In the Eclectic World of Mark de Clive-Lowe

Written by Alessandro Gambaro on Tuesday, 30 June 2009 20:31

It is difficult nowadays to find music artists that are eclectic, talented and focused at the same time. It became clear that this is exactly the kind of artist Mark de Clive-Lowe is after I interviewed him recently in Venice Beach. The New Zealand producer, composer, classically trained pianist and DJ just relocated to sunny Los Angeles after spending 10 years honing his skills in the rainy but ingenious London music scene. Ready to imprint his sound on the entertainment capital of the world, Mark speaks to Sofisticati first about his transitions both professionally and geographically.

ALESSANDRO GAMBARO: You have a strong jazz background and you started to play an instrument very early. What instrument did you learn first?

MARK de Clive-Lowe: I learn piano from age 4, my dad decided that all his kids would have played music, he never had the chance so that was his revenge against his father.

AG: Who was the person in your family that influenced you the most?

MdCL: >My dad, he was so strict and I was scared of him so I practiced; but my older brother, he played piano and he got me into jazz, he had a real love for it. We kind of played together when I was a little kid trying to reaching up to the keys, but we never played together [professionally]. He got me a gig with a band that he used to play for. He does not play anymore, he had the skills but he thought he did not have the personality or the attitude.

AG: Have your family always supported you?

MdCL: Pretty much. When I was 14 I came home from school one, we had someone visiting from a music school in the States and I said to my parents, when I finish school I am going to this music school in the States. My dad kind of laughed at me, he did not take me seriously at all. After attending Berklee College of Music I went back to NZ and I started playing some gigs. I had my own groups and I was still living at home. When I got up in the morning I'd go to the kitchen and my mom would have already gone through the newspaper and she would have circled the job vacancies that would be appropriate for me and left it on the kitchen table. That was kind of funny!
When I started recording and getting some press, it was somthing that my parents could see tangibly and they started to accept it. Parents are always worried about their kids. Even now when we talk they ask me: “Are you making money?”
I am definitely in a good relationship with them and they see now that this is what I do, They are not the biggest fans of what I do because my dad is really old school. When I used to play acoustic jazz, he liked that, but even then after a gig I remember him saying, "why do you have to have the drum solo?."

AG: What kind of music does your dad like?

MdCL: Leonard Bernstein, Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, he likes old school big bands. I grew up on a lot of that and I like that. One time I did a solo piano concert and he LOVED that. And when I did my first solo record with programming, drum machine and samples (Six Degrees) my dad was like, “Where is the melody?”

AG: I read that you studied in Boston at Berklee College of Music. How do you remember that experience?

MdCL: It was cool. I wanted to be a straight head jazz musician, I grew up thinking that I wanted to play with Branford Marsalis, so Berklee College was part of that process: go to the States, go to a great music school, be around with great musicians. I remember I used to love jamming after school, we used to jam all night. My private piano teacher was great, he was friend with Bill Evans, Bob Powell, he taught Keith Jarrett but I could not really get with the curriculum, education…I dropped out basically. Over there I met this piano player from Panama named Danilo Perez, he plays with the Wayne Shorter Quartet now and he really got me into Afro-Cuban music. Just to meet him and have that connection was really nice too.
MdCL at Cargo

AG: You also travelled around the world for one year just to discover new music. What kind of music or artists did you discover during that long trip?

MdCL: That year actually started because I was chasing a girl. I was dating this girl in NZ and she was going to England for 1 year so I said to her: “If you are going away for 1 year, I am going to travel for a year too.” So I got this travel scholarship grant to basically chase music and explore, and I made sure to go to London as many time as possible. She left for London and by the time I left we had basically broke up.
On the way there I went to Saint Fran, I have friends in San Fran. Then I spent some time in Havana (Cuba), that was amazing for me: the culture of richness and hearing music all the time. Every Wednesday there was a place called Uniac playing rumba, with 4-500 people. I got to hang out with Chucho Valdes and just the vibe of the place was amazing. I did not speak any Spanish and I remember as I was landing the person besides me was teaching me how to count to ten, how to ask for a beer; that was all I knew basically. It was kind of cool to be in a place so alien, so different. Then I went to London in the middle of winter and I spent 3 months living on the floor not in a good neighbourhood, asking myself why am I here. The first person I hook up with was this techno Dj name Dave Angel. I met him 4-5 years earlier in NZ and he told me whenever you are in London give me a call. You know people say it but don’t quite mean it. Well we talked about it later on and he did not remember me at all. So when I got to his studio it all kind came back to him and we made this mad techno-jazz track. I caught up with a friend of mine a sax jazz player from NZ, Nathan Haines, he was working for MetalHeadz, Goldie’s label.

