By Joshua Lickteig | Contributing Writer
Once a month on Alberta in an upper f loor recording studio, a freshly formed jazz ensemble lays down the equivalent of an album’s length of new tracks. In May on a Thursday I joined a session midday and spoke with the band, called Neighbors, about their music.
Each of Neighbors’ bandmates live nearby. Machado Mijiga (drummer and producer) greeted me brightly at the building’s south-side entrance near NE 19th Street. The multi-unit commercial property has served various community and cultural purposes over the years, including a ballroom, and today is home to Alberta Street Gallery (an artist collective of 30 local professional artists), Psychic Sister, Altared Energy Reiki & Remedies, Dynamic Acupuncture, and AI Robot Spa. The recording studio is called The Center for Sound, Light and Color.
“We’re gearing up for a busy summer, both as a band, and separately with all of our other acts,” explains Mijiga, who used to play saxophone and keys with Portugal. The Man. Beyond the top of the stairs and a couple small turns down the hallway we enter a cozy main loft space full of gear, with high ceilings, long mossgreen curtains and a mezzanine balcony.
Garrett Baxter (bass guitar, upright bass, prominent student of composer Chuck Israels) and Mike Gamble (guitarist, recording engineer, instructor at Reed College and OSU with close ties to the music scene in NYC, New Orleans, and San Francisco) wrap up discussing a take’s playback and the band warmly welcomes me into their circle. In a flash, Gamble appears with an iconic hand-shaped chair, borrowed from an adjoining room partitioned by glass, where Ryan Oxford (studio owner, songwriter, Y La Bamba tour musician, and for whom the space serves as home base) is working with another local musician.
It’s a space bustling with creative energy, known also as Color Therapy Records, reputable for its indie music production in Portland. “This place is like our garage,” the Neighbors seem to chime in at once. They resume work on a contemplative surf tune that soon morphs into a bright mysterium.
“It would be cool to have some kind of riff and harmony that outlines the solo sections,” says Mijiga from behind the piano, preceding a swift move to the drum-kit. The sound is creative jazz / experimental rock that also likes to space out and embrace mistakes, a keen balance of exactness, wonder, and ephemerality.
“Okay, that’s a new form now,” Gamble says, referring to a quick improvisational take, as Garrett jots notes on emerging structures in the soundscape.
“We all write really fast,” says Baxter. “Individual relations overlap often, though it’s not an abstraction. There’s a serious passion and space where ideas are constantly taking shape.”
“We have the spirit of a bigger band with lots of individualistic contributions,” Gamble adds.
Mijiga says, “Portland has an impressively diverse and talented pool of musicians for a city so small– I learned from MusicPortland last year that our city has the most venues per capita of any major US city, scaled to population and size, but it seems to spread disproportionately to the jazz community, because I constantly hear complaints from fellow musicians about how scarce the gig economy is for a jazz musician. A town that once boasted dozens of jazz clubs realistically now has one or two dedicated venues. I think the Neighbors’ sum-of-all-parts formlessness allows us to fill the quantum space between Portland musicians’ various social strata.”
In April, Neighbors was ranked one of Portland’s “Best New Bands” by Willamette Week. Bandcamp is the direct way to support Neighbors as a whole, where you may find about a dozen EPs from the band’s jam sessions for free, while they finish compiling their first official album, for their one-year anniversary in fall. This summer they will tour a few dates in the PNW and perhaps California.
Joshua Lickteig is an artist and engineer. He was born near the other Milwaukee and has been in Portland since 2018. His latest book of poems is called Half Moon Day Sun.