Rizorkestra gonna life the life he sings about in his songs

RIZORKESTRA by JENNIE WARREN

W.C. Handy called it “the weirdest music I ever heard,” and if that isn’t the first thing ever thought about the birth of 20th-century pop music, it may still be the most honorable—that gut reaction to the blues and country from Nick Tosches’s American forest primeval, which bulged and twisted into songs for the whole next century; and which now find new care in the hands of Rizorkestra, the one-man blues-kazoo band. He sets up almost the same rig as Dr. Ross the Harmonica Boss (kick drum, high-hat, and guitar . . . but kazoo and not harmonica) and pulls an hour of music out from a hundred years.

He once covered Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile” by (he says) bathing it in acid ‘til only the skeleton was left, and he discovered that inside was a simple Delta blues. And that, he says, is the “most new” song in his repertoire. The rest is the kind of sing-for-supper catalog musicians would have needed 80 years ago, jazz (Mingus and Monk, remembered from Riz’s vibraphone days in hot combo configuration) and gospel and blues and Riz’s own improvisations (“Maybe singing about somebody while I’m looking into the audience!” he says) tipping in and out of each other. Those old songs are air-tight, he says—“Like a fuckin’ brick house! You can do anything you want with the tune and it’s as strong as ever.”

He’s sort of a Richard Bishop character in reverse, a jazz-trained musician from Georgia who found Civil War-era music through Trent Reznor’s dad (“I’ve a had a surreal life, man,” he says) and spent years exploring traditional musics of the world. He has a nice story about coming to his favorite oud (which he describes as the grandmother of the guitar), and he spent years writing music in a disconnected cabin in the Angeles forest. And then he came up with the idea to tiptoe back after ancient American music. Now he describes himself as an amateur musicologist—with the kind of determined enthusiasm that must have brought Harry Smith’s house parties to life—and he zigzags from the highlights of his lost one-man-band tradition to the democratic virtues of the kazoo (Red McKenzie and his Mound City Blue Blowers—the million-selling kazoo kings of 1924!) to the obscured but unflagging power of certain bedrock songs. He can still, he says, get a room of people singing “This Little Light of Mine.”

“Everybody knows,” he says. “Those songs are from another era for damn sure, but little punker kids—they know that shit! People grow up in a musical environment—their uncle plays folk guitar or something—and they might look like they never go near that kind of music, but it’s in their heritage. People do know.”

Riz is not after nostalgia, he says. Instead, it’s immediacy, which is the same spirit his oldest songs were written in—persistors and resistors from the last years before radio erased the regional accent.

“It’s a young country,” he says. “The tradition is essentially non-tradition. If we went back 150 years and I’m a musician and you’re a journalist, there’d be a German guy in my band playing an accordion because that’s what he brought with him, and someone from Mexico, and another guy from New Orleans. We’re all out of our traditional context here in the new world, and we have each other to reach out to, so when we’re making music, we bring what we have. The beauty of being American is that we’re bastards, and we can take whatever we want and include it. That’s really the definition of the free world. That’s the American deal.”

RIZORKESTRA PLAYS WITH JOEL EASTON THE PIKE | 1836 E FOURTH ST | LONG BEACH 90804 | 562.437.4453 | PIKELONGBEACH.COM | FRI 9PM | FREE | 21+