With Rama 1 (out now on Magna Carta), bassist Andy West (The Dregs, Crazy Backwards Alphabet, The Mistakes, Zazen) has unleashed an album that will, no doubt, be remembered as one of the most important releases of this decade and, one hopes, of all time. Filled with high-caliber performances from such luminaries as Rod Morgenstein (The Dregs, Winger), Jonathan Mover (Joe Satriani), Mike Portnoy (Dream Theater), Jens Johansson (Yngwie Malmsteen) and Mike Keneally (The Mistakes, Frank Zappa, Steve Vai), the often dense but always rewarding compositions here range from something approaching a 21st century fusion freak out (?Mad March?) to a slightly disquieting slice of chamber jazz (?Resonate?). All the while, the tastefully aggressive and quietly life-affirming album reveals through its innumerable layers of lavalike energy again and again why now, more than ever, the world needs Andy West. (And others like him.)

Not that the world has ever been without him. Despite his longstanding career as a software designer, the once (and, one hopes, future) Dreg has never fully removed himself from the industry. Since The Dregs folded in the early 80s, West has recorded a series of impressive and challenging albums: be it the tastefully twisted but instantly classic Mistakes album with Keneally (who co-produced R1), Henry Kaiser and Prairie Prince, or with Zazen, a collective that has recorded several releases that are dying to be heard. And now,with R1 hitting stores and seeping its way deep into progressive hearts, the project?s mastermind is already turning his attention to his next joy-inducing project, FWAP, featuring master guitarist Joaquin Lievano and ace drummer Hillary Jones, a group whose still-unreleased work suggests what we know from listening to anything that West has played on: that he is careful and wise in choosing his projects. While anyone versed in even one page of Dregs lore knows that the business was not especially kind to West and his cohorts, you also get the sense that his sometimes stealthy distance from the industry has less to do with his disdain for those on the inside than it does with his personal desire for sanity, balance.

Certainly sanity and balance are two things that, one way or another, inform the R1 album and, one way or another, prove to be two things West is not in short supply of. At least not today. An affable, centered, and remarkably intelligent man, West remains confident but unassuming. He is eager to praise those around him (including Toshi Iseda, whose efforts on the R1 album should not go unnoticed) for their contributions to the album and to note that it feels good to have the project completed and available for public consumption, all the while sounding extremely proud of what he has accomplished with the nine tunes on R1. As he should be.

For more information on West, including soundclips, bio information, links to at least one place that sells Rama 1, a cool glimpse of our planet, and more about FWAP (including gig listings), visit
http://www.xen.com and http://www.fwap.net.

JB: Can you talk about the genesis of this project?

AW: Some of these songs first happened as early as ?94 or ?95, when I lived in Chicago. Toshi Iseda and myself had a trio there and we were doing some of them. At the time, I was into more industrial-sounding stuff. But I?d wanted to do it in a small format, get a big sound out of a small band. Toshi and I did a couple of gigs but we didn?t really go much further with it. Then, I moved to Arizona and several years later I was back in Chicago on business and Toshi and I were talking and we were saying, ?God, it would be really cool to do some more of this stuff.? I got excited about it again and we started recording a few of the older tunes without actually having a band to perform them.

One thing led to another [and we got involved in making the project happen]. Rod [Morgenstein] has been a friend of mine for a long time. Toshi knew Mike Portnoy and Jonathan Mover and asked them if they wanted to be on the record. I?d been a fan of Jens Johansson?s work for a while and I contacted him via the Internet. I?ve never actually been in a physical location with him. We?ve only talked on the phone and written to each other through email. Then, Kit Watkins, who?s also been a friend of mine for years, was around and I wanted to draw him into something different than what he?d been doing lately. What happened with Mike [Keneally] was that I got stuck on this album. We couldn?t [really finish it]. Toshi lives in Chicago, I live here, everyone else lives [wherever]. I was trying to finish it by myself and I couldn?t get there. So, I called Mike and said, ?Why don?t you come here for a week and we?ll go through every single tune and finish it? Whatever?s not there, we?ll add. Whatever is there, we?ll tweak.? So, that?s why Mike?s on every tune, really. Because we started with the first tune and said, ?Okay, what?s it need?? After he?d overlayed all these intricate parts, all these weird parts, I naturally wanted him to mix it because the mixing was going to be frightening because of [the various layers].

JB: Do you have a core band in mind based on the players from the album that you?d like to work with in a live situation?

AW: Obviously, I?d like any of these guys to be able to do it. But part of the concept of this album was that everyone would do their own parts. What I said was, ?Okay, here are the sections of the song. Here?s the groove I want and here are the chords. Now do something with it.? Everyone contributed to the whole thing but, obviously, there?s no way I?m going to get a [full] band together with these guys because they?re all very busy and the market for this stuff is really limited. But all I can say at this time is that it?s an idea I?d love to be able to execute. I do think that there are people out there who could play this stuff. No question, even if they didn?t write it.

