Leap is the second album released by Drop Trio

Drop Trio

Drop Trio is a jazz band from Houston, Texas, consisting of Nuje , Patrick Flanagan and Ian Varley ....

. The album debuted in 2004 and was self-released by the band. The album is noted as having been recorded entirely improvised in the studio.

History / Premise

During a long drive in their van in late 2003, while on a short tour of cities in Texas, the members of Drop Trio

Drop Trio

Drop Trio is a jazz band from Houston, Texas, consisting of Nuje , Patrick Flanagan and Ian Varley ....

 (then Ian Varley, Nuje Blattel and Nino Batista) discussed ideas for a date to record their next record, the follow-up to their debut, 2003's Big Dipper. Deliberations eventually, and unintentionally, realized the idea of recording an entirely improvised record in the studio. They subsequently booked time in the renowned SugarHill Recording Studios

SugarHill Recording Studios

SugarHill Recording Studios is a recording studio in Houston, Texas. The studio was important in launching the careers of such artists as Lightnin' Hopkins, The Big Bopper, George Jones, the Sir Douglas Quintet, Roy Head, and Freddy Fender. It is renowned for its collection of vintage regording...

 for the date February 29, 2004 (which was in fact Leap Day, a part of the inspiration for the album's name). John Griffin of SugarHill, who had previously engineered the band's debut album, was called on once again for this ambitious session.

Recording session

On February 29, 2004, at 10 AM, Ian Varley, Nuje Blattel, and Nino Batista rolled into SugarHill with dozens of instruments in tow. It took over four hours to set up the studio with all the instruments, electronics, and microphones that would be needed to produce the eventual two and a half hours of straight musical improvisation.

Some notable instrumental elements in the studio that day were a wooden recorder

Recorder

The recorder is a woodwind musical instrument of the family known as fipple flutes or internal duct flutes—whistle-like instruments which include the tin whistle. The recorder is end-blown and the mouth of the instrument is constricted by a wooden plug, known as a block or fipple...

, kazoo

Kazoo

The kazoo is a wind instrument which adds a "buzzing" timbral quality to a player's voice when the player vocalizes into it. The kazoo is a type of mirliton, which is a membranophone, a device which modifies the sound of a person's voice by way of a vibrating membrane."Kazoo" was the name given by...

, countless and highly varied percussion

Percussion instrument

A percussion instrument is any object which produces a sound when hit with an implement or when it is shaken, rubbed, scraped, or otherwise acted upon in a way that sets the object into vibration...

 elements such as conga

Conga

The conga, or more properly the tumbadora, is a tall, narrow, single-headed Cuban drum with African antecedents. It is thought to be derived from the Makuta drums or similar drums associated with Afro-Cubans of Central African descent. A person who plays conga is called a conguero...

s, bongos

Bongo drum

Bongo or bongos are a Cuban percussion instrument consisting of a pair of single-headed, open-ended drums attached to each other. The drums are of different size: the larger drum is called in Spanish the hembra and the smaller the macho...

, rototom

Rototom

Rototoms are drums which have no shell. They consist of a single head in a die-cast zinc or aluminum frame. Unlike most other drums, they have a variable definite pitch. Composers are known to write for them as tuned instruments, demanding specific pitches. Rototoms are often used to extend the tom...

s, shakers

Shakers

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, known as the Shakers, is a religious sect originally thought to be a development of the Religious Society of Friends...

, cymbal

Cymbal

Cymbals are a common percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. The greater majority of cymbals are of indefinite pitch, although small disc-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a...

s, a grand piano, a vintage Hammond B3 with vintage Leslie speaker

Leslie speaker

The Leslie speaker is a specially constructed amplifier/loudspeaker used to create special audio effects using the Doppler effect. Named after its inventor, Donald Leslie, it is particularly associated with the Hammond organ but is used with a variety of instruments as well as vocals. The...

 to match, Rhodes piano

Rhodes piano

The Rhodes piano is an electro-mechanical piano, invented by Harold Rhodes during the fifties and later manufactured in a number of models, first in collaboration with Fender and after 1965 by CBS....

, 4 string electric bass, 6 string electric guitar (custom tuned a perfect fourth

Perfect fourth

In classical music from Western culture, a fourth is a musical interval encompassing four staff positions , and the perfect fourth is a fourth spanning five semitones. For example, the ascending interval from C to the next F is a perfect fourth, as the note F lies five semitones above C, and there...

lower than normal tuning), drum kit, a broken acoustic guitar that has over 75 handwritten signatures (from friends, ex-bandmates, and various other random people), guitar effects pedals, and pretty much "anything else that made noise in the studio that day...". It is of note that the album cover features a photograph of dozens of keys hanging from strings, which together are an informal and unique set of musical chimes used at SugarHill as part of their in-house instrument collection. The sound of these keys is heard at the very beginning and very ending of Leap.

The band members found themselves walking around the studio towards the end of the marathon session, using each other's instruments at will and exploring with sounds ranging from hand claps to random shouting to "throwing drumsticks at cymbals leaning against the wall across the room...", all the while recording every sound they made.

The music produced in that session ranged from palatably melodic and ambient to highly atonal and experimental.

Reception

The 2.5 hour recording session was in fact edited for time, but still the final recording that was released is truly the 100% improvised compositions that were performed, with no modifications or overdubs added later. Leap reviews are varied and generally divided into "Loved it" or "Hated it" categories. Critics typically found the album bold, daring, and ambitious, but opinions became strongly divided beyond that. Fans of live instrumental music, as well as musicians themselves, tended to find the album favorable, whereas others (including some Drop Trio fans) felt it too drastic a change from the sound they enjoyed on Big Dipper.

The online music vendor, Magnatune.com, even went as far as not carrying Leap in their online store citing that it didn't fit the style of their catalog, even though they carried the band's debut album, Big Dipper. Further, Drop Trio's third record from 2005, the piano dominated, melodic Cézanne, is in fact carried by Magnatune.

Drop Trio went on to "re-learn" some of the improvised pieces they had spontaneously created in the recording session so they could perform them a live shows. Since then, several tracks from Leap have become very popular live show staples, including "Mothership", "Robot Suit" and "The Big S.O." (In an ironic twist, as stated before, Magnatune sells Cézanne, although renditions of "Mothership" and "Robot Suit" appear on that record.)

Track listing

NOTE: While the 2.5 hour recording session was, in effect, one long improvisation, specific durations of the session were edited out of the seamless recording and loosely divided into "songs". They were then ordered as follows, which were mostly kept in chronological order (in regards to when they appear on the master recording) to preserve the feel of the improvisation as it progressed.

All tracks are credited to Varley/Blattel/Batista.

1. "Leap"
2. "The Big S.O."
3. "Mothership"
4. "Because Rifles Are Huge"
5. "Anapodyopsis"
6. "Washington's Armies"
7. "Tethered"
8. "Ooog Baby"
9. "The Elements of Argument"
10. "Two Words: Sound"
11. "Robot Suit I"
12. "Robot Suit II"
13. "Robot Suit III"
14. "Leapt"