A plywood crate is not an instrument anyone chooses for its range. Rick Brown chose it anyway, and for more than a decade it has been the floor under everything 75 Dollar Bill does: a dry, resonant thump, fringed with maracas, shakers and bells, that carries a groove for fifteen minutes without asking for attention. Above it sits Che Chen's guitar, tuned to places a standard fretboard cannot reach. Wooden Bag, from January 2015, is where that arrangement first became a proper record.
Brown had played since the 1980s in V-Effect and Curlew; Chen came out of True Primes. They began playing together in New York in 2012, first at the Manhattan Inn in Greenpoint, and taped a cassette the following spring from live sets and rehearsal recordings. In 2013 Chen also went to Mauritania to study Moorish modal music with the guitarist Jeich Ould Chigaly. It was a short apprenticeship, but it reset his ear: by the time of Wooden Bag he was playing a quarter-tone guitar on two tracks, and the intervals between Western notes had become a working vocabulary rather than an exotic flavour.
Wooden Bag was the band's first vinyl outing, released by the Other Music Recording Company after two cassettes, and its seven tracks are a short course in the method. Two versions of a piece, intro/wzn#2 and intro(cont'd), show how a single modal cell can be turned over until the repetition itself becomes the event. On box-altos and 4 altos both men put down their main tools and pick up alto saxophones, producing a rough, stacked drone closer to a village horn ensemble than to any jazz reference. Brown recorded it himself, Chen made the hand-stamped sleeve, and the first pressing sold out fast enough to earn a later repress.
What makes the record more than a curiosity is its refusal to treat its influences as decoration. The Mauritanian modes, the wezin dance numbers that guitarists play at weddings there to work a crowd, the raw boogie of American guitar music: none of it is quoted. It is metabolised into a language of pattern and rhythm that belongs to these two players.
Everything since has grown from that base. Wood/Metal/Plastic/Pattern/Rhythm/Rock arrived in 2016 on the Los Angeles label Thin Wrist and brought in baritone sax, viola and contrabass. I Was Real, a 2019 double album recorded over four years with eight guests including Sue Garner, Cheryl Kingan, Karen Waltuch and Barry Weisblat, topped The Wire's annual list. The band now shifts between duo, Little Big Band and a 25-piece marching outfit, and keeps releasing live tapes from Tubby's, Cafe OTO and its Social Music at Troost series.
Yet the crate and the odd-tuned guitar are still the whole idea, and Wooden Bag is the clearest proof that two people with limited materials and enough patience can sound like nowhere in particular and everywhere at once.
