Laing blows to laws of supply and demand

By GRAHAM REID

Toby Laing may just be the hardest-working man in New Zealand show business. He's a Wellington trumpeter who has played in Black Seeds and, with CL Bob, is a member of Fat Freddy's Drop, and a new outfit, Scribes of Ra.

Tomorrow night he also appears with the Flight of the Conchords and last week he was in Auckland working on a music score for a contemporary dance production.

He was a mid-90s graduate of the same Wellington Polytech jazz course that spawned TrinityRoots, Twin Set and most of the people he now plays with.

Tomorrow night he's on stage with all three bands at the Trifecta! gig. We were curious about his workload.

The joke in Auckland has been that every flat in Newtown seems to come with its own horn section. But now we know it's just you, isn't it?

Well, it's actually me and Joe Dukie [Dallas Tamaira from Fat Freddy's], but also some new guys who are in Scribes of Ra.

Is your life just constant rehearsals?

It's been like that this year. Fat Freddy's, Black Seeds and CL Bob were all getting off the ground at the same time with releases, but then there are the working bands which are doing well, like Scribes of Ra and Twin Set. I'm not actually in Twin Set but am in a few bands with those guys.

So really there's just a core of 15 to 20 people in Wellington who are in about eight bands?

Yeah, all the people at Trifecta! tomorrow are a pretty wide representation of who's around in Wellington. The only thing we'd be missing out would be the whole scene at The Space, which has now changed its name to Happy, which is a venue where a whole other group of musos are connected.

I guess the reason you have so many aliases is to keep those separate identities?

Everyone's got lots of nicknames. Mine changed from Toby Hornblower to Tony Nairobi which then went to Tony Ironi then Tony Chang. It's still going. It's a bit confusing releasing things under all these names but I haven't really settled on anything yet.

Apparently not, Sugar 2 Tone and Clubba Laing. But fair enough. Scribes of Ra, who play tomorrow, are a new band to us. I thought it might be an excuse to play old Sun Ra songs, but the inspiration is the Nigerian Afrobeat of Fela Anikulapo Kuti.

All we play is the music of Fela Kuti and we've learned these arrangements and are trying to make them our own. We've also started a set of original stuff but at the moment it's in the roots of that Afrobeat which we had to learn over a long period.

It took us about seven months of rehearsals before we did any gigs, getting 20 people together once a week to sort out this style we were unfamiliar with. It started with the drummers learning how to do that Tony Allen stuff.

It's more complicated music than it sounds. People think you just get that groove going and that's it.

Yeah, it's given us a discipline we didn't get from jazz school, where it was all about assignments and proving you could cut the changes and be a soloist. With this it's all about staying at home in the pattern and having to hold down your part, and sometimes for 40 minutes if it's going well. If not, we start another one up.

Fat Freddy's Drop is off for a British/European tour soon.

We're going on April 20 for six weeks. We travelled overseas last year for three months and tried to cover costs along the way. London for six weeks, then Berlin for six weeks and we spent time in Amsterdam and had a gig there with TrinityRoots. We made some good contacts.

We've now got a tour of clubs hooked up and some larger venues for this six weeks, and the idea was to secure some places in festivals for later this year, but we might be going back later than that.

The main thing is we finish the Fat Freddy's album and that will take another month and a half when we get back.

And what happens to Black Seeds and Scribes of Ra while you are away?

I'm not playing with Black Seeds currently. They've got such a heavy touring schedule and I'm so busy with Fat Freddy's I had to stand aside. Scribes is big enough to carry on, too.

You are playing with Flights of the Conchords also tomorrow.

When they played the Classic in Auckland a year ago they had a full band with them and I was in that. They haven't done that since then so we are getting it happening again for this gig. So there will be a heavier presence from the Conchords.

And a heavy presence for you because you are in all three bands.

Yeah, I'll be in deep costume, getting into different personalities.

And of course getting three times as much money as the rest of them.

Ahhh, I don't think it's going to work out like that.

Performance

* What: Trifecta! with Fat Freddy's Drop, Flight of the Conchords and Scribes of Ra

* Where and when: Regent, tomorrow