AG: You were born in Auckland NZ, after the 1 year trip you moved to London and now you moved to LA. What made you move first to London? and then to LA?

MdCL: I am going with the flow. After meeting a few people, the Metalheadz people, then in London I met the community of people that literally changed my life: The Bugz in the Attic, 4Hero and basically when I met them we immediately started making music together and what we were making it was a kind of new music for me. I moved to London because of my need to be in the music. Obviously it had nothing to do with English weather, food, the English humor, it was just about the music. And it has been for 10 years and never in my life had I thought I would live in London. It was a great experience because I was touring Europe every weekend but at the end of that decade I kind of had the feeling that my time there was done. Also I remember when I first went to London, Bjork had just left London and I remember reading an interview and they asked her: “why did you leave London when you did?” and she answered: “I left before the energy turned bad”; and that always stayed in my head. It was time to leave for me and I felt like the next place to go was the States. After a decade in UK I feel I am ready as a producer to bring something to the States, this is something I wanted to try.

AG: Why did you move to LA and not to NYC?

MdCL: Apart from the weather? In New York you have a infinite amount of culture not so much industry, in LA there is infinite amount of industry not a lot culture. I feel really confident and secure about what I do now and how I do it and what I want to do. I want to create a culture, a movement, facilitate change and also make some money as well. This is the kind of city where diligence and talent, the combination of two can really pay off…I hope!

AG: What can you say about the music scene in London? And in LA?

MdCL: London for me musically speaking is the ultimate melting pot on the planet. It’s the only city that has come with an entirely new form of modern music: jungle and drum & bass especially. I grew up on a lot of Native Tongues Hip-Hop and even New Jack swing and then when I turned to rave and acid I got kind of turned off in club music. Then when I heard jungle I thought: What is this?!? It was everything I could've imagined. And that turned me back into club music and that was a totally English form. Then what happened after Jungle and Drum & Bass? You could not have had Timbaland, Missy, you would not have even had the Neptunes. The all contempory pop music and black music culture is influenced by the UK. If you ask Timbaland, he would tell you. If you check the end of the Roots' album, “Things Fall Apart”, Questlove would tell you.
And then what I saw happening in my time in London with the all West London Side scene, with people like Bugz in the Attic and 4Hero, all that stuff, subtley affected American music as well. Once in while somebody comes along and smashes all the rules and constraints of American music and then that’s the new rule you have to break. Here it has to be done in a certain way instead in UK none cares: you got number one tunes like Dizzee Rascal and Wiley produced by kids on a Playstation basically. It is one of those places where underground music can be chart breaking and once it is there starts influencing, definitely special in UK. However at the same time we never had the industry that you have here, that is the key difference.
Growing up most of my favourite music was American, so there is no diss on anything American, anything that I was making in UK and lots of my friends were making that was hugely influenced by American music, but I think the fact that we were not in America, meant that we could take the influences and reinterpret them in a way that we wanted to. I think having the objectivity of being away really counted for a lot.
Mark de Clive-Lowe

AG: What inspires you the most when you have to select a record?

MdCL: Nothing! I put a record on. I just like what I want to hear. Actually for me Djing is way down on the list; I enjoy sharing music, I prefer to play, I love being in the studio, I grew up playing. Also there are Dj's DJs. You can watch Cut Chemist or J Rocc put records together and that's something else. But they're never going to play an instrument like I do and I am never going to DJ like they do, which is fine. To me djing is what I want to hear and nothing else.
I remember on gig in LA and somebody asked me if I had anything old school Hip-Hop and I said No. I am here for two hours and I am going to do what I want to do. After that you can ask to the next one [to play] whatever you want.

The classic line is, "Can you play something I can dance to?" Do you remember that Blaze joint called “My Beat”? The main hook is "can you dance to my beat." I am in a club in NZ in 1990 and my friend was spinning that particular tune and one girl asked him if could play something she could dance to. He answered her "can you dance to my beat?"

AG: What are the records/artists that have influenced your sound?