But there?s a very cool aspect to all of this in that Magna Carta has a lot of really cool artists and bands that are in situations similar to mine. I was talking to Pete [Morticelli] at the label and we were saying that it would be really great if we could get a band together featuring some of these solo artists and do this music.

JB: Would the music take a similar shape to the stuff on the album or would you say, ?Okay, we?re going to do ?Mad March?? but know that on a given night ?Mad March? could transform into anything at all based on the players present that evening?

AW: There would be some of that, of course. But with these songs, it?s hard to say that they?re tuneful but in a way they are. The form and the melody are pretty well dictated. There?s not a lot of jamming with the exception of solo improvisation, which is a form that The Dregs really kind of perfected: you have these songs and we?ll solo and someone will play parts underneath. On the other hand, I do love to improvise, so there?s no telling what could happen. I approach it all in a very organic way, depending on who I?m working with and what they can do.

JB: You?ve known Rod for many years. What are some of the ways that he?s surprised you as the years have gone by? Are there things he does that, when you see him play or hear him play, make you say, ?I never imagined he could do that??

AW: You know, it?s interesting because I?d almost say I feel that way more about Steve [Morse] at this point. I think Steve, as amazing as he is, had more of a fixed way of doing things, which was his strength, at the same time, and his power. The Major Impacts album, for example, is so radically different than anything I ever thought he would do but it?s still him.

With Rod, I expect it. Rod is a very versatile, amazing player. If there?s anything that surprises me, it?s his love of basic pop-rock. The Winger stuff. All the guys in that band are very accomplished musicians and songwriters but it?s obviously pop, which I don?t gravitate toward as much as more eclectic music.

JB: ?Government? is one of my favorite tunes on the album and I?m very fond of the guitar parts [there.] What do you remember about how that song developed?

AW: I work with sequencers a lot when I write. I start with a bass line or a drum pattern in the sequencer and come up with parts. In the middle of that song, what that is is a clavinet part that I came up with. It was an accidental sort of thing. I was writing all these little sequencer patterns, little sixteenth note patterns and putting them in the computer. I was hand-crafting this weird little part and when we were recording that thing, that was the middle section. I was playing it for Mike [Keneally] and I said, ?Mike, I don?t know about this, do you want to do a solo over this?? He said, ?Hey! I like that part. I think I could play that part.? I said, ?You?re kidding?? That part is insane. It?s all over the place. There?s this really fast picking; it?s over a chromatic bass line, so it fits in a weird way. But we sat down and he played it section by section and figured out how to fingerpick that part. So, that?s a part that I wrote and he played. I never thought any guitar player would play that. It?s just crazy.

JB: ?Old Meat Frame? is the only vocal track on the disc. Was that one of your intentions from the beginning? Did you say, ?This really needs vocals,? or did that become a concern later on?

AW: When Toshi and I had [Rama] together, we were using a lot of samples over this stuff. ?Government,? for example, had a lot of samples from a Great Speeches of the 20th Century CD. One of the speeches was Richard Daley at the Democratic Nation Convention in the ?60s. It?s all Big-Brother kind of stuff. So, I overlayed samples and repeated patterns, so the samples had a kind of song form which meant they lent themselves to words or instrumental melodies. In the case of ?Old Meat Frame,? that pattern just needed words. Ever since I came up with the bass line, I?ve said, ?This really needs words.? So when Mike was here, I told him that. So he sat down on the couch, came up with the first verse and sang it. Then he sat down and came up with the second verse and sang it. I said, ?God, this is great, except I?d really like to hear a different verse for the last verse.? So he sat down and came up with that. I love the words, I think they?re very cool. They have this oddly metaphysical sensibility to them.

JB: How have you seen Mike change since you first met him?

AW: He just gets better and better. He gets more interesting. His early stuff is great, his new stuff is great. I just saw him play in San Diego about a month ago and they were just unreal. He?s got Nick D?Virgilio playing, who?s great and the band sounds incredible. Mike is so key to the sound of this album but it?s nothing he would do. At the same time, I think I brought something out of him by saying, ?Hey, Mike, play on this stuff.? I?m really happy with that aspect of it. It?s a true collaboration in that sense. I brought something in and he finished it. He?s a very amazing guy, very eclectic. His music is very rich. Even when I?m listening to it, I like to listen to it in short bursts unless I?m listening to him live. I?ll listen to half of an album because it demands a lot of focus and attention. At the same time, I could go through all his albums and [extract songs and] make a pop album.

