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Artist History ==> Web Page 8 of 26
Before the completion and during the building of his home recording/project studio, Dombrovski did not completely relinquish all supporting roles, recognizing drumming perfectly augmented his songwriting and studio craft. In April 1992, Dombrovski chose to drum for the New Castle County-DELAWARE-U.S.A. experimental, jazz-blues-rock-fusion trio "TRAUMA UNIT," which featured bassist/composer M. Cooke Harvey and guitarist/composer Vince Eoppolo, co-producer and engineer of Dombrovski's song "The World Isn't Home Yet." Again, after having served its purpose for the three musicians involved, TRAUMA UNIT soon disbanded. TRAUMA UNIT recorded the difficult if not impossible to obtain, and now tentatively titled, CD Formerly Live from Delaware, named in reference to the fact all tracks were performed and recorded live with no overdubs by a band that no longer exists. Eoppolo, the trio's leader, disbanded TRAUMA UNIT circa October 1992.
DOMBROVSKI: Vince Eoppolo studied jazz guitar in his younger days, and Vince kept in touch with me while I was in Boston, MASSACHUSETTS, U.S.A., at BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC in 1991. In October 1991, Vince told me he was talking to a good friend of his, M. Cooke Harvey, an excellent bassist with a strong jazz background. Vince and Cooke were going to get together to feel things out musically and exchange ideas and tapes. On April 14, 1992, immediately after I returned to DELAWARE, U.S.A., from Los Angeles, CALIFORNIA, U.S.A., I contacted Vince. Soon afterwards, I remember sitting in Vince's apartment with Vince playing me tapes of what he and Cooke had achieved musically up to that point in time with another drummer. On April 29, 1992, Vince, Cooke, and I played together for the first time in Cooke's basement/studio. Nobody knew at that point in time whether the trio would turn into a gigging band or just be a recording situation.
DOMBROVSKI: It was Vince's project, and Vince was the leader. I think Vince always dreamed of having his own Pat Metheny, Bright Size Life-type configuration--you know, guitar, bass, and drums--an eclectic trio, if you will. Manfred Eicher's ECM RECORDS out of GERMANY inspired the whole TRAUMA UNIT project. Pat Metheny's recording Offramp was my introduction to ECM when I was 13 or 14, and I never stopped playing that record. Vince then introduced me to more ECM guys like Terje Rypdal, Eberhard Weber, Miroslav Vitous, and Jan Garbarek.
DOMBROVSKI: The most important thing about TRAUMA UNIT was it was understood Vince wanted an extreme eclecticism, with a confluence and contrasting of different styles. From the drums, Vince wanted a Jon Christensen, cymbal-dominated approach and the avoidance of an over-reliance upon rock music's "BOOM-BAP BOOM-BOOM-BAP" identifying paradigm. In fact, the couple of times something like that accidentally slipped out of me, all playing stopped; Vince became livid with rage; and Vince would shout, "ANYTHING BUT THAT!!!" I had to respect that, although I don't think I let the cymbals dominate to the degree a true jazz drummer would because I loved my bass drum and snare drum too much.
DOMBROVSKI: For me, as a drummer, TRAUMA UNIT was a big step away from the rock music "BOOM-BAP BOOM-BOOM-BAP" paradigm I defined myself with and became very dependent on because of what the bands I played with in the past required. I was forced to contend with, "What the hell do I do now?" I tried a lot of different approaches until I finally learned how to keep things interesting enough not to get kicked out of TRAUMA UNIT, all within the limits of my basic rock technique and conception.
DOMBROVSKI: This ultimately helped my songwriting because the piano is a stringed percussive instrument played from a keyboard, and the drums are a percussive instrument, too. I've played both. Playing either instrument augments one's ability to play the other, although it must be said I've played much more drums than piano, and I've played many more electronic keyboards than piano. Playing more than one instrument is good because it stops you from approaching music from within the confines of the techniques of a particular instrument, and that makes you realize music is far larger and more inexhaustible than you ever imagined. My point is, playing drums helped my keyboard playing, and becoming more facile at the keyboard made realizing musical ideas easier, but the drums in and of themselves were primordially inspiring, too.
