Fat Freddy’s Drop

JOE LINDSAY, trombonist, (and now tuba player), for FAT FREDDY’S DROP, proves to YUMI SED once again that Kiwis are simply the nicest people in the world to interview. When they’re not rambling on, they find time to talk about the new album.

The Wellington dub scene is small yet tightly interwoven like a complex Venn diagram. Take Warren Maxwell as an example. A former member of Fat Freddy’s Drop and the disbanded Trinity Roots, he now fronts the psychedelic rock group Little Bushman. Other members of Fat Freddy’s frequently play with The Black Seeds and of course, there’s Salmonella Dub, whose frontman Tiki Taane has left to pursue a solo career. Lindsay assures me each of the bands fervently support each other’s successes and enjoy the little community they have built. Further to the tale, Scott Towers, who replaced Maxwell on saxophone, went to the Wellington Jazz School with Maxwell and was Lindsay’s tutor at the school years later.

“That’s how I knew him,” Lindsay says. “But that was many moons ago. There’s so many musicians to call on in Wellington, it’s great. I only ended up in Freddy’s because I kept hanging around until I’d convinced them they needed a trombone player.”

Organising and orchestrating seven players should be quite the challenge for the band, but Lindsay explains that harmony is easily found amongst the members. “Yeah, we try to keep the writing in a jammed-based, democratic style,” he explains. “I’ve actually been playing a lot more parts on tuba and Scott is playing a lot more on baritone sax so the horn parts are a lot darker. I think the whole focus of the band is just finding that space to play your part without having to blow the whole time.”

Their latest album, Dr. Boondigga & The Big BW, is an excursion in beat reduction and finely tuned soul. With a running time of 70 minutes, there is a mere nine tracks on the album, with each of them an almost classical take on dub, reggae and soul. It is dark and light, fun and forlorn, and this dichotomy is something Lindsay says was very deliberately constructed. “We definitely wanted to explore light and shade on this album,” he says. “There are some parts where we’ve double the bass with the tuba which sounds really good and then there are other parts of the album where we just use the tuba to fill out the bottom note of the chord and it makes it really full. The main focus is just to listen to each other intently.”

Perhaps the greatest thing to come out of the Wellington dub scene is the diversity of the bands that represent it. You cannot listen to Dr. Boondigga & The Big BW and then listen to, say, The Black Seeds’ Solid Ground, and write it off as duplication. It is clear, as is acutely demonstrated by Fat Freddy’s Drop’s latest release, that dub’s musical well is as deep as the farthest reaches of the ocean.

DR. BOONDIGGA & THE BIG BW is out now through The Drop. www.fatfreddysdrop.com

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