Interview: The Aqua Velvets Surf Odyssey Continues with EL MOROCCO

The progression of rock guitar has crossed and obscured musical boundaries. The instrument has been remade in the hands of players many times over, and a look between the strings finds a fascinating history behind those who strap them on.

Such a person is Miles Corbin, the composer and leader of The Aqua Velvets. Since 1992, the surf guitar band has cut its own path with instrumentals that go far beyond the sounds one brings to mind.

El Morocco, the ninth studio recording for the Velvets, and their first since 2010's Tiki Beat. The new album has Corbin taking his 50 years' experience with guitar into familiar territory, moody trips that remind of the classic surf tracks, but influences that travel further.

There are some creative twists to this project. "I just kind of took my time," Corbin explains from his home in Chico, California. "I don't know if I set out to do this on purpose, but what I was doing a lot of was using acoustic guitar, then electric with reverb and vibrato. It seemed to just take shape, so I followed that style I think. On past albums I've used keyboards and lots of percussion and stuff. Kind of minimalistic in many ways, in fact a couple of tracks it's just me playing solo guitar and nothing else."

The acoustic figures into the sound Corbin has brought across the scope of the Velvets, and his related work. "I've used acoustic a little on earlier albums," he explains." I did a solo album about eight years ago called Sounds from the Tiki Hut, and that was purposefully just acoustic, electric guitar and bongos. 'That was the first off the path, kind of minimal sound, so it's kind of a mixing of that with the full band thing."

A large influence on Corbin's work leading up to El Morocco was the African guitar legend, Ali Farka Toure, and in particular the acclaimed album he recorded with Ry Cooder, Talking Timbuktu (World Circuit, 1994). "That album just has really stuck with me through the years," Corbin recalls. "I think that minimalist approach, and I think that's one of the origins of what became American blues guitar.

'(Toure) kind of turned it around, his generation with electric guitar. They use these really interesting open tunings, where you change just one string and (that) throws everything off into a different kind of chordal structure. On El Morocco I actually use some African open tunings, so it was fun playing around with that."

One thing critical listeners will pick up on in the Velvets' sounds is the feeling of space. There's air between the interplay of guitars, bass and percussion. That's an experience Corbin has cultivated from the band's debut in 1993. "The music I was playing at the time was kind of rockabilly, blues, some early surf tunes (by the) Sentinels, "Pipeline" by the Chantays. I think that was something I wanted to combine, the surf instrumental sounds with kind of film noir. Several songs were ballads, maybe bossa nova, maybe something that would fit into a David Lynch movie, or a James bond, spy kind of genre. I came up with, 'Surf Spaghetti Western B-movie Soundtrack Music'."

A listen to "Spy Theme Seven" fits on the latest. Blues that recalls John Lee Hooker dominates "The Girl with the Turkish Shoes." "Flamenco Boogie is a characteristically midtempo track, acoustic and electric guitars in an back and forth interplay. There are two separate arrangements of "The Big Sea." Keyboards walkover the guitars on the Moderato version, while a faster, Ventures-like guitar leads on the Uptempo take.

What led up to Corbin's formation of the Aqua Velvets was a step in a musical career that began in the Napa area, "in 1965 when I was like eleven. I was listening to the British Invasion groups," Corbin says, "the Beatles, the Stones, the Yardbirds, the groups that I saw on TV shows like Shindig, Hullaballo and Ed Sullivan."

With middle school friends, Corbin formed his first band, The Devonshire Rogues. "We were all instrumental, we did versions of 'Day Tripper,' 'The Last Time,' 'Gloria,' so that's what we were doing. We played that, and "Wipeout" and "Pipeline." I think we had a repertoire of about six or seven songs; we played around Napa. That was a huge influence, what was being played on the radio in the mid 60's."

Even with this, surf wasn't completely in Corbin's view. He moved for his high school and college years to St. Louis. "In 1970, I was in a rock band like the Stones," he recalls. "We covered Velvet Underground, the Stooges and MC5, what kind of influenced the punk bands later. Chuck Berry was a local hero; he had a farm up in the country, and he had a music festival on his farm in '71 and we played his festival. We're 16, 17 years old, mostly local bands from St. Louis. He was host, and that was a pretty cool thing."

Corbin never stopped listening. "It was about that time I discovered the original blues players," he says, "like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters and BB King. They all played that circuit, so I got to see these guys in a lot of small clubs. So I played blues in the early 70's, and just kept discovering more and more guitar players. Django Reinhardt, Charlie Christian and I listened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Early 70's I'd say, I was on a discovery path."

A return to California may have altered Corbin's course a little, but it brought him true contact with surf. "It wasn't until the late 70's when I was in San Francisco in the heyday of the early punk/new wave scene when I was buying surf records," Corbin remembers, "and (I) really studied that style and incorporated it into bands I was playing in.

'I started playing in the San Francisco club scene in '76, playing jazz and blues and then I found myself in a group called Leila and the Snakes, in the summer of '77. They were a punky girl group that had just put out a single, and I was hired to play guitar. I was about 22 or 23.

Corbin's recollections of a thriving scene from the inside are worth noting. "The music scene was amazing and exploded to the point in the early 80's there were fifteen or twenty clubs with live music. It became a Mecca for a lot of groups that were touring, to come to San Francisco and be a part of this great music scene that was happening here. In those years, we opened for Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Mink Deville; I met the Clash and guys like that. We were recording in all different studios, offering us free time. We did a lot of recordings, played a lot of clubs and big concerts, the big theaters in Berkeley, the Cow Palace."

During this time, Corbin began forming his own groups and recording his own material, with Mojo in 1982 and the rockabilly-flavored Kingsounds. This all led up to the Velvets. "By the time I finished the ten songs on the first album I had found my style and my voice and what I wanted to do," Corbin says. "That's become the prototype or model of what was to follow. A lot of different influences, but still this thread of all these led that up to it."

The original Aqua Velvets lineup of Corbin, Michael Lindner, Donn Spindt and Hank Maninger still gets together and plays on occasion. More recent and current members include Ferenc Dobronyi, Shig Komiyama, Spencer Chan, Steve Cameron and Dave Jess. Corbin switches up the group from time to time, occasionally as a trio or a larger ensemble.

The Velvets will tour up the west coast as far as Seattle (so far) with new dates coming in January. One thing to point out: over 22 years, the band has acquired a fan base that will go out of its way to catch them live. Corbin says, "What I love still to this day is someone will come up to me at a show and say, 'I've been wanting to see you guys for years!' That happens a lot, this one group that has this extended career. We haven't toured a lot. People will actually fly into other places to find we're playing a particular date in San Francisco or wine country."

Has the longevity of the Aqua Velvets helped usher in a new generation of fans, and possibly guitarists? "Absolutely," Corbin says. "I'll see people my age come in and have their adult kids that grew up listening to a particular album, and now they get to see this band their parents have been playing for the past 15 years," adds with a laugh. "Even little kids, they seem to get it. Sometimes we play all ages shows and the kids will dance in front of you and stuff. They get the rhythms ant coolness of seeing live bands on stage. You get that kind of response and feedback out of your music, that's what I think it's all about."

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