When Fond of Tigers opened for Tortoise at the Commodore

In 2007, two instrumental rock bands – one from Chicago and one deeply embedded in our creative music scene – crossed paths at the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. The former, Tortoise, headlined a show at the Commodore on June 27th. The latter, Fond of Tigers, played the opening set.

Tortoise will play the Pearl on March 6th presented by Modo-Live, I Am The Eggplant, and Infidels Jazz. They have a new album called Touch. Their lineup is John McEntire, Dan Bitney, Douglas McCombs, John Herndon, and Jeff Parker, though according to the writer Peter Margasak, James Elkington might play guitar on this tour instead of Parker.

Fond of Tigers had released their debut album, a thing to live with, by the time they opened for Tortoise. Their second album Release the Saviours was on the way. Their main lineup was Stephen Lyons on guitar, JP Carter on trumpet, Jesse Zubot on violin, Morgan McDonald on keys, Shanto Bhattacharya (also known as Shanto Acharia) on bass, and both Skye Brooks and Dan Gaucher on drums.

I only learned about this night at the Commodore after Tortoise's March show got announced. To explore the story, I interviewed Lyons and Gaucher by phone. They discussed the enriching spaces they inhabited back then, including now-defunct ones like the Sugar Refinery and 1067, and the influence of artists like Tortoise on their scene.

Gaucher was a Tortoise fan in the late 90s, in his late teens or early twenties, before he even moved to Vancouver. "I was volunteering at CJSW campus radio in Calgary and got hip to all the Chicago Thrill Jockey kind of stuff from the music director there," he said.

The Chicago-based label Thrill Jockey released all of Tortoise's albums except for their newest one, Touch, which came out on International Anthem. Thrill Jockey is associated with the post-rock genre; International Anthem's roster has many famous names in jazz, from Makaya McCraven to the Tortoise guitarist Jeff Parker.

"When I moved to town to go to Cap," Gaucher said, "it was jazz, jazz, jazz, Monday to Friday. [Then on] Friday night, I'd be like, I’ve got to get out of here, and I'd take the bus straight to the Sugar Refinery. I wouldn't even look to see what was happening."

The Sugar Refinery's address was 1115 Granville Street, next to the associated former space known by the address 1067. This story is not a comprehensive look at its history, but its importance to Gaucher and Lyons was undeniable.

"It was kind of our dilapidated but very characterful clubhouse of weirdos and strange music," Lyons said. "There weren’t too many straight-ahead things that ever found their way through that unmarked alley door. It was pretty much all weird all the time, which was nice." It closed in 2003.

Lyons told me about how his band, Fond of Tigers, got going as a solo project powered by experimentations with the day's technology. He'd manipulate the audio from Walkman portable CD players "by turning things up and down and fast-forwarding and live mixing, and then sometimes playing electric guitar over top of that. I was doing that kind of stuff. Every show was different."

At the Sugar Refinery, Lyons worked the door, hung out, and met several of his bandmates. "Shanto, I didn't know him before that. JP, I met through the Sugar Refinery. And then Dan, yeah, I feel like Dan was doing a DJ set at some point."

"I wasn't in any local bands yet as I'd just moved to town, so I asked about getting a DJ gig," Gaucher said. He told me that on his Calgary radio show, he had experimented with "some audio collage, layering multiple tracks at once and often adding other sounds", similar to what Lyons had been doing with Walkmans. The Sugar Refinery DJ set happened to be Gaucher's first-ever performance in Vancouver.

Lyons, when recalling the house music at their space, cited Tortoise's second album. "I think there was a copy of Millions Now Living Will Never Die on rotation in the 5-disc CD changer at Sugar Refinery. I was really into that album, listened to it a lot, and got TNT when it came out."

"The album that got me was their sort of first big album, TNT," Gaucher said. Released in 1998, TNT is Parker's first album with the band, though he appears alongside the previous guitarist, David Pajo.

Writing for Pitchfork's Sunday Review series in 2019, Mark Richardson noted something about late-90s Tortoise that resembled the experiments of Lyons and Gaucher. Millions Now Living Will Never Die, Richardson wrote, "put the idea of after-performance manipulation at the center of the piece, as a deep-pocket groove is born, develops, and shatters halfway through in a moment of digital haywire that sounded like a mistake."

"TNT is a record where copy, cut, paste, and undo reign supreme," Richardson wrote later in his piece, referring to the band's early use of digital audio workflows.

"Their first two records sound more like a band that had a vibe," Gaucher said about Tortoise. "It was this tenor guitar, low-tuned, droney, sludgy, slow, patient, developing kind of music. Kind of like proto-post-rock. And then with TNT, it started to really open up: more electronic music stuff coming in, and more of that spaghetti western guitar sound that they started to get known for, and all these other things."

