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Doing time with one-man orchestra Tippy Agogo
Mirror: So
how did your whole musical shtick come about? Tippy Agogo: Well,
my mother is an ethnomusicologist and for a while, growing up, we lived
in some of the worst ghettos in the United States. She was teaching
all these black and Hispanic kids, essentially learning their ethnic
folk dances and teaching it back to them. By the time I was sixteen
I could do all sorts of folk dances. Basically, in those days, there
were no trees in these neighbourhoods that people could cut down to
make live drums the way they would have done back in their homeland,
Africa. They only had garbage cans. And the one thing I noticed was
that in all of these ghettos kids were playing beats on garbage cans
turned upside down. That’s where it all really started for me.
Later, my mom married a Mexican and he was always doing this vocal percussion
stuff and I picked up a lot from him as well. M: Vocal
percussion? TA: Yeah,
I mimic the sounds of buses, doors slamming, whale sounds, everything.
Making sounds with my face and putting it into a loop. M: Oh, I
see, kind of like the black guy from those old Police Academy movies. TA: Um,
well, it’s not a shtick, you know. I have a four-octave voice and
what I do with my mouth is orchestral. I manipulate feedback, using
loops and delays a little bit. A lot of it’s live. It’s organic.
I build four-part harmonies and polyphony simultaneously, right on the
spot. It sounds like a DJ but everything is live. All the tin cans I’m
beating on are live. M: I suppose
it’s not easy to put a label on your work. TA: Well, no, because I don’t do any one style consistently. I have four albums now and every two songs I do are different. What I’m trying to do in my life—and maybe this will only happen once I’m dead—is start a genre called “know genre.” It’s a genre for artists that do whatever the fuck they want and for the audiences who expect this from them—audiences who understand they’re coming to see a well-rounded show.
Caged heat M: You’ve
played a lot of interesting venues in your time—Bosnian refugee
centres, penitentiaries, etc. Have you played any prisons lately? TA: No,
not so much lately, but I love doing it. I like to take my cue from
Johnny Cash, who is my favourite guy. M: I’ve
heard that women’s penitentiaries can be a pretty cool place for
a virile young male to score a gig in. Is that true? TA: Last
time I played inside a woman’s prison I did a kind of industrial
samba thing with a 13-piece band full of sexy guys and one really hot
female dancer—who turned out to be really popular with a lot of
the inmates. Anyway, halfway through the gig, I sensed that we were
missing a percussionist on stage. And then I noticed there were all
of these giggling women in the audience surrounding a table, blocking
it from the view of the guards and everything. You could tell that something
was going down over there and sure enough, they had somehow managed
to smuggle our percussionist under the table to take turns doing stuff
they weren’t supposed to be doing with him. When he came out he
was all flushed and exhausted. M: And how
did you fare personally? TA: Oh, well, you know, I was just singing on stage and hiding behind our female dancer. Honestly, most of the inmates were chasing after her. But the whole experience was very surreal—it was like we had walked into a Nazi camp, there was so much security and everything. You know, I don’t know much about the justice system but I can’t help but think that there’s got to be a better way. : With Carrie
Katz and Butterfly at le Swimming tonight, Thursday, Feb. 21, 9pm, $5
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Tippy
Agogo is a celebrated West Coast musician who is famous, as freak show
impresario Jim Rose puts it, for being able to “make an orchestra
out of a wet soggy box.” Incorporating tape loops, exotic rhythms,
homemade percussive instrumentation and an ability to mimic pretty well
any sound with just his vocal chords, Tippy’s always unique performances
have become legendary in some circles. In his day, the Tipster has worked
alongside k.d. lang, Skinny Puppy and Sarah McLachlan, to name but a
few. The Mirror spoke to the enigmatic troubadour, currently in the
process of relocating to Montreal, by phone earlier this week.