Freebass were one of the first acts on Deepgrooves to drop a full-length album, aided by the fact that they could cut it live. Cheap as chips to make, the album was recorded over three Friday nights at High St’s Cause Celebre nightclub in November 1992 with Chris Sinclair recording it, assisted by Zane Lowe, Mark Tierney editing and compiling it, and the band and Tierney producing.
Freebass - Raw: Live at Cause Celebre (Deepgrooves, 1993)
The album Raw: Live at Cause Celebre was released early 1993, with the funky typographic cover designed by Minka Firth. Freebass were part of a growing collection of musicians and DJs who mixed and mingled in an assortment of bands playing around High Street in central Auckland.
Jazz Committee in Vulcan Lane circa 1990. Malcolm Taylor, Steve Harrop, Ben Harrop, Nathan Haines, Joel Haines. - Photo by Chris Priestley
The lineup on the recording was bassist Steve Harrop, Ben Harrop on trombone, Nathan Haines on sax, Joel Haines on guitar, Ben Holmes on alto sax, Ben Gilgen (ex Ardijah) on keyboards, Juan Muzzio on percussion and Ritchie Campbell on drums. Nathan left after the recording and started his own band with Joel, as The Enforcers. The Harrop brothers and Haines had played together in an earlier outfit, The Jazz Committee.
In Auckland Jazz: The Cappuccino Years 1990-2000, BFM Jazz Show DJ Andrew Dubber wrote: “From 1992, Auckland was undergoing a rapid process of radical change, culturally, socially, infrastructurally and of course economically. The CBD had seen the first tentative influx of inner-city residents [thanks to the 1987 stock market crash making plenty of inner-city properties empty and ready for anyone to rent, with many landlords turning a blind eye if you happened to live there].
“The territory marked out by High Street, Lorne Street and Vulcan Lane was establishing itself as the heart of urbane café culture as well as the centre for young jazz nightlife, where those inner-city sophisticates hip to hip-hop could catch sax player Nathan Haines and then-rapper Zane Lowe shoulder to shoulder at Cause Celebre…
“... Perhaps capturing and typifying the scene in 1990s Auckland jazz were the Cause Celebre bands. Between 1990 and 1997 each weekend the High Street nightclub stopped playing records around midnight or 1am, and a band with a solid funk rhythm section (sometimes with two drummers), Latin percussionist, and sometimes a DJ and a rapper or two, would perform to an enthusiastic crowd of young people who had come specifically to hear them, often until dawn. And they would dance.
Freebass in Auckland's High Street, circa 1992. Left to right: Steve Harrop, his brother Ben, Ritchie Campbell, Ben Holmes, Nathan Haines, Juan Muzzio and Ben Gilgan. - Photo by Alistair Guthrie. Simon Grigg Collection.
“Amongst the earliest and most inventive of these was Freebass, a band driven by the two Harrop brothers, Steve (bass) and Ben (trombone), which featured a huge and everchanging array of young musicians.”
Dan Sperber (New Loungehead): “That was such a beautiful time in Auckland nightlife because you had the flannel coming in, the grunge thing, and suddenly it brought this flavour of Westies coming to town, and they could turn up at bars in High St and party, and be accepted. Now, if you go to something like Laneway, it’s become really middle class, no freaks.
Freebass (L-R): Juan Muzzio (percussion), Steve Harrop (double bass), Ben Harrop (trombone), Nathan Haines (sax), Ben Holmes (sax)
“With Freebass, you had Joel Haines with his long hair, his flannel shirts, and his low-slung Les Paul, and it was such a choice thing. It made such a great picture, that everyone could relate to. I loved Freebass, and it was a hard ask for Tierney to record it, cos they were just such a live, fruity sound.”
Nathan Haines & The Enforcers, Cause Celebre, Auckland circa 1994. Murray McNabb, Joel Haines, Ben Holmes and Nathan Haines. - Photo by Karl Pierard
Cause Celebre/Box co-owner Simon Grigg wrote in his Opdiner blog, May 24, 2009 that “Freebass were important for a number of reasons, but not least because it was one of the early vehicles for the Haines brothers, Joel and Nathan. Nathan’s next band was The Enforcers, who went on to record the globally released Shift Left, the only New Zealand-recorded album ever to appear on Verve.
“I remember the night fairly well. Chris Sinclair had miked up the room and he and Mark Tierney taped it, struggling against all sorts of adversity. They had to battle with odd acoustics, inebriated folks repeatedly tripping over cables, and staff who really didn’t care who or what they were, they had to get that case of Mac’s Gold to the back bar without delay.
“But it worked out pretty well, it was a landmark album at the time and, as I recall, sold pretty well.”
The album won Best Jazz Album at the NZ Music Awards in 1994.
