Monsters Of Ska
"Researching where to place mics, what mics to use. We wanted the record to sound like you were having that orchestral experience, sitting in a great sounding room.”
"A bit of organising, a bit of love and a bit of magic and it all comes together,” Bomba laughs as he downplays the technical and logistical aspects of pulling off the kind of event that recording the Melbourne Ska Orchestra's debut album must have been. “The hardest part is just getting all those people in the one place at the one time – everyone's doing different things.”
Over the two week duration of the recording process, there were up to 25 people in the studio at any one time. Bomba and his engineer Robin Mai coordinated the recording sessions so precisely that he says it actually wasn't that much more of a challenge than recording a smaller band. It also helped that as a multi-instrumentalist (Bomba most famously plays drums for John Butler Trio in another life) he was able to pick up the slack and jump on drums or guitars if the circumstance arose.
“We always had the majority of the horn section there and bass players and percussionists,” he explains. “We always had enough people to make a song and then I added some overdubs later on. It was one of those things where you throw a bunch of stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks, and a lot of it did!”
The band consist of a lot of session musos and players from other bands, all of whom relished the opportunity to record in such a non-conventional way.
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“Sometimes it's hard to translate the live spirit of a band onto a record, and with the orchestra it seemed like the live approach was the only way you could record that band,” Bomba continues. “The essence of the sound was the harmonic synthesis that happens when you have everything in one room. Our main goal was to set up room mics to capture that, and that's how we spent a lot of our time. Researching where to place mics, what mics to use. We wanted the record to sound like you were having that orchestral experience, sitting in a great sounding room.”
This method of capturing musicians in a live room environment as opposed to close micing the individual instruments dates back to the beginnings of recorded music, with one or two microphones picking up the entire band due to the restraints or early recording technology. “We did a lot of research listening to the big bands like Gene Krupa Band and orchestras, and they always had a beautiful stereo image,” he says. “If you listen to classical music, even on shitty headphones, you can hear a big stereo aural experience. If you can translate it on that level and you spend a bit of time with it you can really do it. The harmonic overtones that happen when a guitar and a horn and a bassline all congeal – we were kind of thrilled when it came to mixing and we could hear that we had captured that real energy.”
Getting down on tape the real essence of a band is always a challenge, and Bomba says that it's actually possible to achieve if you go about it the right way and think outside the boundaries of how recordings are commonly made in the modern digital age. “You hear people say that about bands all the time, that they sound really great live but it doesn't sound the same on record,” Bomba continues. “It's often a diluted version, but we really feel like we captured that energy. There's a lot to be said for capturing the real emotion of the track, the warmth.”
Bomba says that lessons he learnt from the exercise were very valuable and will have an impact on his future endeavours. It also gave him an insight into why he liked the sound of music from his younger days when he fell in love with music the first time, like early reggae and ska recordings. “Even stuff like the Buena Vista Social Club,” he says. “There's a lot of room in those recordings and you don't sit back and think about it, you feel the music and that's it.”
Melbourne Ska Orchestra, as you can imagine, are an amazing sight on stage, especially when you get to witness them on stage at an event like Golden Plains in Meredith, Victoria where the majority of the other acts are three- or four-piece bands. They've also taken on the daunting Blues & Roots Festival in Byron Bay and stood their ground amongst the flotilla of international bands and household names the festival is famous for attracting. Bomba says one of the best aspects to finally having an album in the can is that they can now work their own original material into the set and graduate from being almost a review style show to a fully fledged original band in their own right. He says that the last night of Bluesfest this year was a pinnacle moment for the group.
“Up and until this year, before we recorded our album, we used to do a few originals but we were just really a ska cover band. Now that we've got our own album out, we've really stepped it up and the whole feeling throughout the band is that we're not just rehashing old stuff, we're making some inroads into the ska genre. To be playing original songs and to get the reaction that we did at Bluesfest, it was pretty special. It just felt great.”
The feverish loyalty of ska fans is well known. They stick by the bands and looser associations with the genre despite it falling in and out of public favour as the circle of fashion spins. Bomba says that the fans of the broader genre of ska have been ready and willing to embrace the band, even if it turns into non-traditional territory and Bomba's massive range of influences create new tangents.
“When we played Golden Plains recently, we were before Parliament and after the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion,” he says. “Half of the people there probably didn't even know what ska was. We just did what we do and went 'this is our energy' and I think people pick up on that. I think the ska purists – well all I've heard from them is thank yous for flying the flag for ska. I don't find any sort of elitist attitude at all from them. What we're doing, our set and our songs pay respect to old ska, to the 2-tone ska era and with our new stuff it's like a hybrid with Latin funk and New Orleans. So because we're offering something new there's a freshness about it. Guys that have been doing ska for years and years come up to me and physically shake my hand and say thank you for pushing the barriers for ska and turning more people onto it.”
Melbourne Ska Orchestra will be playing the following dates:
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