‘It has to be flowing. It has to be collectively grooving together’ — for fun, make a list of things JP Carter might be describing
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Friday, November 16 - Friday, November 16
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Their sound has been called experimental jazz, psychedelic jazz, creative music and post-rock instrumental, but no matter how you cut it, Vancouver’s Inhabitants can’t be packaged or labelled. They like it like that — they’re self-confessed musical rebels. “Some musicians enjoy those boundaries,” horn man JP Carter laughs. “I mean, you know there’s always boundaries, but we try to ignore them.”
This “no boundary thing” drives more than just Inhabitants’ sound. It led them to seek the perfect home for their music and their experiments: Jesse Zubot’s Drip Audio record label, which is known for its range of experimental jazz and creative composition projects. Nothing is mid-range or predictable in Zubot’s stable. “We’re all playing a lot of different projects,” Carter says of his band. “There are a lot of different influences coming to the music.”
It’s not just varied ideas that energize this band, though — it’s also the way they’ve come together as a group. They aren’t a conventional quartet; in fact, their sound has been described by some critics as resembling two duos. That may well come from their earlier heavy experience as separate projects. Two of them, Carter and Dave Sikula, used to be members of Carsick, another Drip Audio project. Carter insists it was a natural progression for that group to evolve into Inhabitants because, in one form or another, these four musicians have known each other and gigged in side projects for years.
“Of the four of us,” Carter says, “ Dave and I have been playing together for a long time. Skye (Brooks) and Pete (Schmitt) have been playing together for a long time. I was playing together with Skye and Pete, and I was also playing in a group with Dave. Then those three guys got together for a gig one time, and they expressed how much enjoyment they got out of that.”
Strangely, though, playing together as a quartet wasn’t an obvious move. For some reason, that took a little longer. Carter laughs when he talks about this jump to quartet status. “Obviously, with a lot of the groups we’re involved with, there’s a lot of improvisation,” he says. “We wanted to try something a little different at the time. I think we were thinking about it for a long time but didn’t really say anything in outside voices. It’s really been a lot of fun.”
With the release of their first self-titled CD in 2004, Inhabitants gelled in this new incarnation — but don’t assume they’re doing things conventionally. They continue to challenge audiences by performing without a clear bandleader. As Carter explains, they may be leaderless but they definitely know what they want, and this is clear in their current tour for the new CD The Furniture Moves Underneath. “We all put our own two cents in,” Carter says. “That’s the way we work best. I think we’re all individually trying to grow, but when we get together as a group, the focus is on how we sound as a group and those individualisms get thrown out the window. (It’s only) at a certain point that they reappear. I feel like when we’re really hitting it, we are fully playing as a group but allowing each other’s individual expressions to come out, and that can be when it’s the most interesting.”
Interesting, and like the rest of Inhabitants’ music and method, it stretches audiences’ listening abilities. As Carter says of their gigs, “It has to be flowing. It has to be collectively grooving together, and sometimes that requires pushing it a bit.”