JB: This album has many different layers for me as a listener: on one hand, it?s the kind of thing where I find myself listening to with headphones on and really trying to focus but I can also listen to it in the car as I?m out running errands. I imagine that that?s not always an easy line to walk for a composer.

AW: You?ve hit on a key concept for me. A lot of the music that I love is unlistenable in the way that you just talked about. You can?t just put it on and drive around. You have to pay attention. I guess I?d characterize it as the difference between Full Metal Jacket and The Terminator or XXX. At once, there?s a lot of stuff happening but you don?t really have to engage, you can lie there. And in another case you have to engage or else you?re not going to get it. But you don?t always want to engage. I?m a big music fan, I listen to a lot of it and sometimes I think, ?Wow, I?d love to be able to write music that people just enjoy.? So, that?s kind of in the back of my head when I do some of this stuff.

JB: The album is interesting for the fact that it gets stronger the farther you get into it; especially ?Resonate.?

AW: That was another tricky one. It originated with a sound that I had on my synthesizer, a really plucky, guitar synth sound. It had this very weird articulation where, based on the velocity, it would have these different kinds of attacks. I really liked that. It was just a pattern that fell out of my fingers. I didn?t know what to do with it but then I wrote a bass line for it. That was all I had for that song: a bass line and a pattern over and over and over. Nobody could come up with anything else. Rod learned it and played it almost like jazz but it?s him, it?s the compositional awareness that he has. He took the song and played this very free-flowing thing over it. I sent it to Kit and all it had was the arpeggiated section, a bass line and the drum parts and he overlayed the pianos, the chords, the saxophone, the whole thing. It was something that he fell into.

It?s funny because I sent him two songs [including] one of the heavier songs, which I knew he?d be great at but he didn?t want to do it. He just didn?t want to play that kind of music any more. But this I think kind of struck him. So, I really have to give him credit for it because he brought it to a whole other place. That?s the hardest part of being the seed of all this stuff, having to say, ?Okay, self, this is good enough to present to people.?

JB: You?ve certainly worked in collaborative environments in the past. Now that you?re on your own, have you found that you?ve had to develop your own sense of self trust more?

AW: It?s very different. In the Dregs, Steve was so far ahead of us in terms of composition that while there was sort of a feedback group it was really his thing. He?d come up with these songs and we?d learn the parts and they were very challenging. So, I had to maintain a high level of technical ability just to play that stuff. After that, after the Dregs broke up, it became very different. Around that time I met Henry [Kaiser, Crazy Backwards Alphabet, The Mistakes] and started doing outside jazz or free rock/improv. That led to a whole different kind of sensibility. After that I started getting into a more orchestrated works with Zazen. It was a studio band but with neat orchestrations but in that sense we all worked together. That was the first time when there was lot of collaboration, where we?d bounce ideas off each other, we?d come up with sections, people would start to overlay stuff; it would go back and forth.

That?s when I really grew to love that stuff, because I was so surprised by the things that would come out. A simple bass line would generate a whole thing. I really thought that was cool. That kind of collaboration, I found very comfortable. This kind of thing, where it?s just me coming up with stuff, there is a different sensibility. I have to use my imagination and think, ?Okay, well, what kind of things would I hear?? Of course, the possibilities are endless. But there is a point where it snaps in and you say, ?This is good enough to be a song. Someone will work with it or I?ll finish it out.?
Now there?s the practical side of life: I live in place where I don?t have a lot of musician friends right next to me. I do know that the people who I consider the greatest musicians in the world are the ones that I can play with. But it?s a different dynamic now and I?m forced to be sort of inherently creative.

JB: How important has being surrounded by other players been to you over the years? Or do you think that you?ve made leaps in your playing as the result of being isolated?

AW: I really think that it?s more of a lifestyle choice than anything. If I had my way, I?d have plenty of money and I?d be hanging around musicians all the time. That would be the ideal. But you make the best of what you can. For everyone that means something different. I have a dual career: I?m also in software development. I write and design software for a living. I could do that in pretty much any major city but living in L.A. is kind of abrasive and painful. There?s a lot of people there, there?s a lot of anger there, there?s a lot of bad stuff. But there?s a lot of good stuff there, too. There?s a tremendous amount of music in that town. But I guess it?s kind of a conscious compromise to a certain degree. [But] I think that, for a musician in their formative years it?s really important to be around people who can play a lot better than you and that you?re exposed to a lot of stuff because it just starts to sink in. At this point in my life it?s unlikely that I?m going to make any sort of unbelievable giant shifts in my musical sensibilities. I have to work with what I have. But when I was 20, that wasn?t the case. Anything could happen. I think there are times in your life when you need that more than others. I miss playing a lot. I don?t necessarily play every day now, although I think about music every day and I usually work [with it] on the computer some. But it?s not the same as going out and doing gigs.

