Three guys walk into a bar — or a virtual recording studio — and create rattling, calamitous rhythms, slippery edits and freewheeling, squealing, cracking guitar and banjo lines cascading with taut contagious melodies, all improvisationally, without ever being in the same room.
Album number one, Stove Top (RareNoiseRecords, 2021), featured the players of Three-Layer Cake — bassist Mike Watt, banjo-playing guitarist Brandon Seabrook, drummer-producer Mike Pride — going long on improvisations with a series of elastic, eight-minute-plus tracks.
Their new record, Sounds the Color of Grounds (Otherly Love Records), finds the trio tightening up with shorter songs but double-the-melody musicality. And, fittingly, a dedication to Beat-punk-funk minimalism re Mike Watt’s former band and punk origin story, Minutemen.
While no one here is strictly jazz, Watt is the least of all, having gone from Minutemen to indie-rockers fIREHOSE and a series of rough-house solo albums to holding down sideman gigs beside Iggy Pop in his latter-day Stooges reformation, to recent rock-out ensembles such as Il Sogno del Marinaio and Big Walnuts Yonder with Nels Cline.
“Let’s talk about the ‘j’ word,” Watt says with a laugh about his introduction to jazz, and how he initially got it confused with the “p” word.
“The first time I heard Coltrane was when [illustrator] Raymond Pettibon played me Ascension after a Germs gig, and it sounded like punk to me. Punk was more of a mindset then, so the freak flag that was flying for jazz was similar to that of punk.”
Seeing the likes of Elvin Jones, Cecil McBee, Pharoah Sanders and Little Jimmy Scott in intimate club settings (“the same type of places where Minutemen played”) further connected DIY jazz to punk for Watt. “I’ve always been in student mode, and being five feet from guys like Elvin Jones onstage made me feel as if we were kindred spirits.”
Bungee Cords and Revenge Tools
Fast-forward to the last ten years, when Watt put himself in the center of improv-oriented trios such as the collab with guitarist Joe Baiza and drummer Chris Corsano, tuneful jams with jazz guitarist Mike Bagetta and drummer Stephen Hodges (“I love trios because you have more room in the boat”), and A Love Supreme Electric with Vinny Golia and Henry Kaiser.
I remind Watt of something my late saxophonist father once said: “Solo as free and go as far out as you want, but always come back to the head, to the melody.” Here, Watt totally identified with the personal aspect of all free playing.
“Too much stuff gets abstracted. Kids ask me about the old days of punk, and I tell everyone that it all came down to the people making it. I think that’s happening again now, too. There are people playing in the movement where getting back to the clubs rather than worrying about achieving arena rock status is important, just like Raymond taking me to see Elvin Jones. That’s the bungee cord that’s going to keep me from slipping off the bullshit limb.”
The people of Three-Layer Cake, who Watt didn’t know before making Stove Top (the three still haven’t met in person), had to have revealed enough of their hand and their personalities to entice the bassist. “If you want to make something happen, you find ways,” Watt says. “We might miss the physicality of being in a studio together — that means you have to work harder to visualize it all in your mind. And you get the benefit of doing things again on your own terms. You can even record naked.”
After interviewing Pride as a guest on the Watt from Pedro radio show, the gears started turning, and the drummer suggested his pal Seabrook as the third layer.
“Pride has a good rap, and he was talking about the joys of improvising and his music journey. I suggested that for me to further learn, why don’t you do it with me,” says Watt. “And go find a third person, put it in a bowl and mix it together. So Pride sent tracks and I played to them as if they were an improvised event, a layered collaboration. And then what Brandon added to the Cake blew my mind. I have no idea what Brandon felt like when he got those tracks from me and Pride, but it was incredible. The banjo shit especially.”
Though it was Watt’s idea to make Three-Layer Cake happen, the bassist is clear that he wanted Pride in the driver’s seat. He’s fascinated by the notion of drummers as composers. “Drummers should be at the front of the stage — that’s how I’ve done it live for the last 25 years,” says Watt.
“Chico Hamilton couldn’t get credit for songwriting because his [charts] were too short, so I’m using Mike Pride as a revenge tool against the record biz racket. For me, there was no way that Pride was going to just be the guy in the rear with the gear.”
After 2021’s Stove Top proved successful for its cut-and-pasted jams trimmed up like a handsome haircut, a goal of brevity was derived for Three-Layer Cake’s second outing, one where melody became more of a priority, with Pride and Seabrook asking Watt to sing something of his own devising.
“I took the first three sonnets of Shakespeare and imagined I was writing for Raymond Pettibon, and repurposed that for Three-Layer Cake,” Watt says, laughing. “Pride wanted me to sing on the first album, but I didn’t want people to think it was a Mike Watt project. This is our project. I was too blown away by what they did to see it as any other way but a collab. Pride and Seabrook brought so much identity to what we were doing that I decided I could get away with my singing spiel on this second album.”
