Story by Jacob O’Gara
Photos by Will Kanellos
Multimedia by Will Kanellos, Kyle McKee, and Kathryn Boyd-Batstone
Hot Milk isn’t your grandmother’s jazz quartet, though that statement assumes a lot—about jazz, about music in general, about your grandmother. We have this image of jazz as something old-timey and rarefied, belonging to a lost age (the Jazz Age, in fact) when “today” was spelled “to-day” and the Charleston was considered most obscene. But that image isn’t even half true. Jazz is, as Hot Milk would tell it, the only art form original to America; indeed, would it be so overblown to say that jazz created American culture as we know it? The greatest artists in the genre are known as “kings” and “queens” and “gods” for a reason. Atop these giants stand the members of Hot Milk, the 2012 winner of Ethos’s Bandest of the Bands competition.
Like any decent, self-respecting jazz crew, the story of Hot Milk begins at a club, at Eugene’s own Campbell Club cooperative. “My first weekend of college, I went to the Campbell Club, and they were having a gender bender party,” says Andy Page, the band’s saxophonist. There he met Rebecca Conner, lead vocalist and guitarist. “She had a mustache, and I said I played saxophone and she gave me a hug.”
Conner also met the other two members of the band—Dusty Carlson, bassist, and drummer Susan Richardson—at the Campbell Club during open mic nights hosted by the co-op. The four were drawn together by their mutual adoration of jazz music; in early 2011 they started calling themselves Hot Milk.
One element of jazz that appeals to each Hot Milk member is the liquid nature of the genre. “It’s ever-changing. Even when it was first a thing, jazz was pushing, changing into something new,” Richardson says.
Page agrees: “The jazz tradition is to push the boundaries of whatever is comfortable.” In other words, the jazz tradition is that there is no tradition at all. Because of this and because of its amorphous quality, jazz is just as strong now as it ever was even as it continues to change.
In Page’s estimation, jazz is a distinctly American art form that, because of its roots in blues, a music style born from African-American culture, couldn’t have gotten started anywhere else in the world. Despite its US origin, Conner fell in love with the genre while traveling around Europe. She’d listened to Billie Holiday in middle school; at the time, it wasn’t really her thing. But in Europe, going to jazz clubs every night and writing in her journal about her experiences, writing about how she was “falling in love with the world through jazz,” Conner was completely taken by the music.
“One day I realized I needed to spend the rest of my life learning to play jazz,” she says. “I had to explore.”
Each member of Hot Milk has a similar story, one that illustrates the magnetism of their chosen genre. Page got into jazz after concluding that the saxophone looked and sounded cooler than the clarinet he’d played during grade school. Things got serious for Page when playing the sax became more important to him than his two main high school activities: skateboarding and football. After she listened to some jazz drum solos as a child, Richardson didn’t stop banging away on kitchen pots and pans until she got a drum set of her own. (Nonetheless, she still occasionally uses cookware as instruments.) Carlson says he was “hooked” as soon as he listened to Miles Davis’s quintessential jazz album, Kind Of Blue.
Blue is the signature color in the jazz musician’s palette. “A lot of people describe jazz as playing colors,” Page says. “When you’re playing, you might go, ‘This needs some blue,’ and because you practiced the rudiments and building blocks to a point where it’s almost automatic, you instantly know the scales that are blue.”
That sort of learned technique in making it up is central to jazz or, as Carlson puts it, the “ultimate form of improvisation.” Despite this improvisational core, something that seemingly goes against the idea of teaching, all the members of Hot Milk are jazz students: Richardson and Page at the University of Oregon, Conner at Lane Community College, and Carlson from Western Illinois University with a degree in music performance. The purpose of jazz studies is to learn how to listen to other musicians and build off what they’ve played, how to have a conversation with musical notes.
“It’s really like learning a new language; it’s a collaborative making stuff up,” Page says. “Eighty percent of what your brain is doing is listening to everyone else.”
This ethic of improvisation and conversation extends beyond the music Hot Milk plays. Unlike the RZA of the 1990s rap group Wu-Tang Clan or the infamous Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, both of whom had carefully plotted and meticulously followed five-year plans, Hot Milk doesn’t have a set blueprint for the next half-decade.
“We’re pretty free-spirited,” Richardson says. “I don’t think any of us have a plan for that far in advance.”
Still, the group has an eye cast toward the future, even if nothing’s exactly mapped out. “I like to plant seeds for the future,” Page says. “I think, ‘By this time a year from now, I want this, whatever it may be, to have happened.’” He says a year ago, he wanted Hot Milk to be regularly booking shows in Eugene, and today, they play a gig almost every weekend. They’re where they want to be.
The opportunity to record their music in a studio (part of their Bandest prize package) presents a new set of prospects and challenges. “Recording is a totally different beast than playing live,” Carlson says.
Conner explains: “You feed so much off the audience so you have to internalize that energy in the studio and still sing to the crowd even though there’s nobody there.” Another concern Conner has about recording is that it tends to make the artist overthink how the music sounds.
That said, Richardson considers recording Hot Milk’s music a valuable exercise. “It’s good to think about what it sounds like sometimes. It gets you to that point where you’re like, ‘We have to make everything sound really good right now.’”
At the moment though, the members of Hot Milk are more focused on performing in a band with musicians who all enjoy sharing jazz. As Conner says: “I love playing with these people more than anything that I could ever imagine for myself.”
 

Gallery • 4 Photos

Will Kanellos

Liquid Jazz