MdCL: I think as conceptual artist, Miles Davis, the way he changed the rules everytime he put out a record. He always evolved, he was a catalyst: he could put together musicians and together with him they made something that no one else could have made. You put the same musicians without Miles, they could not have made that record. He was kind of the prototypical producer as well. There are producers but as far as what a producer's role is to me, he really nailed that.
I am huge Prince fan, I love all the obvious Black music artists, I love a lot of African music, Cuban music, I am huge brazilian music fan like Cesar Mariano, the kinda more crazy stuff. Growing up as a piano player Herbie Hancock was always the best one, George Duke, The Mizell Brothers.

AG: What are the artists that you admire the most at this moment?

MdCL: My favourite from recent years would be Dilla, D’Angelo, Tip. That’s about it.

AG: You just finished a long world tour, what are the cities that you enjoyed the most? Musically? Vibe? People?

MdCL: There are a lot of special places. Japan is always special for me to play, I have seen crowd sing along to every track for all night when people in London don’t even know the lyrics. I always enjoy playing in Atlanta, DC is a lot of fun, New York, the party I did in LA at the Vanguard in the lounge I had a great time. I guess I am lucky because when I am book somewhere the promoters know what I am about and they build up their own audience. Also a couple of months ago at the Cannes film festival, that was a crowd that knew nothing about music, purely a fashion and industry crowd. By the end of the evening we had them rocking, those are fun gigs too. If you can rock a crowd that has no point of reference it’s something special too.

AG: Do you have any new projects going on? New album? Collaborations?

MdCL: I am just working on a album with a rapper name Rep Life, he is from Ohio but he lives in Oakland. He is one of my favourite new rappers, I did an album for him and it should be out later this year, maybe next year. I produced the album, "Tunnelvision," for the trumpet player, Rob van de Wouw. I got to make the jazz album that I always wanted to make. I would not make it for myself either, this guy is a jazz trumpet player and he wanted me to produce his record, so I basically brought my sound to him and this has all my sound all over it. Here it is the link to the making of the album Tunnelvision that is going to be released October 27th 2009, also there will be a launching party at Paradiso in Amsterdan .
I am a big Eddie Henderson fan so I wanted to make a Eddie Henderson album mixed with my stuff and that’s what we did. I was very happy with that.
There is some stuff coming out with Lady Alma, Jody Watley (I remixed a joint called Midnight Lounge, it’s on the record she just put out), Sy Smith, Rahsaan Peterson and Leon Ware. That’s the great thing in this country and in this city especially, there is so much amazing talent here and I am kind of fortunate and if I reach out to them they kind of know what I do in kind of shape or form. There are a lot of American artists that become pigeon-hold and your average producer sounds like an average American producer. So if someone else comes and asks them, "do you want to smash out the box and do something completely different and dope?" They are likely say yes. I kind of reach out to a lot of people in this basis. There is a great singer named Laurnea who moved here from Atlanta, Omar produced her last record actually, and she is here really hungry to do some stuff. For instance for the show at the Vanguard, Rahsaan came along, Jill Scott came down, and I see these connections build up.
It’s an interesting thing [that developed] from going to Venice, I am talking about going in August to record an album with an Italian musician, I am also planning on running a festival in December, so there is a lot of connections from just being there.

AG: Where can Sofisticati readers come to listen to you spin?

MdCL:
    Jul 18 - MdCL Live in Brooklyn, New York
    Jul 19 - MdCL Live feat Lady Alma, Philadelphia
    Jul 20 - McCL DJ Set @ Silk130, Philadelphia
    Aug 13 – McDL Live with Soweto Kinch @ Café Moody, Haugesund (Norway)
    Aug 14 – McDL Live with Soweto Kinch + Special Guest @ Café Moody, Haugesund (Norway)
    Aug 15 – McDL Live with Vanessa Freeman @ Café Moody, Haugesund (Norway)

AG: Top 5 current records?

MdCL:
    1    Yameen feat Lady Alma - Light of Love (MdCL remix)
    2    Root Soul feat Leon King - Feeling Good
    3    Sun Singleton - Ready (Version 3 remix)
    4    Can-Q Tip - Man Woman Boogie (Phlash edit)
    5    Reel People feat Omar - Bike Love (Souled remix)

AG Classic Top 5?

MdCL:
    1    J Dilla - Welcome to Detroit
    2    Miles Davis - Live Evil
    3    Shuggie Otis - Inspiration Information
    4    Ahmad Jamal - The Awakening
    5    Don Blackman - Don Blackman

    www.mashibeats.blogspot.com
    www.myspace.com/markdeclivelowe
    www.twitter.com/mashibeats
    www.markdeclivelowe.net

AG Thank you so much Mark!

MdCL: You are welcome.

Mark HeadShot