I remember talking to Billy Cobham at a Jazz Is Dead show and I said, ?Gosh, I wish I could play more.? He said, ?No you don?t.? I said, ?What do you mean?? He said, ?If you wanted to play more, you would.? I thought, ?I guess you can?t really argue with that logic. If you have any control and power in your life, you pretty much do what you want.? I made a choice. I don?t feel victimized by the world in any sense. I?m certainly looking for more ways to change my life, just as I think anyone who?s a conscious, thinking person does.

JB: How did you feel when the Dregs ended? I think a lot of music fans have romantic notions about bands like that, that there?s this sense of the band striking out against the world, etc. Did you feel that it was a choice you all made or did you feel, because of the adversity you?d faced as a band, that there were forces against you?

AW: There?s a very a complex answer to that question. But I guess what I?d say in a simple way is that Steve and I met in high school and we grew up together. The band formed and it was us against the world. There?s a lot of power in that, a lot of energy in that, there?s a lot of youthful vigor in that. But what happened was, at the point at which it ended, we just weren?t having the same kind of good times that we?d had before. There were a lot of pressures on us from a lot of different places and a lot of different factors within that. But, in a nutshell, what it would be is that it just wasn?t as much fun. There was a lot of shit going on. There were management issues, internal issues in the band, everyone had relationships, everyone had this and that. There were infinite things of infinite complexity but it really all boils down to, ?How does it feel when you go out onstage and play in front of people?? And if it doesn?t feel great, at least for us, then it?s the beginning of the end.

JB: How have you changed as a musician over the years in terms of how you play, what you play?

AW: I think I used to be a much more technical player than what I am now. Working with Steve, there was a high degree of precision required. I totally appreciate that. While I still bring that with me, I think that my experience with Henry [changed me]. Just getting a sense of, ?How do you improvise together? What?s it really all about when you create music from scratch?? So that?s changed a lot. The places where you look for value in music, what tweaks you, what gets you off, what makes you happy when you play? Those things have changed slightly. I think that?s about it. I have made a conscious effort not to play certain kinds of music. That and I?m probably not as technically astute as I used to be [laughs].

I try to think more compositionally now. I didn?t used to. When I was with the Dregs, it was really all about speed and articulation. ?How fast can you play this stuff perfectly?? And with what kind of energy. It wasn?t just a technical exercise. Every note had meaning, no matter how fast or how slow you played it. But there was a high level of athleticism involved in the performance of that music. Even though I don?t have a great ear, I tend to think more outside the box, in terms of what I?m hearing.

JB: Why do you say that you don?t have a great ear?

AW: I have a good ear in that I think the songs I write are interesting, so, obviously, I hear those things. But there?s kind of a training thing which I never really bothered to spend the time with and that is my only regret right now: [that I?m not one of those people who] can just sit there and can learn how to hear music and understand its structure in a very [learned] way. For me, I have to find that. Some people can mimic stuff instantly. Mike Keneally?s a great example: he can just pick up a steel box and start making music with it because he hears things in that way. I don?t necessarily hear things like that.

JB: You know, another thing I love about this album is that the notes are really multi-dimensional. If you say that something?s well-produced, that has all kinds of negative connotations, so I?ll say that it?s very vibrant.

AW: We paid attention to everything. There?s a lot of stuff on there where, when we were doing it, I?d watch Mike?s responses to it and it would really tickle him. He?d go, ?Wow, that is really neat. We want to bring that out.? I?d say the same thing: ?You know, what?s really important to me is that this particular sound has to cut through.? So we really worked on that. We tried to make it not so that it?s massive and people bow down to it but so that the right things pop out at you.

JB: Well, that?s such a fine line isn?t it? On one hand you can spend all this time making something sound a certain way but it becomes so polished that you can?t really wrap your ears around it.

AW: It is. You can have an amazing piece of music that just doesn?t have the production, doesn?t come out and grab you like it should. But, it?s crazy: I was just in my studio the other day and this guy was demoing a piece of equipment and he pulled out this Muddy Waters album from 1962 and I swear he put this song on and we all (there were four guys there) started smiling. It sounded so great. There was so much energy. What it really comes down to is that it is about music but I think that the production can certainly enhance the effect.

JB: Do you think the Mistakes will work together again?

AW: I hope so. We talked about it a couple of years ago and it just didn?t happen for some reason. Henry, Mike and I are all still friends, so I guess it depends on whether or not we all get bored at the same time or inspired at the same time. Probably more inspired because I don?t think anyone is sitting around bored these days.