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Artist Interviews
Q&A: Led Bib
By CMU Editorial | Published on Tuesday 8 September 2009
Formed in 2003 by drummer/composer Mark Holub, Led Bib have frequently been described as “the future of British jazz” in recent years. Their third album, ‘Sensible Shoes’, released earlier this year on Cuneiform Records, brought them to wider attention when it picked up a Mercury Prize nomination. You can find out how they fare when the overall winner is announced tonight, and then catch them live all over the country between now and the end of the year. We spoke to Mark Holub to ask our Same Six Questions.
Q1 How did you start out making music?
I originally started playing the clarinet as a child in school, mainly because I wanted to play the saxophone and the school music teacher thought I should do clarinet because when I blew through the sax it made no sound. It wasn’t until I was about 12 or 13 that I found the drums and then I started thinking about being a musician.
Q2 What inspired your latest album?
In some ways, our last album! We did a limited edition live CD and it sort of woke me up to the difference between our previous studio albums and our live sound, so I wanted to create something which had the best of both. Aside from that though, the album is inspired by life and everything that contains, from sitting next to a drunk man on the Victoria Line to a beautiful sunset.
Q3 What process do you go through in creating a track?
Usually I have something in my head, a melody, a groove, a concept and I sit and work at it on the piano. I then score it out for everybody and bring it to rehearsal. When everybody starts playing it they add their own colours to it, which always makes the track much more than I could have imagined while I was writing it.
Q4 Which artists influence your work?
Loads, it’s almost too hard to answer. A start would be John Zorn, Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, though there’d be many more too. But probably more than anyone else, for Led Bib, possibly strangely, I am influenced by the other guys in the band. I suppose that for me the most exciting thing about them is they all bring their own influences, be that Donny Hathaway or Kraftwerk, and we somehow mould that together into a coherent sound. Led Bib is all five of us, it’s not a bandleader and four musicians.
Q5 What would you say to someone experiencing your music for the first time?
Approach it with an open mind! Listening to music you aren’t used to can be challenging, but it’s about exposure, you just need to give it a chance. Led Bib is an exciting and fun group, give us a try… you will like it (we hope)!
Q6 What are your ambitions for your latest album, and for the future?
Well, I suppose a Mercury Prize nomination would have been a good ambition, but we’ve got that! A knighthood, perhaps? In all seriousness, just having one more person listening to us and enjoying it is a pretty good achievement for me. As for the future, well, we will be touring a lot over the last bit of 2009, working on new music and hopefully recording stuff sometime in the not too distant future.
MORE>> www.ledbib.com