Joel Haines, Sam Gent and Ben Harrop at the APRA Silver Scroll awards, 1994
Grigg mentioned other acts to play in Celebre included “Mark de Clive-Lowe, Greg Johnson and Bluespeak, Murray McNabb’s magnificent quartets, and, as we stretched the policy from jazz, the Fuemana family, a pre-hits Supergroove, Che Fu on his own, Upper Hutt Posse, Lava Lava and dozens more. I look back with some pride at what became the epicentre of what was happening musically in our late-night city and beyond, as these acts often went on to sell records around the world … in the case of Paul Fuemana, millions.” (Public Address/Speaker blog, May 22, 2009)
Grigg’s label Propeller arranged a digital reissue of Raw in 2010. The album liner notes, by New Zealand Herald music journalist Russell Baillie, chronicled a typical night for him, ending up at Cause Celebre after being out late, reviewing a rock gig. “After the deadline panic of scribbling some almost coherent thoughts on a notepad and phoning them through to make the next day’s New Zealand Herald, the night seemed young again, even if it was rapidly turning to morning.
“So it was down to CCs to unwind, drink, talk, and er, drink. Only Freebass started getting in the way … they didn’t just have volume and lots of shiny instruments. They had energy, guts, and groove. And more often than not, they had more of those qualities than that rock group earlier in the evening …
“... while the monster of the late ’80s early ’90s dance music and hip-hop increasingly looked to jazz for ideas and attitudes, acid-jazz exponents like Freebass were grabbing it by its tail, adding the kick of the dancefloor to their individual, gifted beyond their years musical abilities.
“As well as they figured you leave the standards for the wedding gigs; here you do your own tunes. The result? Well, some nights in CCs more people were dancing in front of Freebass than next door. Dancing to jazz? Isn’t that a bit like getting verbally excited about wallpaper? Perhaps, until this band with the slightly rotating door membership policy came along and gave what local jazz has needed – a good kick in the well-pressed, shiny bottomed-pants…”
The producers say in the liner notes that “This record attempts to capture what was at the time an electrifying live experience. Celebre is a basement jazz-style club where the band occupy one end of the tiny dancefloor, and the musicians are eye to eye with the audience, the soloists only inches from the sweating crowd.”
They also note some technical compromises had to be made due to the nature of the club. Venue staff were most accommodating, but a recurring technical fault beyond their control which meant a lot of the crowd’s response had to be edited out.
Ben Harrop: “We were playing every Friday night at De Bretts bar, and they’d open the sliding doors onto Shortland St, and there would be more people outside on the footpath watching the back of the band than inside. Zane and Oli [Green] were in effect, along with Nathan and Joel Haines, my brother Steve or Matt Fields on bass, and myself and Ben Holmes as well. Drumming was Tim, or Richie.
“At that time, we actually used to have practices, occasionally, which was completely unheard of for Freebass, and had some tricky time changes which we thought were cool – and Zane and Oli were very creative and funny.
“As I recall, after the first album on Deepgrooves, we recorded another album at that studio off Symonds Street [The Lab studio], just below Khyber Pass.
“This guy who was the manager or owner of De Bretts paid for some time at that studio, and we pissed around in there. Manuel Bundy was there as well, on the turntables. It was all laid down on reel to reel, and rather time consuming.”
Bundy says that the album they started at The Lab was engineered by Chris Sinclair and produced by Ben Harrop but never got released.
Harrop: “I do remember BFM having a copy of ‘Stinkfinger’ a particularly offensive song [done in those Lab sessions]. It wasn’t on high rotation.
“We did release another album – a cassette tape-only release [due to budget constraints] on Dedwood Records – named after the street in St Mary’s Bay where I lived. It was called Le Jazz Acidique and was all one-take recordings. That album was recorded at a studio in Newton Gully – I think Murray Thom owned it. Not sure why we didn’t put it down track by track – I guess cause all the tunes were 99% improvised, but it captured something.
“In a month we sold out 300 copies at Marbecks. And another 200 behind the bar at Cause Celebre. Definitely would have almost cracked the Auckland Hot 100 if there was ever such a list. One side of the tape was with Oli and Zane [of Urban Disturbance], the other just Freebass but without Nathan, instead this Aussie sax player was on tenor. Brad was his name – good musician.
“We were playing with Freebass at Celebre one night, [and] at the beginning of the second set around 3.30am, Bundy is spinning – Steve my brother is doubling up the bassline of The Jacksons’ ‘Shake Your Body Down To The Ground’.
“The band joins in, it’s a 20-minute version, Bundy scratching in the first four bars of The Jacksons’ vocal over and over. Nathan and Ben, soloing flat out on top of each other – that might have even been the night we had two drummers – both with complete drum sets.
“When that finished – remember the place is packed and everyone has had a couple of sherries – the general jubilation after the whole packed house was going off for such a long song, was just nice. You wanted the whole gig to be that moment. I think Otis Frizzell was jumping around up front with Traci Lords – what a crazy night. And the whole thing was started by Bundy and Steve with that great bassline.
“We never played that again, although probably should have. But we had been there already. ‘What other records ya got in that crate, bro?’
