We sat down with Kevin And Hell ahead of the release of his new record Sounds of an Electric Fantasy to talk jazz vs. rock, his home recording, the interesting orchestration method he used on the album, and what it means to really listen. A whirlwind conversation that is insightful and inspiring all at once. Make sure to check out Kevin’s new record and swing by Bernice’s this Friday January 10th for the release party!

-Kyle Land

KA : Kevin Anddhell

How did the moniker Kevin And Hell come about?

KA: I grew up in Orange County and we played in a lot of garage bands back then. That was the scene that Ty Segall and The Growlers came out of. They were a grade or two older than me, so I didn’t really know them, but those were the local shows we would go to in highschool. It was kind of a joke at one point, we would come up with band names left and right. We would have fifteen minutes of music, play two shows under one name and then it would go away. Sometimes you would come up with a name and you would just have to have a band for it. In that flow I came up with the name Kevin And Hell for a solo project. I wrote a couple tunes and did a home record, I don’t even have a copy of it anymore, they’re all gone. It was called These Are Songs and then I put the project aside for a long time. Around the time I went to college I got into jazz so much that I dropped the whole rock n’ roll thing completely for a few years. I have to admit that I went as far as to be into the jazz snobbery purism for a little bit. Even though when I started playing guitar I didn’t even want to learn how to play, I just wanted to strum chords. It was just, “ahhh, I don’t have to get good at it.” 
The funny thing was, in that rock n’ roll scene there is a definite “don’t learn your instrument” mentality. A lot of my friends were into that Southern California coastal garage sound. That’s how I was getting filtered into music. I was swept up into that, but I still listened to Jimi Hendrix. 
I eventually started listening to Django Reinhardt. It took me a year of listening to jazz before I was like: “I wanna do this.” Once I got to the point of jumping full in, I got into the whole jazz world. It was important for me to do, because I got into playing jazz so late that I still feel I’m catching up to this day. When I go out and play with people that were raised into it, I’m still always trying to catch up when I’m on stage with those guys. No one cares about your backstory when you’re onstage, you’re either playing or you’re not. 
Eventually I realized that jazz purism was a psychological tick, a myth, it’s not really healthy. I never actively disliked rock, I just wasn’t listening to it. But then I realized I just wanted to do everything. 

Well that’s what you do now.

KA: Yeah, wanting to bring it all together and do everything. I’m really happy now to be able to bounce around like that. Sometimes I still spend hours a day working on jazz. That’s just what playing jazz is, but for me it was frustrating at first but once I got past that hump that’s all I want to do. That’s the beauty of it, to pick up the instrument and have something completely different and interesting happen every time. Which is something you can’t get to if you don’t work on your instrument and have the discipline side of it. Sometimes I’ll be working on a Monk or Coltrane tune, something with a lot of changes, and then after a couple hours I’ll have to step back and listen to Guided By Voices. It’s a cleansing of each other. Walk along both sides of the steam.

You had a really busy 2018 as far as releases go.

KA: That’s true. There’s a lot more. Right now, including this record I probably have four full lengths recorded. Some of them need to be mixed, one of them is mixed. Part of it is the jazz thing. Because playing jazz is composing. If your playing jazz you’re composing all the time. Having spent so much time with it you’re constantly having so many melodies come in, I never try to write a song. It just seems forced. I learned how to not try, and wait. Basically every song I write just appears, and then you grab it and record it. That’s why most of my records say “all songs discovered from the vast realm of possibility.” That concept goes back far before me. I remember hearing it was Hoagy Carmichael who said: “there’s all those songs on the keyboard just waiting to be found.” So I record all the time. I have the home gear and I’m writing all the time. If I’m playing shows I’m writing and if I’m not playing shows I’m writing even more. 

So your new record Sounds of an Electric Fantasy was home recorded?

