Cease & Desist by Jungle Boogie

It’s hard to say when Jungle Boogie started. Britt and I first played together in January 2020, along with our friend Tim Ruth. We talked about calling that project Deep Fakes. During the pandemic and shutdown the three of us were more or less each others’ pod, getting together about once a week to work on Tim’s material and sit around, talking about everything from metaphysics to cryptocurrency to what was (and wasn’t) going on at the time - occasionally dipping in and out of conspiracy theories and always exploring all manner of tangents and arcs. Musically we hewed along similar lines, even though we were working on structured material, we rarely played an idea the same way twice. I hadn’t picked up my bass in ages and Tim and Britt’s patience with me was what I needed to push me out of the corner I’d unintentionally painted myself into at that point. Sadly, that trio fell apart after about a year and a half, without us having played a show or made any recordings to showcase what we had been working on. Britt and I tried to figure out a context to keep playing together, at first just bass and drums seemed like something worth trying to explore, but working in those roles as we had in the past didn’t make much sense in a duo setting.

In early 2023 we began playing regularly with Tim Barnes, which was the spark we needed. Tim was wrestling with early onset dementia (and continues to), but his playing and more importantly ability to improvise were undiminished. Tim was fearless, inventive and driven, and though I had played with him years ago in Pullman and Britt had been friends with him for years, neither of us had engaged with him as an improvisor. While I’ve spent plenty of time jamming and screwing around in a number of different contexts, I’ve never been willing or able to call myself an improvising musician, certainly not in the way Tim was. For Britt, both creating spontaneously and adapting to Tim’s broad palette of sounds was also new. As playing with Tim Ruth had been, this was a welcome push out of my comfort zone, and I know that Britt was also invigorated by our trio. Sadly again, that group came to an end, as Tim entered a period where playing regularly was no longer an option for him. Fortunately some of that music is documented elsewhere, released under Tim’s name.

The music represented here was all recorded post-Tim(s). It's fair to say Britt and I struggled a bit as a duo, but a few years in we were connecting more than we were not, and we had found a way to build a generous amount of sound between the two of us. I joked from time to time when people would ask me what we were up to that I was just trying to make enough noise to get Britt to do what only he can do, and I think there's ample evidence of that at hand. The earliest of these recordings is from late autumn 2023, the latest from early summer 2024. They appear here in roughly chronological order. Sometime in that span we decided to call ourselves Jungle Boogie, and played a handful of shows. Although almost every performance had some success, we were unable to achieve the same dynamic we shared with each other in rehearsal, which is much better showcased on these tracks than even the best moments of those shows. All of these recordings were made in our practice space, live to stereo, on a handheld digital recorder. As such, the quality is somewhat raw, but it captures the feel of what went down with an immediacy we could not likely have achieved under a more structured recording situation. A couple of the tracks have some minor editing, mostly for clarity and conciseness (one could argue that with not a single track clocking less than 7 minutes and most well exceeding 10, concise may not be the best way to describe our approach…) One track, Lives Of The Most Excellent, is an excerpt from a recording of one of our practices that we burned to some CDRs in an edition of 10 and sold at shows with hand painted and folded sleeves. Unfortunately on that track you can hear the limiter snapping shut throughout, though that particular selection seems to somewhat benefit from the squashed vibe.

The intent behind making these recordings was not so much to create something to present outwardly as it was to listen back to what we were up to, see how the things that felt like they worked in the moment held up to further listening and so forth. Britt and I both have well earned reputations for being a bit mercurial in our musical associations, so it seemed inevitable that this situation wouldn’t carry on forever. On the one hand pushing to play out may have hastened the demise of this arrangement, but it’s reasonable to wonder how long the two of us would have kept at it just grooving in our own space. As we looked back and spent some time with this music, we both enjoyed listening to it well enough to want to make it available for others to check out, and I still feel the frisson we shared in the moment with each listen. We hope you do too.

- Ken Brown 

Jungle Boogie was an improvisational duo of Ken ("Bundy") Brown and Britt Walford