The Seabrookian Way
Brandon Seabrook is the baker most interested in Watt continuing the “singing spiel,” as it is the guitarist-banjoist who came up listening to, and loving, Watt’s Minutemen with the late, great singer and frontman D. Boon (who died in an auto accident in 1985 at age 27).
“I first heard Minutemen when I was 15,” says the guitarist about life before the New York jazz and improvisation scene. “Coming from a classic rock, hair metal, blue-based rock place, I had never heard anything so ridiculous in its musicianship, brevity, ferocity and humor. It had a deep soulfulness to it, too. Even D. Boon’s lyrics, with words like “foist” and “fascist”: You didn’t get that in hair metal. Minutemen felt fresh.”
Freshness first manifested itself on guitar for Seabrook before he allowed the rhythmic kick of the banjo to take hold. “I’m so in love with percussion, and in my music, rhythm takes precedence over pitch for the most part. The tenor banjo that I play is very percussive, with virtually no sustain to it. If I want sustain, I have to use tremolo picking to create it, or a bow. The banjo, though, is so tactile — it’s like a snare drum. I was drawn to that. It’s the exact opposite of a guitar, and I love the dichotomy of those two sound worlds.”
Eventually, Seabrook brought guitar techniques to banjo and banjo techniques to the guitar for what he calls “a more unified sound.” But all of those elements can be heard on albums from saxophonist-composer John Zorn and traditional klezmer groups to upcoming recordings with vocalist Cécile Mclorin Salvant’s chamber ensemble and David Byrne’s work with the Ghost Train Orchestra on the forthcoming September 2025 release Who Is the Sky? [Matador]. This is in addition to Seabrook’s own recent albums on Pyroclastic, brutalovechamp (2023) and Object of Unknown Function (2024).
On remote recording with Watt and Pride, Seabrook says: “Their foundation was so strong that I heard things right away — I had an electric endorphin rush.” The Grounds material came to life with Pride-Watt rhythm tracks at eight or nine minutes, which Seabrook sought to change to something tighter.
“I thought maybe we could make more of a concise statement on this second album, something more song-based,” Seabrook says. “Watt wanted that too — he would tell Mike that we had to reel some of this in. So I put my stuff down, then Pride and I sculpted each track down, then sent those back to Watt to talk things out. Fine-tuning the mix of it all, the sculpting and everything, made it sound more physical, more slushy.”
No More Bull
Mike Pride has been a part of so many scenes and music in New York City that it’s hard to find the root of what he’s doing with Three-Layer Cake. There’s the industrial poli-sci punk rock of Millions of Dead Cops, his drumline septet Drummer’s Corpse, the hardcore MOC and even a jazz piano trio, I HATE WORK, to say nothing of jazz ensembles he leads such as From Bacteria to Boys, Pulverize the Sound and Period.
“I still don’t know what to think of the Three-Layer Cake albums, or where they came from,” says Pride from his home studio. He believes, though, that one thing is totally different on this album: “[Watt’s] bass parts are more organic this time out, based on what I sent him to play over. The first album I took more of an approach to chopping everything up. For Grounds, I did less of that, less dubbing and moving things around.”
Pride is also serious about challenging himself without repeating past victories. “Specifically since I’ve had children, I definitely don’t give a fuck what people think of me or how they judge my playing,” he says. “I had long felt like the bull in the china shop, and maybe I liked that at first, playing punk rock. Now I don’t mind being the bull, but there’s so much more that I’m into. I would do these very delicate, complicated sessions where they wanted a lot of energy, but didn’t know how to achieve that — so they’d ask everyone to do interesting stuff and me to just go apeshit. That got boring, so I pulled back on the density and found [a] new space where I could access intensity that doesn’t involve so much obvious machismo.”
A Working Band?
As Watt used the phrase “second album” often, it seemed to signal that a third album was happening, one scheduled with the three Layers in person at last, at Pride’s New York studio come autumn.
I imagine an if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it-scenario where the three Layer men discover that real chemistry exists, no matter their physical distance or proximity.
“I always like each project to change with every record in some significant way,” says Pride. Seabrook, for one, has a hope that Watt will sing more. “Getting together in person is a natural progression, a logical next step, gives us more to work off,” Seabrook says, before laughing. “Then again, it could also be a disaster.”
As for Watt, the eternal boat captain, he’ll do what he does best. “I say let’s play first, then do whatever,” he laughs. “They’re interesting cats, and I’m looking forward to hanging, but let’s get down to business.” JT