Portland Cello Project Cavalcade of Strings Takes on Hip-Hop By Benjamin Ricci / Photos by Jason Quigley and Tarina Westlund
Portland Cello Project’s leader, Doug Jenkins, recently spoke with Performer about his group’s mission to blur genre boundaries and introduce new types of music to different audiences. A sight to behold, PCP’s stage show often features up to 12 cellos performing at once, and with a repertoire of nearly 1,000 pieces, there’s no shortage of styles or random pop songs you might hear at one of their concerts.
As the band so perfectly summarizes:
“The Cello Project’s mission is three-fold: 1 To bring the cello to places you wouldn’t normally hear it. 2 To play music on the cello you wouldn’t normally hear played on the instrument. Everything from Beethoven to Kanye West to Pantera. 3 To build bridges across all musical communities by bringing a diverse assortment of musical collaborators on stage.” On the group’s origin, Jenkins has this to offer: “It was kind of a random thing. A bunch of cellists moved to Portland about five or six years ago who all played different kinds of music. We’re all classically trained but we all played different kinds of music, from folk to rock. One day we were like, ‘Lets play in bars,’ which wasn’t an original idea, but it was fun, and then we thought, ‘This will never happen again, we’re done,’ 18 JULY 2012 PERFORMER MAGAZINE
but eventually for whatever reason we booked another show and took to inviting our friends on stage with us. Our first funny arrangement was one that I did of Brittany Spears’ ‘Toxic.’ It caught on and just kind of evolved to what it is today.” And so our interview begins…
You say one of the goals is to foster collaboration and I think that people might have the misconception that it’s ‘all cello, all the time.’
Yeah, absolutely. There have just been so many wonderful things we’ve done with other musicians. We just played the other day with Jennifer Holliday, who’s a Broadway singer from the original cast of Dreamgirls, and that was just an amazing thing, completely outside of what any of us had done stylistically. We’ve played with a lot of folk musicians in Portland. We’ve done some heavy metal collaborations up in Seattle. We went on tour with [guitar virtuoso] Buckethead. That was something else.
Does the bucket ever come off of Buckethead or is that a permanent fixture?
The bucket came off… But the mask, I never saw him without the mask! I mean, we
went on tour with this guy, and I still know nothing about him. I was like, ‘Man, all my mysteries are going to be solved.’ I remember reading about him in Guitar Player when I was a kid, and I was like ‘Yeah, I’m going to learn about Buckethead!’ but no, I don’t know anything. I have no gossip, nothing.
Buckethead is very much the prototypical guitar shredder. How do you collaborate, as a group of cellists, with that style?
I usually write the majority of the arrangements for the group and it’s been really eye opening. People talk about music as the universal language or whatever, and it is and it isn’t. If you open your mind to what’s going on inside the music, any kind of music - whether it be heavy metal, classical, hip-hop, Broadway, whatever there’s always something in there that’s inspired and human, and I think that’s really how all the collaborations work. You have to find that human connection, that inspired connection, and bring it out.
Do you have a stable line-up now?
It’s still a rotating cast. There’s definitely a kind of core group that tours. But for the most part, it’s still a rotating cast. And it depends, too, on the type of stage we’re playing on. I mean, some stages we’ll fit six or eight cellos on there but otherwise, if we’ve got space for ten or twelve, we’ll do that. And increasingly there’s more than just cellos on stage. We’ve almost always got at least one percussionist, usually two.
How do you recruit members?
Most people come to us, and there’s no audition process of anything. It’s pretty much just… you either can do it or you can’t. You’ve gotta be a really strong reader because we don’t have that many rehearsals. Even though we’re not playing all that much classical music, you’ve gotta be classically trained to play the pieces. Because technically you just won’t be able to do it, otherwise. Some of the stuff is just difficult and that’s the nature of the cello.
I’ve played cello and I can definitely attest to the fact that it’s not the easiest instrument to pick up and learn, especially intonation-wise, for people like me who are used to playing fretted instruments. Yeah, it’s my taskmaster. Something that I will never master completely, and I don’t think anybody does, which is kind of what’s so cool about it.
How do you choose a setlist?
I guess my goal is to kind of confuse the audience. [Laughs] That gives me the most entertainment in choosing stuff. Like, obviously Pantera should follow Bach, stuff like that.