Interview with Portico Quartet

Portico Quartet's startlingly unique music is a hybrid of African beats and minimalist contemporary jazz. But it is jazz taken in a different direction, away from stereotypes of classical jazz quartets.

Sitting on a sofa in a small Devon arts venue, I waited for the band's sound check to finish with mixed expectations. Hearing the curious musical sounds in the auditorium, I expected its creators to be quirky, esoteric types. However, when Nick Mulvey approached me and introduced himself as the Hang drum player in Portico Quartet, I quickly reconsidered my assumptions.

Nick Mulvey and I began to discuss the unique musical sound that has taken four students from busking on the South Bank to a Mercury Prize Nomination.

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How did you get hold of a 'Hang' drum instrument?

Well, the initial encounter was at WOMAD, which is a world music festival, in 2004. Me and Duncan (the drummer in Portico Quartet) stumbled across a small percussion shop selling these incredible sounding, odd steel pan instruments, and we were just instantly drawn to the sound of them and very moved by it.

Also, we found them to be very accessible and intuitive instruments, and through them we were able to explore a lot of the minimalist music that we were getting into at the time.

How did the group learn to play their respective instruments? Were you music students?

I think for all of us, music was really central, but none of us are officially trained, we are all self-taught with different degrees of training. We played in different bands from a young age and different bits and pieces like that, but I never had any training as a Hang player; I just stumbled across the instrument. Really, there is no training for the Hang instrument - I'm a guitarist and I also play drums, so learning this instrument was just really intuitive.

Why and how did the band begin busking?

Busking began quite innocently really; with the band, nothing began with any intention or design. I think other people realized we were a band before we did, really.

Duncan and me had these odd instruments, and we just thought that they would work really well busking. We were students, and we just took the instruments down to a nice spot by the river in London, and it was an instant hit. People just responded to it as an interesting and unusual thing.

I then invited my friend Jack Whiley (the saxophonist in Portico Quartet) to bring his sax along and he then invited in turn his friend Milo Fitzpatrick (the double-bassist in Portico Quartet) to bring his bass down, and so the four of us just came together on the South Bank of London, and that was the first time that we had really played together.

The band has always been performance based, and it just grew from there. Eventually, through all the time that we were recording and performing together, the band just grew really tight and we just all got to know each other and our instruments.

When you made the transition from 'London Hand Quartet', (the band's previous name) to 'Portico Quartet' did your sound change?

Well, actually, we were only called London Hand Quartet for about a week. The second time that we went busking in London, this guy who was an Italy festival organizer saw us, loved what he heard and flew us over to Italy for some gigs, which was when we decided that we needed a name, so we called ourselves London Hand Quartet. We played three nights while we were in Italy, and on the third night we played under this lovely old stone structure that was situated outside - a portico. So later, Duncan made the suggestion of the name 'Portico Quartet', and it just stuck.

Would you describe your sound as 'experimental'?

Not really. We came together, and from the start realized that we had an unusual quartet of instruments, originally without the drums, and before anything really developed we knew that we had this particular, unique sound. The Hangs would make repetitive, cyclical patterns, underneath which the double-bass would harmonize, and the resulting sound was just really warm and resonant. It also left a perfect space for a lyrical saxophone line, for the soprano sax to go on top of the other instruments.

The skill was then just recognizing that this arrangement worked so well, and then just the natural process of us developing a sound that was based on all of the minimalist composers that influenced us, and the African music that we were also beginning to listen to. We were also influenced by some more contemporary jazz, and so once we found a sound that was ours I think all of these things came together as we started to write the music.

But no, we certainly didn't design our music to be experimental or to be different, or really to be anything, we just wanted to have fun with our music. We never really thought further ahead than next week's gig.

Was it a conscious decision not to include vocals in your music?

No, it wasn't a conscious choice at all. Once we started developing our own music and we had found this sound that was ours, we realized that there was something magically under-said about it. I mean, as soon as you start putting words into music like ours, you kind of tie the meaning of it down and you lose something. With our music, its completely open to interpretation, and so listeners can have their own experience with it.

I guess we could work with vocalists, but it would have to be taken away from the narrative that usually accompanies vocals.

You were nominated for a Mercury prize, how do you compare to other nominees, such as The Arctic Monkeys?

I think there are only very broad parallels - I think our music is very different. Although people are very quick to label us as 'jazz', I would say that in the enormously positive ethos of the way we work, with us all being mates and living together and being really into the identity of us as a quartet, then I would say we're much more like an indie band in our functioning than a classical band, or as a quartet where there might be for instance a lead saxophonist that takes the name, with an interchangeable backline of instrumentalists, which is a more traditional way for some classical and jazz bands to operate.

But, I think like the Arctic Monkeys, our band is just made up of mates on a mission.

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Watching the band huddled around a table after the performance, eating burgers and cracking jokes, there seemed to be no distinguishable difference between them and the crowds of students that had come to see them. However, watching them perform live it becomes clear why this band chose busking to first broadcast their music. This is a performance, and seeing the band members play, they become performers, artists on stage; watching them live is like theatre. Even the lighting contributes to the effect, with long shadows of hands dancing on instruments playing on the walls.

When playing, every member of the band seems to know their instrument as well as they know each other, and the instruments weave into each other like threads in a scarf. At times the rhythms they create become so intricate, they can only be grasped halfway through the song.

There is a spontaneity that comes through in their live performance, such as when Nick uses hand claps as percussion in Midnight Delight, and Cittagazze is brought to a close by Milo, Nick and Duncan's African style chanting, and this reflects the description that is sometimes applied to them, as 'experimental jazz'.

They may just be 'mates on a mission' but unlike the Arctic Monkeys, their music is not part of any clear genre. It is more a unique amalgamation of instruments and people.

Interview Author: Jack Tauchert-Cake

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Portico Quartet's album 'Knee Deep In The North Sea' is available to buy now. For more information, visit:

www.myspace.com/porticoquartet

www.babellabel.co.uk/artists