Dave Harrington

Darkside guitarist on late nights at Tonic, Red Dead Redemption 2, the LA scene, and the humility in putting the music first

It’s about twelve paragraphs into an early profile on Darkside before I finally got around to describing Dave Harrington:

Harrington, dressed in head-to-toe black, methodically draws on an electric cigarette. Harrington’s energy seems less intensive than Jaar’s at first, but he’s every bit the music obsessive. Earlier, they discussed their favorite albums. Harrington waxed rhapsodic about having his whiskey neat while listening to Tom Waits’ Alice at 3 a.m., though Jaar opts for Rain Dogs. They went out for a drink at Greenpoint’s River Styx, where one of Harrington’s favorites, Steely Dan, played overhead.

(Speaking of early, the extension for the above link also says “download-our-new-ipad-app”)

From the vantage of 2013, Dave and I mourned the decimation of the NYC downtown scene post-9/11. Though of course, such creative improvised music is a hearty weed (per Shepp: “a lily in spite of the swamp”) and it would only be a few years before that scene began to rebound.

I lost track of Dave when he upped and re-rooted in Los Angeles a few years back. (Early parenthood no doubt also played a role in that miasma.) Recently, we re-connected to talk about his upcoming album, Skull Dream (out this Friday), a speedball of NYC-shred and Cali-drift, downtown sidewalk debris and tumbleweed dust, released on his new imprint, Maximum Overdub.

I had always wanted to ask how the first Darkside album (and your first album) getting a 9.0 on the site affected you. Was it liberating? Validating? Constricting? I mourn its prominence on the landscape, where a rave like that could change fortunes.

Oh man, it was a different era, a simpler time ha! That score and the weight it carried at the time definitely gave Darkside a bump in terms of audience and opportunities, no doubt about it. But to be honest, I think it had very little to do with what I did after that. Maybe if I had stayed in a lane that was more directly or overtly connected to the music that Darkside made then I could’ve “capitalized” on some of that (perceived?) clout...but that wasn't really where the music took me.

I remember the first gig I played solo back in NYC after all the Darkside touring ended after we played our last show at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple. I was doing a solo guitar gig trying out the very beginning of some new ideas at Nublu on the LES (a place that would go on to become really my musical spiritual home in NYC) and thought to myself “Well, three thousand people came to Terminal 5 and over a thousand people were just at Masonic, I'm sure people will come to this gig.” And of course there were like 3 people and some random passerbys.

It didn't deter me or even really bum me out it, just let me know that I was going to need to build whatever I wanted for myself for myself. And that's basically what I've been doing ever since – eventually we were selling out a new and bigger Nublu with massive improvising bands and special guests and playing on New Year's Eve and I was traipsing all around NYC and Brooklyn doing similar shtick, before I moved to LA and now I’m doing it here.

I seem to recall you came up as a jazz player, hanging out at Tonic and the original Knitting Factory and the like. What was a formative concert for you?

I actually grew up in NYC and was lucky enough to have an acceptable fake ID and was able to have a lot of those experiences sneaking into the original Knit and Nublu and especially Tonic from the time I was about 14 on. There were so many amazing shows – seeing Zorn a bunch with Milford Graves or Ikue Mori or Electric Masada crammed into Tonic, a run of benefit shows MMW did when they were trying to save Tonic.

But two things come to mind. When I was about 17 (back then I was a bass player) I went to go see Oteil Burbridge's solo project at the old Knitting Factory on a rainy Thursday or something, when he had a night off during an Allman's Beacon run, and there was basically nobody there – I mean there were maybe 10 of us. And this guy is a legend already at that point, a fave bass player and a hero, and he just walked right out said “Well hi! I guess we know who our real friends are!” and proceeded to play a blistering 2hr+ set. One of my favorite shows I've ever been to and the deepest lesson in humility, in putting the music first, in having love and respect for your audience. I think about that night all the time.

Also I have to honorable mention seeing Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra at Tonic dozens of times – they used to play late, two sets on Fridays and I went constantly – that was my favorite band for a while, still one of my all time favorites – and I was lucky enough to have Steven and also Doug Weiselman and Briggan Krauss (who were often or sometimes in the MTO) all work on my new solo album, which was beyond an honor.

You also have the vantage of seeing jazz go from a sorta dead end in the early '00s to now be vibrant and humming again. What do you think led to that shift?

