#outofyourhead

A few years ago, in Baltimore, bassist Adam Hopkins and guitarist Matt Frazao began an improvisational collective known as Out of Your Head. Having found a conducive home in Baltimore's The Windup Space, that series has been going strong for many years, with new members joining the collective.

When Hopkins moved to Brooklyn, he started another branch of the series, which is returning tonight at its temporary home, Douglass Street Music Collective. Douglass St, which in recent years has been an important venue for the scene, will soon shut its doors, so aside from witnessing the return of OOYH, you ought to go experience DSMC before it's too late. 

I caught up with Hopkins via email and he gives a nice history of the series as well as serving up some notable anecdotes about OOYH.

Can you talk about the origins of OOYH in Baltimore? Why did you and Matt decide to create such a series?

Matt and I kind of came up with a very similar idea at the same time. We were sitting in the Yacht Club in Baltimore, which was a bar and pretty mediocre restaurant right across from Peabody, where we both went to school. We sat in the Yacht Club a lot in 2008, come to think of it. Anyway, we were talking about how we had been playing in Baltimore for a few years, and were part of all of these different scenes of really great musicians, but none of those people were playing together. A lot of these amazing musicians we were playing with didn't actually know each other, even though musically Baltimore is a fairly small city. 

So we got this idea to put people together from different scenes who had never played together before, and see what happened. OOYH was born out of that pretty simple idea. The original concept was that every week it was a new one-time-only band of people who had never played music together. OOYH Baltimore has been going strong for 5 years now, so the concept of a full band made up of people who had never played together wasn't completely sustainable. Despite the original concept not being fully possible at this point OOYH Baltimore continues to be a breeding ground for some of the best improvised music in town. A lot of current Baltimore bands were born out of a one-off OOYH, which is pretty cool. 

What were the effects for the improvised music scene in Baltimore once OoYH began to pick up steam?

People started playing music together, both inside and outside of OOYH. People started making bands and writing music. We would all hang out. OOYH would happen every Tuesday night at the Windup Space, and when it ended at midnight we'd all go hang at a bar down the street. We were just into being around each other. It was a musical community, and that is the best possible outcome that we could have asked for. People making friends and playing music together. It was (and continues to be) a really awesome thing. You also can't talk about OOYH without mentioning Russell de O'Campo at the Windup Space. He gave us our first date for Out of Your Head in March 2009, and he's been supporting the series ever since. It is so rare (especially in NY, but in Baltimore too, or anywhere really) to have a bar/venue owner who supports creative music in the way that Russell does. We had nights early on where OOYH played to a crowd of 3-4 people, and he stuck with us and allowed the series to grow. Any other venue guy would say "I made $15 tonight, we're going to make Tuesday night dart night. Sorry." Russell is the man, and he's been a very close friend since we started OOYH in 2009. OOYH have ended a long time ago if not for his continued support.

When you moved to Brooklyn, did you know that a chapter was going to open here? 

Yes, definitely. I had that in my mind, and had talked to Matt about it before I moved. The idea was for OOYH to start in Brooklyn, and then we'd cross-breed the series', sending musicians from NY to Baltimore to play and vice versa. It happened a couple of times and it was really great, but I had a hard time keeping the series running in NY. Nothing to do with the musicians--all of the musicians played and supported and it was a great scene. But we didn't have someone like Russell here in NY, so I didn't have the support necessary to keep the series running at a venue. It seemed like a great idea--instead of just focusing on musicians playing together in one city, why not introduce people in Baltimore to people in NY and see what came out of that as well? I still have hopes of it getting there.

  Another good friend and great drummer named Devin Drobka was living in NY when OOYH BK was happening. When he moved back to Milwaukee he started an offshoot of the series called Unrehearsed MKE, which is apparently going really well. I'd love to collaborate with that series at some point as well. I think there's a lot of potential for mixing all of these series up. We'll see...

How have the two series been different, if at all?

Well, they were actually booked differently from the beginning, and that was a result of instantly having a ton of people in NY interested in the series, and not enough events to have them all participate. OOYH Bmore happened every single week, so each Tuesday night was two sets of the same band. It was really awesome to hear the change in a band after the set break, when they got to hang out and talk for a minute, then come back and play again with the same group of people.

When I started it in Brooklyn I could only get someone to agree to let me have the series every other week, and I had twice as many people interested as in Baltimore. So I had to do two sets per night with different bands. They didn't get a second set to hear how the music developed, so it was a very different experience. I think both series' served the same purpose and addressed the same need in each city. They just had to be curated a little bit differently for that reason. I also enlisted a co-curator for every cycle in NY, because it was too much control for me to do all the booking myself. I wanted someone who would offer an opposed perspective when it was booked. Matt and I had that for each other when we booked together in Baltimore, so I wanted to keep that when I did the booking here. Jesse Stacken, Dustin Carlson, and Josh Sinton all helped me co-curate a cycle. That being said, I did this round on my own just because I had to get it done quickly. 

Do you have any notable or humorous stories from either Baltimore or Brooklyn's OOYH?

Ha, I do! And Matt still holds this one against me. This was in August of 2009, and the first (and one of very few) OOYH's that I ever missed in Baltimore. There was a guy (not to be named here) traveling through Baltimore from Chicago and wanted to participate in the series. I checked out some of his music--he was an improviser, and seemed cool when we spoke--so I booked him on the series with some great Baltimore musicians for the night. The guy apparently showed up with a ton of gear, and a posse of 4-5 musicians who all thought they could play the series as well. We were very clear from the beginning that OOYH was NOT a jam session--it was a curated event. A lot of thought went into putting the bands together, so it wasn't really an open "jam" environment. Anyway, the set started and the dude was playing ridiculously loud and not listening to anything else going on. His friends started sneaking up on stage and grabbing instruments, and it was apparently a disaster. Matt and the other Bmore musicians (I believe it was Nathan Ellman-Bell and Jon Birkholz) walked off stage mid-set. After the Chicago guys were done Matt canceled the second set because it was so terrible. I got an email the next day telling me all of this. I think I still owe Matt a beer for putting him through it...

Here is the schedule for the remaining OOYH's at DSMC:

JULY 14

SET ONE (9:00pm) Mariel Berger--accordion/piano Joanna Mattrey--viola Nathan Ellman-Bell--drums/percussion SET TWO (10:00pm) Anna Webber--reeds Eric Trudel--reeds Carlo Costa--drums Flin van Hemmen--drums SET THREE (11:00pm) Ben Syversen--trumpet Brian Drye--trombone Dave Miller--guitar Chris Welcome--guitar Devin Gray--drums

JULY 28

SET ONE (9:00pm) Ed Rosenberg--tenor sax Kirk Knuffke--cornet Patricia Franceschy--vibes SET TWO (10:00pm) Jesse Stacken--piano/nord Sebastien Ammann--nord/piano Nico Soffiato--guitar Jonathan Goldberger--guitar Nico Dann--drums SET THREE (11:00pm) Josh Sinton--reeds Patrick Breiner--reeds Drew Williams--reeds Rick Parker--trombone Achilles Kallergis--guitar

AUGUST 24