DOMBROVSKI: Anyway, despite TRAUMA UNIT's jazz-like approach, the fact remains the music that first inspired Vince and me was rock music, given rock music dominated popular music when we were children, and Vince played electric guitar, and I played drums, two dominant instruments in rock; so the aggressiveness and blues influence of rock underlies everything in TRAUMA UNIT's music more than anything that swings, yet there was also a jazz attitude because a lot of the music was closer to boxing than ballet, although a lot of the music was unorthodox by anyone's standards. I would say a classical influence sometimes reared its head in the fact that some of the music was composed, in the sense we would play certain tunes the same way every time without really deviating. We stuck to the plan on those; although the classical influence was the most distant given TRAUMA UNIT was NOT attempting to achieve one ideal sound or approach. The jazz attitude was present in other tunes because so much of the music and/or solos were improvised. I would also say there was a funk/R&B element in the music because TRAUMA UNIT often played in one bar what could be played in two. The jazziness was also a result of an often polyrhythmic and syncopated approach, not denying rock and funk are syncopated, also. At times, TRAUMA UNIT approached free jazz because of the absence of any preconceived harmonic structure; that is to say, there were no chord progressions, nor was there any form.
DOMBROVSKI: Vince and Cooke composed the music, the majority of it composed by Vince, so TRAUMA UNIT was performing original music, jazzy in the sense that what ended up being recorded was a reflex response to aural images rather than visual representations of music as would be the case with classical.
DOMBROVSKI: Obviously, we immediately knew the band wouldn't be making any money playing weddings, TRAUMA UNIT being just a little too far outside for that. TRAUMA UNIT was commercially doomed from day one as far as playing most clubs in DELAWARE, U.S.A., was concerned because club owners there, as a rule, were not terribly interested in promoting or booking a band performing original, experimental, and contemporary instrumental music without vocals. Bands dominating DELAWARE clubs in 1992 were cover bands playing Top 40 and radio rock. Those types of bands drew the crowds that drank alcohol and made club owners money. Also, there are no cities in DELAWARE with at least 300,000 people, which meant there was no moderately-sized market for TRAUMA UNIT's very left-of-center, original music there, and that meant building a buzz locally would've been very difficult in DELAWARE. TRAUMA UNIT would've had to make its mark in Philadelphia, PENNSYLVANIA, U.S.A., given Philadelphia has a population of over one million. That would've meant traveling to and from Philadelphia for gigs in clubs. TRAUMA UNIT was more a musical workshop/project-type band than a band with ambitions or goals of making records for an established label and touring because no one in the group felt the situation warranted the kind of commitment planning to make records with an established label, and touring to promote said records, eventually requires. That meant accommodating TRAUMA UNIT to the retail structure of the UNITED STATES, and we were getting what we needed musically without any of that.
DOMBROVSKI: To remain healthy, three essential things an original band needs to do are: (1) write material; (2) rehearse that material; and (3) perform said material in front of an audience. Feedback from an audience is necessary to give the band a sense of purpose and justify the band's existence. TRAUMA UNIT wrote original material, TRAUMA UNIT rehearsed that material, and TRAUMA UNIT even recorded said material; however, TRAUMA UNIT didn't perform in front of an audience. Therefore, I wasn't surprised when Vince Eoppolo announced on May 19, 1992, he was going to slowly divorce himself from TRAUMA UNIT. TRAUMA UNIT kept rehearsing, but by July 17, 1992, Vince wanted to turn TRAUMA UNIT into more of a recording situation and cut back on rehearsals, which was logical because TRAUMA UNIT wasn't planning on booking any gigs, and TRAUMA UNIT already knew its material very well. There wasn't much more that could be done to take the material to a higher level by continually rehearsing it live as a trio in Cooke's basement/studio, given our capacities as musicians at that time. Circa October 1, 1992, Vince disbanded TRAUMA UNIT. Cooke and I had no objections. TRAUMA UNIT had recorded enough material to create a CD, so the band had served that useful purpose; however, with no plans to take the band to the next level by gigging and promoting, continuing would've become more an exercise in redundancy than anything else. TRAUMA UNIT was finding it harder and harder justifying its existence, and TRAUMA UNIT was therefore more and more on the defensive, as opposed to the offensive, which meant taking steps to get the music industry and an audience wanting the band. Well, everyone one in TRAUMA UNIT felt, in all likelihood, TRAUMA UNIT would have real trouble finding a sizeable enough audience willing to endure TRAUMA UNIT's type of music, plus keep TRAUMA UNIT financially viable. From a very conventional point of view, TRAUMA UNIT was stylistically inconsistent, even blasphemously iconoclastic; however, TRAUMA UNIT considered that artistic freedom and prerogative, especially Vince, who was filled with artistic rage and fury given the indignities, limitations, and real-world realities that come with being an evolving musician.
