish glow of an iBook directly behind
him. The thin white computer is a recording studio, a printing press,
a publicity tool, and communications HQ, the mix of media that,
for many of us, defines the moment. Two stacks of the numbered albums
he's released on Limited Sedition, a microlabel made for the times
– Morgan Guberman's Passador-Jomel (11 tracks, 61 minutes,
79 copies) and Myles Boisen and friends' New Millenium Orchestra
(35 tracks, 286 minutes, 63 copies) – sat on the table to his
left. They are carefully crafted, possessing a quiet dignity missing
from their mass-produced counterparts.
"For me, it's definitely about the music," he said quietly.
"But it's part of a scene, so it's about the people, too. We're
all in a position where we have to be together, where we play music
and relate to each other. What I get out of it has something to
do with the humanness of it all."
John Shiurba plays June 15, 8:15 p.m., Acme Observatory
at Jazz House, 3192 Adeline, Berk. Donations accepted. (510) 649-8799.
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