Bebop Cortez

Cortez’s own shot
By DAVID BERRY

Two years ago, had you asked who Bebop Cortez was, anyone but Cortez’s close personal friends or hipsters lying lest they look out of touch would have returned a blank stare. Not without good reason, of course: Cortez’s one-man living-room project was hidden in the obscurity of his, uh, living room, where over the course of about four years he was slipping together eclectic bits of ’70s funk, chaotic undergroundish hip-hop beats and Tom Skerrit quotes.

Stepping out from his shag-carpeted rabbit hole with 2004’s romantic panther commander, though, it didn’t take long for Cortez to start making a name for himself: by the end of last year, the album had become one of the most successful releases from an Albertan since SNFU moved to Vancouver, charting near the top of every major electronic chart in Canada, from college radio to Exclaim, and earning Cortez some pretty high praise from some pretty high places. It was quite a bit from a guy who doesn’t even want to talk about his previous bands.

“It was a complete surprise. I mean, this was literally a little record I made in my living room,” Cortez explains over the phone from his friend’s house, where he’s attempting to install recording software. “I remember the day the record came in, and I was sitting there, thinking, ‘I wonder if anyone is going to like this.’ Then when it started getting popular, and I got a lot of really good feedback from it, it completely took me by surprise. I was just sitting there with this successful record in my hand, and I had no idea how to deal with it.

“I mean, I actually have a four-track that has one broken track, so technically it’s a three-track, and I have an old sampler and a really crappy old computer, and that’s basically what I did the record on,” Cortez adds, sounding fairly incredulous for the guy who actually made all this stuff work. “It’s kind of unbelievable.”

Of course, Cortez’ disbelief in this matter might be a bit unwarranted. Even if a three-track is perhaps slightly lower-tech than your average home recorder, self-produced albums are one of the most potent trends in music today. From The Russian Futurists to The Ladies and Gentleman to Chad Vangaalen to Montag—and those are just the Canadian entries—it seems like everybody’s a one-man band these days, rolling out of bed and into unrepentantly catchy riffs before they even have breakfast. And though the only thing Bebop Cortez’s beat-heavy electronic has in common with bands like the Futurists is that they’re both solo artists using different names, it’s still a big enough ethos at this point to almost have its own section in the record store.

“The biggest thing, obviously, is the access to it: I could have never done something like this earlier,” explains Cortez of his own project. “If this was the ’70s, I never could have gone and paid for a big studio and paid for the tape and everything like that, but to be able to record it in your bedroom, and be able to do it over and over again, you get whatever take you want, and it’s really liberating, actually.

“I also think that, over the course of pop music in the last 20 years or so, people just got tired of being spoon-fed by major labels and big money telling them that that’s what they should listen to,” he adds. “Now you can get the sounds you want to hear in your head and you don’t have to get anyone’s green light for it.”

“But yeah, the new stuff I’m recording is this sort of bizarre mix of early-’90s, Death Row, laid-back California gangsta beats and these sort-of aggressive rock riffs,”. “The last one was definitely this sort of weird ’70s-meets-underground-hip-hop sort of thing, this one is definitely more gangsta, uh, mixed with Motörhead or something. The stuff is really neat, but it’s coming out differently than I think I was planning. I mean, obviously I don’t want to make a record just like the first one, but yeah, this is sort of surprising.”

And though the record is on its way—“Fear not, I [just] work slow,” explains Cortez —for the time being he has more important things on his mind, namely kicking off The Sidetrack’s 25-year anniversary/moving extravaganza (“I’m playing it because [Sidetrack booker] Brent [Oliver] likes us”). Though he’s been recording Bebop for half a decade or so, he’s only actually played a handful of shows as his electronic alter ego, something he attributes mostly to the fact that, given all the wires and samplers he needs, he’s pretty much racked with paranoia every time he’s set to step on stage.

“I get really stressed out before shows, because there’s so much going on. I’ve got samplers and keyboard parts and all these different patches: there’s a thousand things that can go wrong that I worry about,” he says rather breezily, belying what are obviously tangled nerves hidden beneath his calm exterior. “Now, they’ve all gone really well so far, which is great, but the pre-show stress is an awful lot.”

He’s also pretty much against the idea of playing electronic music live, something that probably comes from his love of playing the guitar. Though he’s made it more palatable to himself by enlisting Chance Shredblast and Al Camino and drummer Riot Skincrusher to keep it more natural, Cortez admits freely he doesn’t want to bathe in the glow of a laptop onstage.

“I thought about trying to play it alone, but there’s so much going on, and if I just did it myself, it would just be me and a laptop, and I don’t want to be that guy,” he says with a sigh. “I like to play lots of guitar, and the record is a little more organic feeling than most electronic stuff, and I want to keep that; there’s live instruments all over it, and there’s a bunch of stuff that’s more free-form, and that needs to come through.”

Adding a band isn’t entirely without its problems, of course: though Cortez admits they get along quite well, when you’ve recorded the entirety of your music alone in the living room, you get used to a certain creative control, so to speak. In other words, he’s a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff, and that side can come, uh, shining through from time to time.

“I would like to say that I’m a bit better with the band than I am at home, but they would probably say I’m just as bad,” he admits with a touch of defeat. “I mean, things have really opened up a lot: songs on the record that started off sounding exactly like the record, over practicing them and doing them live, they’ve definitely taken on their own new parts and sections that everyone has contributed to, which is cool.”

“But, well, everyone sort of knows my beast, and they like the music, so I’m driving the ship, for good or ill.”

So far, so good.
- Vue Weekly