Pittsburgh native Bill Harris moved to Chicago in 2011 because he wanted to play improvisational and experimental music. Four years later, the drummer, engineer, and composer launched Amalgam, a record label that also serves as an umbrella for a loose creative collective. He’s released plenty of his own work via Amalgam, including solo recordings, a couple releases by his ongoing collaboration with Ishmael Ali and Jeff Kimmel (who play cello and clarinet, respectively, in both cases augmented by electronics), and the debut album from eclectic fusion ensemble Je’raf (where he plays drums and the occasional keyboard). Harris also helps run a West Loop recording studio called Marmalade, founded in 2020.
Harris has several upcoming local gigs, including three Thursday shows as part of the long-running improvised music series at Elastic Arts: June 29 in a quartet with saxophonist Dave Rempis, pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and bassist Jakob Heinemann; July 6 in a trio called Near Miss with saxophonists Rob Magill and Gerrit Hatcher; and July 27 in a solo set.
As told to Leor Galil
I was talking to a friend the other day—we were trying to figure out what to focus on, because there’s always a lot of things going on. Playing a lot of improvised music, it’s easy to get pulled into ad hoc stuff—which is really important, necessary, and fun—but if that happens too much, it’s hard to lean into the projects you want to do. I’m trying to pare that down.
This group I play with, Je’raf, is something I’m really trying to focus on these days. We’re actually recording our new record right now. I’m trying to book some shows for it and maybe do a tour for it this fall or next spring or something. Kind of trying to focus on the groups I’m in. There’s another one with Ishmael Ali and Jeff Kimmel. We don’t really have a name yet, but that group has three records out, so we’re trying to lean into that. I’m trying to do more of my solo work—learning a lot from this [recent] tour. And stuff with Amalgam, trying to figure out what to do with that and make it more like a community resource tool and not so much of a label. Those are my focuses at the moment.
Bill Harris contributed percussion, vocals, and keyboards to this 2022 Je’raf album.
I started [Amalgam] in 2015. I started to get more involved with the improvised experimental community in Chicago; I was seeing a lot of younger folks doing what I thought was really important work and not really getting recognized by anybody. I was hearing a lot of frustration about people sending work to labels and people to help produce music and not getting any response. What we were seeing happening, and still see happening, is a lot of resources float to the top to this very select group of musicians and improvisers—which is kind of counterintuitive to the whole ethos of improvised music, like, breaking down these power structures. The goal was, “OK, well, no one’s checking this out, let’s create our own thing.”
I created it with the intention of it being a collective of creative folks in Chicago. It’s kind of morphed into more of a label, which I still don’t really want it to be. I don’t want to be a curator or an arbiter or someone that’s making creative decisions.
Ishmael is a close friend and collaborator of mine, and he’s involved with Amalgam at the moment. Another friend, Eli Namay—who I’ve played with in a million things—was part of it, but he just had twins and he’s kind of at capacity at the moment, so he’s taking a little break with the music stuff.
This year we had guest curators—Allen Moore, Carol Genetti, Keefe Jackson, Emily [Rach] Beisel—and we’re gonna keep doing this every year, where we ask guest curators to take the keys of Amalgam and do whatever they want with it, whether it’s their own project or some project that someone has contacted them about or whatever. They have free rein. Only one of them has been released this year: Emily’s [album Particle of Organs]. Some of the other stuff has been delayed—it will be coming out soon. So we’re trying to open this up to more people curating it, rather than just me and Ishmael or just me.
Emily Rach Beisel’s 2023 Amalgam release Particle of Organs
That was the goal of it, was to be this platform community tool—or at least that’s what I want it to be. The long game thing of, “The more we do it, the bigger the body of work gets, the more people will notice it.”
My parents were very musical people—they were always listening to music. My dad was a guitar player—not professionally; he was always jamming with his friends. My mom won’t admit it, but she’s an amazing singer. And my sister was always really into music, and she was someone I actually followed; anything she liked, I liked. She got me into punk rock very young—younger than I probably should’ve been listening to that music. I always thought my sister was the coolest, and so any music she checked out, I would check out.