DOMBROVSKI: It was never articulated this way, but on some level I think everyone understood TRAUMA UNIT was very effective as a playing and recording workshop/experimental/college-music-project-type band; so there was never any great compulsion to turn TRAUMA UNIT into a gigging band, although that would've been nice, and it was discussed. Everyone in TRAUMA UNIT was still an evolving musician, TRAUMA UNIT being no more than a step on the way to where each of us was going musically. For me, that meant writing more of my own original material and building a home recording/project studio. I never lost sight of that, and some of my original material was presented to TRAUMA UNIT, although none of my material was performed. However, I do remember our bassist Cooke really liking my demo version of an instrumental composition of mine entitled "Soft Cerebral Hemorrhage," which Vince and I would later go on to properly produce and engineer near the end of 1992, after TRAUMA UNIT disbanded.
DOMBROVSKI: TRAUMA UNIT rehearsals/sessions were recorded live, meaning no overdubs; the result was 12 to 14 musical pieces/tracks committed to tape, which Vince engineered and mixed into full-length recordings over 35 minutes in length. No band I was in before ever committed that much original material to a tape with decent production values. TRAUMA UNIT actually completed full-length original recordings we could listen to over and over again, at our convenience, in the cold light of day. I also realized how difficult it is for an original band to sustain a listener's interest over an entire full-length recording. Additionally, it was interesting learning what recording gear, plus studio chops, could do to enhance the sound of a band. I was developing some studio chops of my own because I was cutting my own tracks in my own little demo studio; moreover, my simultaneous experience as a drummer in a band proved to me the studio exists, along with good production values, to serve the music. The music has to be there first, or else you've got nothing, no matter how much studio gear and trickery are at your disposal. It's possible to lose sight of that when you're planning on greatly expanding a little demo studio with a massive infusion of high technology as I was soon going to do. That was a valuable insight for me, which I never lost track of because, as a musician, music in and of itself was important to me first. That kept my studio craft efficient because I didn't operate under the illusion more recording gear necessarily meant more musicality; I knew as a musician how vast music itself is and how long it takes to get good on just one instrument, let alone an entire recording studio.
DOMBROVSKI: TRAUMA UNIT's original CD contained 12 tracks and was 67 minutes, 28 seconds in length. I corresponded with Vince, and we both agreed only four tracks from the original CD were needed to capture the essence of TRAUMA UNIT.
The final result was the CD:
TRAUMA UNIT -- Formerly Live from DELAWARE
Tracks:
1. "Stress Test" -- Copyright (C) 1992 by M. Cooke Harvey. Length 4:14
2. "Punk Monk" -- Copyright (C) 1992 by Vincent Joseph, Eoppolo. Length 3:23
3. "Ebb and Flow" -- Copyright (C) 1992 by Vincent Joseph, Eoppolo. Length 6:08
4. "Memory of Love" -- Copyright (C) 1992 by Vincent Joseph, Eoppolo. Length 4:51
Total Time: 18:39
Musicians:
Vincent Joseph, Eoppolo: Guitar
M. Cooke Harvey: Bass
Dombrovski: Drums
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Artist History ==> Web Page 8 of 26