I think it's really cool that it seems to have lost some of its baggage. I mean I was definitely seeing jazz in the early 00’s re: Tonic/ KF/ Nublu, etc. but I think a lot of that music was doing work to not take itself too seriously in an academic way. And now I think there seems to be a little more space for all of it.

I learned a lot and absorbed a lot of that attitude of non-seriousness, that I take with me today. The music can be serious, but we don't always have to be serious – it's a bit of a wormhole of a semantic distinction but I've found there's always something liberating about being open about the fact that music is fun, that that's kind of the whole point for me, in a way. And it feels like there's a lot of room for that now – and in the scenes that I’m a part of in LA now there's a lot of commingling amongst different generations or micro-generations of player and players who are more studied or more intuitive, and I think it's making for really exciting music out here, all the time.

So what precipitated this move to LA?

I had been coming here for a couple years on and off for sessions and songwriting work and even as far back as 2015 when I was working for a time on the score to Red Dead Redemption 2. I came out here to do a session with Woody Jackson and get to know how that whole world worked. So I had kind of gotten a sense of the scene and started making friends and sat-in at some gigs, hung out at ETA, and was starting to feel like I understood the place a little bit, and I always liked coming here and hanging out and working.

Then in 2019 my wife finished grad school and she was really ready to leave NYC and this felt like the logical next step, for us and our family (we now have an almost 2-year old daughter!), and we live in Atwater and I can actually walk to one of my regular gigs ha!

What did you think of the creative music scene when you arrived? How did it compare to NYC/ BK?

Yeah I mean I had already kind of done my recon before I left to be honest, I couldn't imagine dropping into a place and not being able to play gigs. Honestly, I had assumed at the time that I would play around LA less than I did in NYC but it feels like I’m playing around town local gigs more than ever now--it's really wonderful.

Ryan at ETA took me in right away and offered me nights to experiment with, and I got to play with so many great folks there before it closed – eventually I ended up having a regular trio gig with Jay Bellerose and Billy Mohler (we have a record we're going to put out later this year from those gigs), but also got to play with Justin Brown, Zach Tenorio, Dolphin Hyperspace, a lot of great hangs.

Tyler at Gold Diggers also gave me a lot of trust and bandwidth to curate nights there, and use the spot to try new things out, and now theres a new spot my friend Austin runs in Pasadena called Healing Force of The Universe, I play once a month at my local bar Club Tee Gee.

Skull Dream has its roots in NYC, from players and recording itself, but what makes it feel more like a West Coast endeavor?

Hmmm...well I’m inside this weird Möbius strip of my own making right now, where I made that record Skull Dream with all these horn players on it, but I didn't quite finish it, never settled on the mixes, and then put it aside and made The Pictures out here, which is a solo solo record where I played every instrument.

But then I put together a big band of sorts with a 4 piece horn section to play the music from the Pictures record, and then I realized that I had a band that could play the Skull Dream music, too. So I finished that record, and now I don't really know what’s next--maybe writing a new batch of music for the Pictures Band and then having a big book of tunes to draw from?

So the final feeling that went into the Skull Dream record really is a West Coast feeling – I remixed it with an ear towards really being upfront about melodies and not hiding the horns, and letting everything really speak – not trying to make it into some abstract idea of “cool” just really make it sound and feel like what I want to listen to, that’s kind of my whole journey right now is really just putting away preconceptions aside and trying really really hard to make the music I really really like – maybe it seems obvious but I feel like a lot can get in the way of that if you’re not careful.

Knowing your fandom for him, what was it like bringing in Bernstein for the album?

Bernstein was incredible. He wrote the charts from the back of a tour bus while he was on tour with Little Feat. He let me hire all the cats I wanted to play, he showed up on day one of 2 days of horn tracking with a fistful of sheet music, and I hadn’t heard any of the parts yet, and we just let it rip – I’d give him a couple ideas if I had them and he’d do his own changes on the fly, and conduct a they went, it was really magical. He’s got such a love for the music and such a warm and funny open energy, I was just so honored and so happy to kick back and kinda watch it just happen.

How much post-production, tweaking goes into the album?

On this record it was really a studio endeavor, but there was always heavy amounts of improvising along the way. There was a fair amount of post production work but it was mostly in creating the atmosphere of the songs and getting certain specific guitar ideas just the way I wanted them, but most of the solos were tracked live with the rhythm section, and pretty much all the songs are full takes, just with layers of folks and ideas along the way.

I also asked Dave for some of his favorite LA jazz albums and he hit me up with a few contemporary artists and albums to check out: