Skerik photo by Daniel Sheehan
BY M. V. SMITH
“I like to be in bands.”
Forty years into his musical career, Seattle saxophonist Skerik, resident artist of the 2024 Earshot Jazz Festival, has earned the right to a little understatement.
At one time or another a simultaneous member of too many projects to count, from Critters Buggin’s eclectic blend of heavy rock, prog, and North African trance to the groove-oriented, organ-tinged soul jazz of Garage A Trois to the funk of Headhunters drummer Mike Clark’s Prescription Renewal, to the metal maelstrom of LORBO and the foreboding soundscapes of Sound Cipher, the self-proclaimed dark lord of the saxophone has dedicated his career to the art of collaboration.
Trumpeter and monologuist Ahamefule J. Oluo, a frequent tourmate, testifies to Skerik’s devotion to the band life. “He was just always making sure that everyone is getting on the bus on time,” they remember. “He’s the one voluntarily doing a head count and like, administrative, logistical things to make sure that everything runs right and everything runs smoothly because he’s such a pro…there’s like, zero diva at all.”
Though he sold his tour van during the pandemic, largely transitioning to weekend fly-out dates, Skerik admits he longs to get back on the road. “I love it. I miss it. Yeah, I do not like being at home. I want to sleep in a different bed every night.”
Skerik grew up in Seattle’s suburbs in the seventies, with a dedicated jazz fan father who took him to concerts—Buddy Rich, Count Basie—and delighted in his son’s musical inclinations. “It was cool as a kid being able to practice and have someone listening in the other room and reacting: ‘Sounds good!’” he recalls.
After high school, he audited a class at Cornish College of the Arts taught by local jazz eminence Julian Priester, on top of a demanding day job. “I was running to class, from downtown to Capitol Hill, sweaty. And it was hard, but it was great,” he says.
During his peripatetic twenties, he performed African music in London with his Seattle friend Leif Totusek and followed a French girlfriend to Paris, among other adventures. However, promising musical opportunities, he cites the explosive punk-jazz trio Sadhappy and Critters Buggin, for having a way of bringing him back home.
In the nineties, alongside Critters Buggin bandmates, Skerik sought to deflate the pretentiousness he perceived in many of their peers, performing in outlandish costumes—Mexican lucha libre masks, a sparkly purple coat redolent of the Sun Ra Arkestra’s robes, a bright red cloak and devil’s horns—and touring with an elaborate visual component, courtesy of lighting director David Verkade.
“Instrumental music, the way we all came up with it, just took itself so fucking seriously,” he remembers. “We don’t want to go out there thinking we’re some high and mighty, pious thing…you’re going to get up [on stage], and people are looking at you. So, what are you going to do? You’re going to take advantage of it. It’s just another creative outlet. How is it any less than what notes you choose to play, you know? So, for us, investing in a light show and all the stuff was just very natural.”
Influenced by the surreal, absurdist, and confrontational theatre of playwrights like Richard Foreman and Jean Genet, Skerik also honed a style of prankish, irreverent stage banter all his own. Critters Buggin performances posted to YouTube capture him solemnly intoning “We come from the basements of Seattle” to a Polish festival audience, or ranting about the opening act that supposedly drank all the band’s beer in Portland. “That stuff has to come from a sense of humor, from the individuals that will tolerate it,” he says. “I was always in bands, and they would get mad if I said things on the mic, like, you know, something about Christianity, or, you know, some stupid shit about religion or politics. They’d go, ‘Well, you shouldn’t say that!’ but this was a band that was more open to that stuff.”
Like fellow Seattleites Bill Frisell on guitar, or Cuong Vu on trumpet, Skerik has long explored the sonic possibilities of effects and loops, over time graduating from simple overdrive pedals to elaborate rigs that enable him to harmonize with himself many times over or warp his tone to create indefinable sheets of sound. “He has a seeking mind and a seeking spirit,” says Clark. “He’s trying to open the music up for exploration, not just have it sit there and do what it normally does.”
Over the years, solo shows featuring the entire rig have become elaborate feats of mental coordination and pre-planning. “It takes weeks and months to program it and play,” he explains. “I’ll do dress rehearsals, two or three times a day. So the timer goes on, 45 minutes, and I try and get everything to fit in there.”
We met on a drizzly Monday afternoon for the interview in his White Center backyard studio, a tangle of road cases, amps, and instruments. Tenor and baritone saxes sit at the ready on stands while a drum kit and keyboards await LORBO band practice later that evening. Books and records strain shelves alongside emblems of his conceptual inclinations. A tiered red Devo “energy dome” helmet. A taste for the grotesque–a macaroni-and-cheese-spewing Cheddar Gobin–the disgusting mascot for a fictional food brand in the horror film Mandy and gift from his longtime collaborator, Randall Dunn, who served as a musical engineer to the film’s score.
The White Center compound, purchased 2010, affords Skerik a degree of creative freedom, unencumbered by a landlord’s whims. “I built out so many rental basements, spent a lot of money making them into studios, and then you just gotta leave,” he says. “They raise the rent, or you get kicked out for whatever reason they sell the house.”
Even with the cushion of his studio, Skerik still faces the financial realities of sustaining a band in the age of streaming, barely existent label support, and dwindling guarantees. Recalling the chemistry his aughts-era Syncopated Taint Septet honed during multiple weekly rehearsals, he grants that such a commitment may no longer be feasible. “It’s just so prohibitively expensive, you know,” he explains. Paying a band for three weeks of rehearsals “would cost me thousands of dollars, to go play $500 or $1000 gig…it’s really difficult.”
That financial precarity hit Skerik hard last April.
While on tour with Scott Amendola and Wil Blades, he suddenly suffered unexplained, debilitating shoulder pain, leaving him unable to play or even to get out of bed. A year’s worth of engagements evaporated overnight. “I spent months working on projects that just got wiped out. It’s unbelievable,” he says. “Airline flights—I lost thousands of dollars just the first day.”
Kept afloat by a GoFundMe organized by Amendola and Blades, Skerik dedicated himself to a physical therapy regimen and worked hard to recover his technique following a three-month break from the saxophone, the longest he’d ever gone without playing. “For someone to sustain an embouchure playing an instrument like this, you can’t; if you don’t practice one day it takes two days to make up for it,” he explains.
He also struggled to rebuild his concert stamina in the far more placid surroundings of his studio. “I’m seeing that practicing every day is not the same as performing every day,” he says. “For some reason, it’s so hard to replicate the adrenaline and all that energy from playing live.”
As he regains his old form, Skerik has gradually returned to live performance, traveling to New Orleans to curate a slate of shows at this year’s Jazz Fest, performing locally with his trio and quartet, and this September heading to San Francisco to back Clark at SFJAZZ. He has also begun work on his Earshot dates, inviting Oluo’s band to back him for the opening night party, enlisting filmmaker Blazinspace to create projections to accompany a solo concert, and inviting vocalist Johnaye Kendrick. “We have some amazing ideas that I’ve dreamt of doing for a long time,” he says.
For Oluo, who was a tenant on Skerik’s property at the height of his struggles, his return is both a relief and a boon.
“You really feel, with someone like Skerik, how much this life has been a part of him for so long,” they say. ”It’s so hard to have all of that just taken from you in an instant, and have to reevaluate so many things about your life, who you are. It was really hard to watch him go through that situation.”
“I was so glad the first time I heard him practice,” Oluo adds. “I was like, oh my God, he’s playing again! It was really incredible. I’m so glad that he’s back and that he’s playing as amazing as he ever did.”
