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Bottomfeeders   Biography: We are BOTTOMFEEDERSCellist DANIELLE DEGRUTTOLA Bassist ASHLEY ADAMS ELEGANT STRING FUSION, JAZZ, THAT REALLY ROCKS! "Cellist Danielle Degruttola and upright bassist Ashley Adams... grace the stage... with a deep boogie full of good-natured blues rumbling and pattering." 21ST-CENTURY MUSIC reports on their last public performance (March 2002 Edition): "A happy blend between timbre and composition is offered by the Bottomfeeders, an engaging duo of cello and bass. Danielle DeGruttola and Ashley Adams, vary their bowing from sul ponticello to tasto, heavy to light, and thereby occupied a world of considerable timbral interest." SWIMMING WITh THE BOTTOMFEEDERS by Kathleen Burch: What’s up? Two women, stride on stage in black leather jeans, take up ominous shiny-dark musical weapons. Electric cello, electric stand-up bass. This isn’t girl culture, it’s seriously deep. The Bottomfeeders. Music suited for sand dabs and catfish, catchy, glittering with hooks. At first, it was a buzz on the Bay Area improvisational music scene. Have you heard the Bottomfeeders? Did you see the Bottomfeeders? No, not the LA pop-rockers. Not the Vancouver bluegrass band. I mean the “avant-next” electo-acoustic string duo of Danielle DeGruttola and Ashley Adams. It was bound to happen. Cellist DeGruttola had come via Smith College, the New England Conservatory, and Boston’s Berklee College of Music, reaching Oakland in the early ‘90s to complete her MFA at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music. Then in ‘96, double bass player Adams wrapped up her classical music studies at University of Arizona and came to San Francisco to join the lively local jazz/improv community. Before long, they found each other and begin performing as the Bottomfeeders. Sometime acoustic, sometimes electric, always eclectic. Like their aquatic namesakes, they glide through the musical jetsam of the last four centuries, stirring up disparate elements from classical, jazz, South Asian, and South-of-Market hardcore traditions. The result is a restless, effortless avant-garde sound, breaking away from standard categories, mastering the art of repetition and improvisation without swimming too far from eddies of profoundly beautiful melody. They deliver and please their listeners. I caught up with the Bottomfeeders at Borders Union Square, where an unsuspecting staffer had booked them for a Saturday afternoon gig. Another latte-powered folk-rock act? I don’t think so. I knew we were in for something different when DeGruttola unfolded a Kandinsky painting reproduction and placed it on her music stand. What I heard next grabbed my heart and mind, swept me down vaguely familiar passageways, led me to surprising destinations. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes funny, classical and iconoclastic, it was true millennium sound. Early on, they performed what’s become one of my favorites, DeGruttola’s “Music Pass Time,” funky pizzicato rhythms swinging into a whirring cello buzz saw and then morphing into elegant autumn melodies. Everything in this piece trembles on the edge between lyrical and cerebral, without ever settling down on either side. A few months later, the Bottomfeeders were at the dump. Officially it’s the SF Sanitary Fill, and artist-in-residence Donna Keiko Ozawa had arranged for DeGruttola and Adams to perform at the opening of her sculpture installation there. This time electrified, they bounced and caressed and shook the walls, playing easily into an intermittent wind, blending their sound with the spicy sanitary fill fragrance and Donna’s visual treats. When the SF Center for the Book and Xerox PARC planned a party to launch their Experiments in the Future of the Book show, selecting the band was easy. This was a major avant-garde art event for 2001, and the Bottomfeeders took to it like – well – like fish to water. Their sound complemented the radical next-generation book art works on display, drifting and driving from new jazz ballads and standards to growling metal to the string equivalent of a saxophone wail – and then back to the ballads. In “Tromping Around,” a Bottomfeeders standard based on a theme by DeGruttola, their twin bows sliced through liquid air, turning the thick stuff into a wispy fog. I heard mellow, moody echoes of a stripped down Julius Hemphill sound, and other times, a stirred not shaken concoction of Mingus elements. Very cool! During their second set, a man-sized polyurethane robot came wandering through the gallery, bopping to their sound, and sure enough, they riffed right along with him, robot music with a heart. Both artists maintain multiple performance and recording personas. Adams plays bass for the eclectic alt-rock band Zmrzlina, which gets lots of air play in the Bay Area and is approaching superstar status in Sweden. She’s also led the Ashley Adams trio, backed by Phillip Greenlief and Michel Dumonceau. DeGruttola often performs and records with guitar wizard Henry Kaiser, among others. A comprehensive review of their live and recorded engagements would read like the “who’s who” of local and visiting innovators in the worlds of new music, jazz and improv, including Beth Custer, Leo Smith, Cecil Taylor, Miya Masaoka, Pauline Oliveros, and Prairie Prince. Last year, the Bottomfeeders did a three-hour live appearance on KZSU radio and were featured on KPFA’s Crack O’Dawn with Barbara Golden and guest DJ Dr. Jon. Highlights from the KZSU performance are due out shortly as Bottomfeeders’ second CD, following up on their initial eponymous release in 1999. Along with the pieces I’ve already mentioned, the first Bottomfeeders CD includes the likes of “Chants from Down Under.” This is a joint Adams / DeGruttola composition/improvisation, laying down a gentle theme that flows from and speaks to the heart. It’s like the answer to a riddle – “What’s the sound of a neo-classical ballad with a Celtic improv soul?” So now I know what people mean when they say “Get down with the Bottomfeeders.” DeGruttola and Adams are enriching the Bay Area music scene with their heady blend of composition and improvisation, mixing up bubbly brews of jazz, blues, classical, and heavy metal – but not the kitchen sink. It swings, it rocks, sometimes it even screams. Listen to the Bottomfeeders, keep an eye on those glossy black instruments -- and don’t forget to breathe! Work-In-Progress: WE PLAY AT the Hotel Utah at 8 PM on April 18th, 2002 with special guests:Poet JOHN CAMPION Drummer MICHAEL CORMIER MAILINGLIST: Add your email to our BOTTOMFEEDERS mailinglist by emailing Danielle DeGruttola at ddegrutt@orban.com Our CD is also available by contacting Danielle by email |