Feature: Kokomo - The Long Road from Tauranga to Kokomo
Author: Richard Thorne
Apparently à gogo is a French expression conveying ‘in abundance’ and ‘Kokomo à gogo’ is the name blues and roots act Kokomo have given their eighth album. The live CD and matching full-length concert DVD remarkably celebrate the Tauranga band’s 15th anniversary. Achievements in abundance indeed.
Fifteen years together is a milestone for any musical partnership, and although they cruise well beneath the commercial radar, Kokomo are no stay-at-home studio-based crew. The four-piece have toured extensively throughout New Zealand, regularly performing at the country’s major rock, blues, jazz and folk festivals. As acoustic guitarist/vocalist Derek Jacombs observes, playing together through heart attacks, heartaches, and romances has only strengthened the band, although changing family dynamics have limited their flexibility.
Kokomo Blues formed in 1991 after a chance performance at the National Jazz Festival. Jacombs had been invited to present a set of solo blues and asked harmonica player Grant Bullot to join him. The concert went so well the pair decided to form a band (along with Bullot’s brother Roger on bass) to spread their love of acoustic blues. And spread it they did, touring relentlessly and playing in every township they could find.
“We did a couple of hundred gigs a year for those first three or four years... and it really paid off. We worked far more than any obscure band like that has any right to, and people were genuinely enthusiastic about seeing us perform.”
Recordings also followed quickly. 1992’s cassette only release ‘The Old Original’ and 1994’s ‘When In Rome Do Rome’ were both collections of traditional blues. In 1996 they released two albums including original material, their own ‘To Be Or What’ and ‘Stromboling’ which was written and recorded in collaboration with Tracie de Jong. When Roger Bullot left in 1998, to pursue a career as a sculptor, the founding formula was lost and partly as a mark of respect the name was shortened to Kokomo.
“When you are a three-piece, everyone is so essential to the sound, and it did change after that. A band’s sound has to come organically from the quirks and styles of the players and you have to let it go where it will. Also we had moved to playing our own stuff and if people came to a show expecting a straight ahead blues band they would have been misled.”
The upright bass of replacement Nigel Masters brought a slight country influence. Owner of the well known Boatshed Studio in Tauranga, Masters also added some musical sophistication and has since looked after the band’s recordings, engineering and mixing, in tandem with Jacombs as producer. The pair also regularly work together on other local artists’ albums.
Grant Bullot’s trumpet-playing wife Sonia also joined in ‘88, so creating the unique harmonica/trumpet horn section that has since become a trademark sound. These four remain the Kokomo core, though as the back page of the new album liner notes reveals, an a to z of more than 60 local musicians have joined them in studio or on stage over the years. Bruce Morley is a regular drummer as are Alan Norman and Matt Henessey. Marion Arts and Mahara Tocker are among those who have added vocals while Edwina Thorne, Roy Philips and Terry Crayford are among the numerous brass and keyboard players sometimes used.
Jacombs says musicians like to play with the band because one of the tenets of Kokomo is honest music.
“All the old styles of music we love were honest and direct and we’ve always tried to make music like that - no tricks, no sequenced rhythms, a real band playing real music. This album crystallises that approach of direct expression.”
Although it is simple, some of the music isn’t as straightforward as it might at first sound. Different roots music styles demand different disciplines - where the drum beat sits for instance - and Jacombs references The Windy City Strugglers as a band who impress for knowing their way around a similar range of musical history.
“A lot of players haven’t listened to a lot of music from history and you can tell people who have.”
A cover of the Windy’s Good Grief is one of just two songs not written by Jacombs on the album.
“I always regard songs as just templates. We have a number of arrangements for songs so we can play them in different styles. Strange Angels for instance was a slow blues originally but on this album it is an up tempo washboard shuffle thing.”
Of the band’s eight albums catalogue all but ‘Stromboling’ have been released through Jayrem Records and are still available for purchase at Kokomo gigs.
“They all tick along, because we are nothing to do with style or fashion so it doesn’t matter what order people buy them in! Most have sold around 2500 copies. But like now a lot of people are buying ‘When In Rome Do Rome’ which was our first CD, because Grant and I have been performing as a duo and playing the traditional blues stuff which is on those first albums.”
While he does claim to be “vaguely ambitious” for his band, Jacombs says he tries not to be a slave to the money side of his craft.
“If you have to pay the rent from your art it can get really compromised, and then you lose the thing that was really valuable in the first place - which is your passion for music. Making music is for the love of the music and the songs - purely. Hopefully we do get paid at the end of it - but that part is a bonus!”
Very much the music intellectual the enthusiastic Manchester-born musician shows many other skills. He has previously been director of Tauranga’s National Jazz Festival and though no longer a newspaper journalist he is an enthusiastic wordsmith, writing the band’s occasional newsletters and a weekly column on the local arts and entertainment scene. Which brings to mind the dubious contribution of little known ‘Tennessee music historian’ Milton Haley who, along with the rather better known Grafton drummer and NZ Herald correspondent Bruce Morley, provides liner notes for ‘Kokomo à gogo’. The point of dear Milt’s input is unclear, despite Jacombs’ earnest production of an elaborate back story (including website www.freewebs.com/miltonhaley) by way of justification.
Another role and interest Jacombs himself has is in film making - hence the DVD which, like the album, is a live recording from their Baycourt Theatre performance in November 2005. The DVD also includes the entire first album audio tracks, two videos (both directed by Jacombs), a commentary track and ‘featurettes’. The big celebration planned to mark Kokomo’s 15th anniversary in October will be a show at the same 600-seat Tauranga venue, where they expect to be joined by a number of those artists named on the album’s honour roll. It could well be a long night.
www.kokomo.co.nz