My sister wanted to play drums. My parents got her a drum set, and she never touched them. So then I started messing around with them and had a knack for it and started taking lessons. That’s how I got into drums—playing in high school bands, punk bands, and rock bands. I didn’t go to school for music or anything, but just kind of continued that self-education as time went on.
I went to school in Ohio for computer science and math. I was living there after I graduated; I had gotten a job there. I actually still work for that same company—it’s been 14 years. My partner at the time, she had gotten a job in Chicago. I was really itching to get out of Ohio, because there’s, like, nothing at all interesting going on there, at least where I was living, for culture or music—experimental music especially. We moved to Chicago in about 2011, and I had no idea what was going on here. I had known about the rock and punk scene and DIY scene here, but I didn’t know about the AACM or Umbrella Music. I fell into it, just being thirsty for experimental music.
I didn’t know anyone here when I moved here. It wasn’t until about 2015 that I actually started to meet folks. I always felt really shy and weird about asking people to play. There was this weekly series at Constellation called Sound of the City, and it was a strictly free-improvised jam session, and I met a lot of people through that.
Four Letter Words—the trio of Bill Harris, Jake Wark, and Matt Piet—released this album in 2019.
At one point, there was another series called 3 on 3 that Constellation was running. Mike Reed would ask three different people to put together groups that had never played together, and they would have a concert. He asked me to do that one day, and I was like, “Oh God, I don’t know anybody.” So I asked Jake Wark and Matt Piet to play with me, and that’s how [our trio] Four Letter Words came about. Then I just started to meet more people, going to shows. It was a slow process for me.
I’ve really come to appreciate the cross-community thing here. As a curator, running shows, I’m very much interested in it just not being improvised music. Working with a lot of DIY folks and noise folks and seeing that overlap there is really, really exciting to me. And also seeing people open to that.
I feel like in some other cities, that really doesn’t happen—people are so down their own lane, aesthetically, that they don’t really work with people outside their own aesthetic. I’m talking off-the-cuff here, but I feel like in Chicago, it’s been strong. I’ve come into my creative sense here in Chicago, and I feel ensconced here. I can’t imagine doing it anywhere else.
In improvised music, often there’s not, like, grooves, but I really love playing groove-based music, and I think there’s something really cathartic about the drums. It’s a really open instrument, in terms of timbre—you can get a lot of sounds out of the drums. It’s really fun. It’s a huge sound palette, which I really enjoy. The drums are such an old instrument, historically, and have been around for a long time in different types of music, and it’s really fun to see how you can morph that instrument into something new—or do something new with it, which is really difficult. What hasn’t been done on the drums yet?
I’d like to see a strong community here, for everything. I don’t want scenes to have walls up between each other. I see it amongst people I work with, and I’d like to see more of that. Amalgam has gotten a lot of traction since 2015, and I’d like to give those resources to other people that are our peers and people I believe in artistically. It’s not commercially viable music, so it’s like, “How do you get noticed?” But then the people who are quote, unquote popular or big in this kind of music, it seems like a lot of things are funneled to those people. I think if people can kind of jump onto this thing that already has traction, that can be really useful for uplifting everyone in this boat.
Bill Harris and Ishmael Ali recorded this freely improvised duo at Marmalade and released it late last year.
I think we need some new places to play this kind of music. A lot of stuff closed up over the pandemic. There’s the classic places, like Constellation, the [Hungry] Brain, Elastic, and [Cafe] Mustache. I love these places, but it’d be nice to see some new places in new neighborhoods open up.
That’s another thing that me and Ishmael talk about a lot: the location of these venues and what sort of things can open up. A lot of stuff is on the north side or the northwest side, but where else can we open up venues and what kind of crowd can that bring out? What kind of musicians can that bring out? What does that do to accessibility? I’d like to see some new series pop up—not just me and Ishmael, but everybody we know that has the capacity to start a series, go to a new venue. That will be really awesome to see.