KA: It was all home recorded. It was a new approach to recording that I wanted to try. This one's back on the jazz radar. I kind of like to alternate, as soon as I finish a jazz record I wrap it up and start focusing on a rock record and then back and forth. Usually I have three projects that I’m working on at a time. At this point Kevin And Hell is the exact opposite of what a marketing director would tell you, to make a clear, concise, here’s what the thing is. But I at least try and get each record to be coherent. The idea with Sounds of an Electric Fantasy, I had been listening to Duke Ellington, who I would say is my most important musical influence. There are hundreds of artists, but that one is really foundational. And then a lot of Sun Ra, especially his big band years from the 50s. Those first ten records, that era had a special vibe to it, with that ancient jazz sound. So I couldn’t get a big band together right now. It’s not the time or the right project. At one point the live band got up to seven people, but since I couldn’t have a big band, what if I had an electronic big band. If I can do all the sounds I was hearing, translating the Ellington, Basie, a million big bands, even the more modern ones like Fat Jones, because it’s such a powerful musical force with a big band, the amount of textures and options. I wanted to be able to construct things in that manner, so it wasn’t solo driven. It’s not the kind of post bebop era jazz, that forms about the soloing. And I really like the electronic sound, there’s a lot to be explored. People have, of course, experimented with electronic sound in jazz but I feel like there is a lot they haven’t done. There’s still a lot of ground to cover there. 
One of the cool things was that there was a great way of merging the recording process, taking advantage of the fact that if wasn’t a live band sound. There’s a lot of great things to be done with a live band sound, but there’s a lot to coordinate there. I would have had to have ten people rehearsing which just wasn’t feasible at this point. But what I would do is write a song, record it, have the melody, arrange the parts, get the backing with the electronic chords. Then I would get some featured soloists to come in. One of them is Angel Bat Dawid, who recently is getting some attention. 

Her record is fantastic.

KA: I just happened to connect with her right before all that came out. She’s such a wonderful person to be around. Her energy is explosive. And I had a number of my friends come by. What I would do is have the bass track, have them solo over it and a lot of the time I would orchestrate their solos. I really like how it came out. I would transcribe what they were improvising and add all these electric sounds. It’s not something you could do live, because there is too much of a level of detail that you can only get if you know exactly what someone is going to play. I was interested in capturing the Ellington model, well he wasn’t the only one, Billy Strahan was probably just as important, but the way you can have the orchestration and improvisation seamlessly locked together and compliment each other in that way. I had the drums on every track, that was the last thing I had done. Because Tommaso (Moretti) is such a great drummer, such a great listener. I wanted to make sure the bass and the rhythm track was intact, so when Tommaso plays he’s able to react to everything. It comes through on how we are able to play on what is happening in every little section, rather than if I had him record first there wouldn’t have been that level of interaction. To bring that level of spontaneous interaction into an orchestrated set...  
Except for the soloists and the drums I did everything on a keyboard. Which is funny because I still can’t properly play a keyboard, I wouldn’t perform with it. I would think of guitar spacing and then visualize it on the board. Usually I would take a few bars at a time, listen to it, figure out where it was on the piano, practice it, so I could play that one section, record, and then do the next part. 
It goes hand in hand with what I was doing on the last record, On Earth. Where I was exploring that approach with a Devo like backing, with the orchestration. I was working on this record at the same time as that one. I am much happier with the production on this one, my buddy Doug over at Jamdek mastered it.

Any release plans?

KA: The show is going to be interesting because I think it’s going to be a quartet. A live band version, playing the songs in more of a jazz setting. At Bernice’s in Bridgeport on January 10th. We’re actually going to do a jazz set and then a rock set back to back.

Any plans on releasing any of the other records you have in 2020?

KA: The one that I just finished is called Wilty Pleasures. It’s also a heavy synth arranged one, but it’s really 80s. It doesn’t really sound like Tears For Fears but that might have been where I started aesthetic wise. It’s almost like this record but not instrumental, using a lot of jazz chords. I think it’s a really hot record so I’m trying to figure out a capricious way of realising it. I’m much better at recording albums than releasing them. 
This one is through Midwest Action. They do a lot, but everyone has to be doing a bunch to make sure it works. 

That’s the game.

KA: And the thing this record is really about is listening, and the way that music can help you appreciate. But really it applies to everything. Listening to people talk, listening to silence. Music is a good way to get into it but we spend so much time talking and with noise and chatter. Even if you have music on, are you actually listening to it? One of the bigger things about music, when you talk about what is going on with music, is it’s listening first. That’s kind of the message that I wanted to implicitly weave into the record. How to apply listening when you're not listening to music. Music is maybe a way to wake you up to the idea of actually listening to something. When you put on Stravinsky, or Ellington, or Coltrane and you may space out, did you actually listen to what that person said musically or was there something else going on in your mind. Because every day is a challenge with that. With music you can open that up to what it means to be in a state where you are constantly listening, even when you’re talking you’re still listening. In any art you have to be listening. If you’re a painter you have to listen. It’s a state of receptiveness. It’s so easy, in an instant, to lose it.

Anything else to add?

KA: Look for a lot more to be coming. I keep thinking that hypothetically, one of these days, I’ll have settled on a sound. In one aspect, in the back of my mind, I would like to one day bring it together like a gourmet meal where you have all these flavors come together to create one whole. That can be done, where there is that middle ground where you are simultaneously rocking with that improvisational element but also that underlying relatable tune. That’s the goal. Sometimes I think I get there, that’s the dream.