"I think at the time," Lyons said, "I was into a lot of post-rock kind of stuff that maybe wasn't as represented in the Vancouver scene. Things like Chicago post-rock and DC post-punk. I really liked all that stuff that was coming out of Chicago, including Tortoise."

"It was wonderful to be asked to play on that show."

On stage in 2007 at the Commodore, Tortoise and Fond of Tigers – each a band where two people would play drum kits at once – didn't share kits. "They had two and we had two," Gaucher said.

Gaucher noticed the forward-thinking Tortoise using digital pitched percussion instruments. "They looked more like a percussion ensemble than a rock band. They still have the bass and the guitar, but everything else is basically percussion."

"I remember it being one of those shows where everything is vibrating," Lyons said. "You’re just along for the ride of this intense propulsive energy that's happening."

Lyons recalled another moment in technology when he got a glimpse of the Tortoise dressing room, "seeing a number of the Tortoise guys on laptops, like maybe sending emails."

"At the time it just felt weird, like, why would you be on the computer?" Lyons laughed.

Footage of several numbers from Tortoise's set is on Youtube, uploaded by a user named 'submodalitee'. (I haven't identified who that is.)

Fond of Tigers haven't released an album since Uninhabit in 2016.

"We'd already put out a first record, and the second one was about to come out," Lyons said of the 2007 situation. He told me about the band's touring around that jazzfest season: the Guelph Jazz Festival, more Ontario dates, and Quebec's celebrated avant-garde Festival International Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville.

"I'm really proud of that band," Gaucher said. "If I had to pick a tune, I'd probably pick ‘Pemberdunn Maple Wolfs’."

That track is on Release the Saviours, which came out after the show opening for Tortoise. Morgan McDonald's piano and Jesse Zubot's violin climb without end while JP Carter's trumpet blows into your left ear, and Lyons' guitar distorts in the middle background. The two drummers – Skye Brooks and Gaucher – lay a carpet of thunder. Lyons and Carter lock in for a brief riff, and then after a few more minutes of that thunderous brew, the rest of the 12-minute piece alternates between softer moments and straight-up riffing.

Allan MacInnis wrote for his blog Alienated in Vancouver at the time about "the two drummers for Fond of Tigers, who blew Tortoise away and really generated an amazing amount of excitement at the Commodore".

Fond of Tigers merged noisy music from artist spaces with percussive rock that could fill a big festival set. "I remember thinking how much I liked having that complement of playing 1067 and then playing the Commodore the next month," Lyons said. "Both felt right in their own way. It didn't feel like a contradiction."

Gaucher appreciated the era gone by: the jazzfest presenting at this venue almost every night. He remembered an artist who played there just three nights after them, Kid Koala, as well as others like "John Scofield, Medeski, Martin & Wood, all those kind of groups. And then locals opening, so these local bands got all these amazing opportunities."

Gaucher described Tortoise's new album as representative of the TNT era that he dug in the early 2000s. He called Touch "a snapshot of that band, that approach, that sound, that aesthetic. But now, it's partly rear-view, partly it's like looking at a double image in a way. In my mind it sort of looks back, but it's also saying, we're also here now and looking forward. So yeah, it's interesting. I've always followed them, but they were my favourite band back 20 years ago."

One current group with Gaucher in it, Sick Boss, seems to me particularly close to Fond of Tigers. Gaucher also plays in the bands Star System and Tiny Pyramids, inspired by the music of Sun Ra. Then there's his ensemble playing with Alvaro Rojas, Feven Kidane, and many others.

Lyons now works for Coastal Jazz. On February 26 at Tyrant Studios, he co-presents a project called Applied Silence, with writer and director José Teodoro. They describe their 2023 record Screen Door as "a tonally dynamic merging of atmospheric post-rock and intimate first-person narrative". At the show, they'll interpret this theatrical-experimental work alongside Tyrant booker Daniel Deorksen, Fond of Tigers bandmates JP Carter and Shanto Acharia, and someone who worked at the Sugar Refinery and booked Gaucher there for a DJ set, Ida Nilsen (whose music as Great Aunt Ida I naively turned over here in my early days writing).

"Everything slowly collected around this shared, almost tandem scene of Sugar Refinery and 1067," Lyons said to sum up Fond of Tigers' origin. Just as this portrait of a scene made me wonder what my first time hearing Tortoise live will be like, it also made me wonder who will look back 20 years from now on their formative times, and at which places they'll have happened.