The Rising: Horse’s Ha

It’s a Wednesday afternoon in the ides of July, and as James Elkington sips his tea, he reflects on how much he doesn’t miss his British homeland. He’s in Chicago, the city he loves, and as he stands outside, he chews in the landscape. This is where he belongs.

Elkington’s affair with the city began 10 years ago, when he abandoned his native country - he grew up in a small town northwest of London - and ex-patted to the U.S. to further his music career.

“I was annoyed with London,” he tells IndiePit (via phone). “London is like New York: It’s an enormous, sprawling mess of people. … I didn’t feel like I was part of a community there. I didn’t even really feel like I’d met many like-minded musicians. But when I moved to Chicago, I met a lot of people in a short space of time.

“I felt like I moved to a village. … It’s a collection of communities. … I kept running into the same people, and the musical community was super-welcoming. So for doing music, doing what I wanted to do, Chicago is so much better than London.

“I’ve never really thought about going back.”

As the saying goes, you’re a product of your environment. And if a place is manufacturing you into something you’re not, or something you don’t want to be, it’s incumbent upon you to find your true home. The place where you can realize your aspirations, where you can blossom into your real self.

For Elkington, that meant finding somewhere he could flourish creatively. And as part of the Chicago underground-music community - reputed for its prolific nature - flourish he has. In London, the baritone singer/songwriter had brief stints in a couple of long-running indie-rock bands: the noisy Elevate, and the softer-and-slower Sophia. But in Chicago, the folk-rock fanatic - whose mild-mannered personality is spiked with that (in)famous British wit - came into his own. He assembled the Zincs, which started as a solo indie-pop endeavor but metastasized into a full indie-rock band. A lifelong fan of Chicago’s Touch and Go and Thrill Jockey labels, Elkington’s dream came true when the Zincs got picked up by the latter.

Naturally, being part of the Thrill Jockey family meant Elkington had new brothers and sisters with whom to collaborate. And cousins. And step-siblings. It’s a pretty big family and spans all sorts of indie subgenres: rock, pop, jazz, folk and beyond.

(Among Elkington’s brethren is the Mekons’ Jon Langford, one of the few other Brits he knows in the States. They have lunch - specifically, Vietnamese sandwiches - every Wednesday.)

“When I was growing up in England and listening to a lot of records that came out on Touch and Go and the earlier Thrill Jockey records, I remember thinking that it must have been some kind of magical place where there didn’t seem to be any segregation between musicians. Just because you’re a jazz musician didn’t mean you weren’t going to sit it on a rock band. … They don’t seem to see any difference between the different styles of music.”

That also includes country-folk. Pretty soon, Elkington found himself rubbing shoulders with Janet Bean and her perpetually heartbroken project of that ilk, Freakwater. He played guitar on the group’s 2005 effort, Thinking of You … (post-rockers Califone also performed on that album), cementing his association with Bean.

Enamored with their new friend, Freakwater (who are still alive) took the Zincs (who are not) on tour. But while the bands dug each other, Bean and Elkington eventually agreed in 2002 that a new project was in order.

And that brings us to the reason you’re reading this article: Meet the Horse’s Ha*.

“The way the band is designed - it wasn’t really this conscious, but it started off with me and Janet, who are essentially singer/songwriters and not really improvisers at all,” he explains. “We’re both fans of improvised music and musicianship in general, and we wanted to - not randomize, exactly - but bring some of that spark to what we were doing.

“Janet and I are more traditional in our songwriting. [But] we thought it would keep things interesting if we invited players who would be constantly reinventing the material. … Even though there are parts that everyone joins in for, the greatest part of the material is left up to the discretion of how the [other] players feel like playing it that night. Which makes it very interesting for me and Janet. I’ve certainly never been in a band like that.”

Said other players include bassist (and Jeremy Enigk collaborator) Nick Macri, drummer Charles Rumback and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, all of whom are well-versed, so to speak, in improv-ing. With Bean also dabbling with melodica and mandola, Macri fingering away at a double bass and Bean and Elkington providing contrasting harmonies, the all-acoustic venture is rich-sounding and more tranquilizing than a baby being rocked to sleep.

In the ensemble’s early stages, Elkington and Bean played cover songs, but eventually, he started writing his own compositions for the luscious group. And while the Horse’s Ha were introduced to the world seven years ago, there’s a reason they’re featured in this week’s installment of “The Rising”: Their debut release, Of the Cathmawr Yards*, didn’t drop until this past June, on Hidden Agenda.

To familiarize you with the record, here are two songs from it:

“Asleep in a Waterfall”

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“The Piss Choir”

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If you’re imagining what those songs might sound like in concert, hopefully you live in or near a major U.S. city: The Horse’s Ha have been playing some short tours, but overall, their gigs - even in support of their debut - have been infrequent.

“The thing is with this band, it’s no one’s primarily concern,” Elkington admits. After all, it did take them quite a while to come up with their first album. “It’s something we all enjoy doing. I suppose me and Janet are more in the day to day of it. Everyone is very committed to doing it, but everyone also plays in different groups.

“If there is a downside to the cross-pollination of musicians in Chicago, it’s that everyone is really fucking busy. [Our touring] isn’t really going to generate money, it’s really just being done for the fun of it, because we want to celebrate the record we’ve made. So you have to keep the tours short and sweet.

“Plus, none of us are really touring animals. Janet and I always thought, if we ever did get to the point where we’d be touring, it’d be a miracle that we [would have] gotten to that point. I remember opening for Freakwater, and we went on tour for six months. Maybe there was a little break in the middle. It was a lot of fun, but I remember Janet and I mutually agreeing that it was maybe too long, and that the next thing we [would do] maybe wouldn’t [tour] so much.”

While a lot of bands IndiePit has interviewed recently have stressed the necessity of touring as a means of survival, this is what makes Chicago so “magical,” as Elkington mentioned: You can subsist there by playing in multiple projects and rarely have to worry about leaving the city in order to make ends meet.

“I don’t know if a band like ours would find such a quick footing in other towns,” he says. “We have world-class jazz players on our doorstep, effectively, and we ask them if they would be interested in playing with us.

“There’s definitely something in the air here. Like, it’s kind of expected you’d play with other people. People have asked us if we think of ourselves as a Chicago band, and even though only one of us is actually from Chicago, yeah, we’re completely a Chicago band. I don’t know if a band like ours would necessarily happen anywhere else.”

Check back soon for part two of our interview with James Elkington. Till then, enjoy one more MP3, the Horse’s Ha’s cover of “Slow Moon’s Rose” by ’70s German avant-rockers Slapp Happy:

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*You might be wondering what’s up with the strange band name and equally odd album title. There’s gotta be good stories there, right? Well, it’s actually the same “story” behind both: They derive from a short story Welsh poet Dylan Thomas once wrote about zombies named “The Horse’s Ha.” It featured a graveyard called “The Cathmawr Yards.”

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Don’t miss these past editions of “The Rising”:

Rainbow Arabia
Brian Bonz
The Drums
Too Many Daves
Mountanaka
The Hero and the Victor