Back in 1983, when Jason Hinkle and TJ Widner were just kids, they had a code word: Baldwin. "We used it to mean someone who was in-the-know," says TJ. "It was just some in-joke. So the name really never had anything to do with those other Baldwins."
Indeed: While Alec, Billy, Stephen, and Daniel were lapping up the highlife in Hollywood, the other Baldwin Brothers were in Chicago, working out that elusive musical link between jam bands and laptop electronica. Machine music could ooze sex, they were convinced; it could have the spontaneity of a live performance but the structure of a pop song. And the results of their efforts? Voila! The brilliant Cooking with Lasers, a blend of live funk and studio-created beats that owes as much to Herbie Hancock and the JBs as it does to Kraftwerk.
Threaded through with '70s pop culture references, from "Sanford and Son" ("Funky Junkyard") to "The Six Million Dollar Man" ("Bionic Jam"), Cooking with Lasers revives the me-decade's soul but avoids its kitsch. "Urban Tumbleweed" is a groove-driven phantasm, its vintage organ, live drums, and brass horns all but commanding your hips to move, while "That's Right" is a cut-up collage of conversation snippets and deep, hard beats. "Are You There Margaret? It's Me, God" is a sly, cool-jazz take of Judy Blume's coming-of-age novel, while "Viva Knievil" is a tribute to both the daredevil rider ("I had an Evel Knievil doll when I was younger," admits Jason) and a stripper whom the Brothers encountered on a visit to NY.
Nodding to the future as much as the past, the Brothers also enlist a bevy of babes to inject more flavor into the set. Miho Hatori, of Cibo Matto and Gorillaz fame, breaks into a rap in the jazzy "Dream Girl," Angie Hart, of Frente!, contributes an incredibly fragile, clear-eyed vocal to "Deep Down" and Geri Soriano Lightwood from Supreme Beings of Leisure adds polished soul to the gossamer, twitching "Ether." The Brothers do make room for one guy -- underground hip-hop lyricist Barron Ricks (who's thrown it down with Prince Paul, Cypress Hill and DJ Hurricane) checks in on "Urban Tumbleweed."
The Baldwin Brothers began more than fifteen years ago, when Jason and TJ met in junior high in Kokomo, Indiana. The son of a musician, Jason was already playing guitar and bass, and was soon to add drums to his repertoire; he discovered TJ played piano (he had been taking lessons since age six) and invited him over to jam. In the Hinkle family's basement there was a treasure trove of recording gear ("It was a playground," says TJ, "There was a reel-to-reel recorder, a drum machine, and lots of toys and effects"), so in no time the pair were experimenting with the equipment and taping their results. They continued to record all through high school, between stints in pop and alternative rock bands (TJ) and a heavy metal cover act (Jason, who still reckons he's "The Jimmy Page of the drums -- technically sloppy but very soulful.").
Fast-forward to the mid-nineties, when, post-college, the two met up in Chicago. Although they'd spent nearly a decade apart, the pair started writing and recording again, just for fun. When they had enough material for a 30-minute set, they approached a local club and convinced its managers to let them play live. Calling themselves the Baldwin Brothers, they delivered a mixture of lounge music and funk, with TJ's trusty 1978 Fender Rhodes electric piano emerging as the star of the show. (It's the keyboard of the '70s," he explains. "Billy Joel, Elton John ... just a ton of musicians used a Rhodes. It's the best.")
Slowly the Brothers began making a name for themselves. As their songs became staples on local compilations, and they became fixtures on in Chicago's Wicker Park arts scene, their acclaim grew. Last year, the group released an EP, the five-song Funk Shui. Adding Jimmy Deer on bass and JB Royal on turntables, the Brothers concocted Cooking with Lasers, their debut full-length.
Despite the additional members, TJ and Jason --who wrote all of Cooking -- are still the group's primary composers; instead of writing songs in a typical way, such as composing them on paper or jamming together on a soundstage, they adhere to a rather unorthodox method. First, they go into the studio, turn the tape recorder on, and jam free-form. Then they listen through the recording, isolate two or three parts they like, and make that into the melodic core of the song. Re-recording bits as needed, they then feed it all into Sonic Foundry's Acid, a loop-based music-software program through which they create the piece's dead-lock grooves and rhythmic skeleton. Then they add samples and/or jam some more over the top, to imbue the song with color and interest, just like a painter does with a canvas.
It's complicated, but through all these steps, the Brothers capture both the visceral rush of live music and the precision of a studio recording. But the technique is not without one little difficulty: "When we then want to play the songs live, we have to relearn them," Jason says, laughing, "because our recording process is so integrated into our writing process that we don't know what we did until we play it all back."
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