“We were very ambitious in those days, always wanting new tunes. We would usually end the night with ‘the fast one’ which was just a frenetic minute-long mindfuck of Zane, Oli, Joel, Ben Holmes, Nathan (if he was in the country) and Richie on drums, going berserk. It would freak the crowd out – some would love it, others would be disturbed, but there was always a neat few seconds of silence when it was all over, and the general reaction was ‘I have no idea what I just witnessed’.”
Bundy: “One thing I remember is when I DJed with Freebass I always used one of Richard Pryor’s live comedy albums. He had that ‘Freebase’ routine, [about] when he set himself on fire, and I used to cut that up.”
Soane at Cause Celebre, High Street, Auckland, 1995. - Photo by Simon Grigg
Soane Filitonga: “I’ve often said that the defining moment was when I was working the door of The Box/Cause Celebre and standing at the top or the bottom door between the two rooms.
“There would be this ‘oomph oomph’ coming out of The Box but every now and again, someone would walk out of Cause Celebre and there’d be tinges of jazz filtering through over the top of the ‘oomph oomph.’ I’d be like ‘this is amazing!’ I was exposed to some really great music and great musicians.
“I used to hang around in Celebre as well because I was friends with Nathan and that. I remember before samplers had come out, Nathan and I would go into the studio and make loops off records, put them onto DAT and take the DAT player down to the club. Manuel Bundy would be in the booth and I’d be sitting there with a DAT player. I’d play the DAT with the backing track and then the band would come out and jam over the top of it. Then Nathan would cut the backing track and the band would play on.” [Stephen Jewell, ‘Soane: Doorman – DJ – Producer’, NZ Musician, Vol: 11, No.4, (February/March 2004)].
The first time the APRA Silver Scrolls featured musicians covering the five finalists (an idea introduced by APRA’s boss Mike Chunn), back in 1993, Freebass had played one of the cover versions, doing a Headless Chickens number called ‘Choppers’ in such a radical fashion that it was largely unrecognisable. Murray Cammick told Chunn later that night that half the room hated it, the other half loved it.
Sani Sagala aka Dei Hamo used to rap with Freebass. He connected with them through Zane Lowe, after meeting him at a charity concert that both their groups performed at. They became mates, and one day Zane gave him a call, to ask for a favour. “Zane says ‘I need you to go with this band I freestyle with, to go to Wellington, do a gig, get paid, and come back to Auckland.’ I’m like ‘Where’s the favour?” Like, that was hella cool!”
Manuel Bundy, Nathan Haines, Sani Sagala on the Shift Left tour, Queenstown, 1995 - Photo by Simon Grigg
“The funny thing was [after I did the gig], they were like ‘Man, you’re awesome bro! But it’s kind of put us in a funny position.’ I’m like ‘Why, what’s up?’ And they said ‘We kinda want to fire Zane and take you on.’” (Sani Sagala aka Dei Hamo interview, Episode 3, ‘Aotearoa Hip Hop: The Music, The People, The History’ podcast, November, 2021)
Sagala felt bad about taking Zane’s gig so left it up to them to decide, and they brought him onboard. He started heading down to Celebre every Friday and Saturday for the next few years, ending up featuring on a key song on Nathan Haines’s debut album Shift Left.
In 2010, when Andrew Dubber and Zane Lowe talked on RNZ for Urban Disturbance in Broadcasting House, Lowe recalled: “Freebass were really good and they used to really try things out, they were pretty hardy souls, they were warriors for music, a real ragtag bunch of dudes. And somehow I ended up doing some freestyling for them for a while, and then Oli came and took my gig, and we would split out our time between each other, so they’d use Oli sometimes and use me sometimes and it was fun at the time, you know?
“They’d put a few things out here and there, and there’s probably like some tapes floating around somewhere. It was cool. For us, it was just a way to stay sharp and earn a bit of cash. It was like, ‘Cool, I’m a rapper, I’m not recording, I’m not on tour, I need some pocket money, I’ll go jump down De Bretts, jump down Cause Celebre, get on a couple of sessions with Freebass, make a bit of dough, happy days.’”
Andrew Dubber: “People now talk about that time like that was a movement. Jazz and hip-hop coming together in Auckland. That was a revolution for a lot of people.”
Lowe: “It was a bowel movement at times, but there were definitely some good jams that came out of that. Some good times, some good moments … Maybe it influenced some people – I don’t know, I’ve never met anyone, but we were just having a laugh!
“There’s a song called ‘Diamond In The Rough’, it had this weird kind of build, and the way it would jump in, I would have to count every time, cause it was Ben and Nathan’s private joke, they would have a seven and a half count, so it would go... One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, ‘I’m a diamond in the rough…’ and it would come in on the half. I can’t even do it to this day, but they used to think it was hilarious – it was just a private joke to them, to see if I’d mess it up.”
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An excerpt from Deepgrooves: a record label deep in the Pacific of bass, and the people who gave it a voice, by Peter McLennan (Auckland: Dunbar Noon, 2024). Published with permission.