Drummer Zach Barocas might be best known for his work with punk scene legends Jawbox, but even though he credits that scene with lifelong friendships, he has always gravitated toward other genres as a listener.
He is currently leading a supergroup of indie rock royalty, including Jawbox bandmate J. Robbins, Mark Cisneros of Hammered Hulls, and Gordon Withers, who played with Robbins in Office of Future Plans and Channels in a jazz project called New Freedom Sound. He is refreshed and re-energized, thrilled to be aiming to make a deeper connection with himself and his listeners.
“I have been trying to do what I’m doing now for a very long time. This is me peeling away the expectations of the audience. But to be fair, [Jawbox classic] ‘Spoiler’ is part of that sound, too,” he said. “I’m trying to create environments with New Freedom Sound. I am looking for an experience I’m not having with other music so that I can have it, and then I can share it with you.”
He continued: “One way to approach making music is to make a sound that’s reminiscent of something you love, trying to play in a genre. Another is to try to make music that sounds like what we aren’t yet able to hear, to be the guy who comes up with something we haven’t heard. New Freedom Sound is a chance to take what I’m listening to and make it into something I haven’t heard yet. I am confident that my playing in this group is the best I have ever been.” Anyone familiar with Barocas’ previous work should have their interest piqued by that statement alone.
New Freedom Sound started in 2021, and oboist Lenny Young came on for Eight Freedoms, released in 2022. “I found Lenny through a friend. He also plays the recorder. He showed up with a bass recorder to practice. These are remarkable sounds to me because I’m used to music that is an assault. New Freedom Sound is dense, but it’s not a confrontation,” he added.
“Most people probably don’t know that Mark Cisneros studied woodwinds at the New School. He has a master’s degree and plays flute, vibraphone, and saxophone. I love Hammered Hulls, but his guitar playing isn’t what I’m drawn to now. Before punk rock, J. was really into classical music and film scores. And Gordon played with me in Bells and has played with J., too,” Barocas noted.
For fans of the guitar-based music most of the band members are known for, New Freedom Sound presents an opportunity for listeners to hear members of beloved indie institutions showing off their multidimensional talents.
Sometimes, exploring new horizons includes dialing back on what Barocas is best known for. “The newest release, Two Freedoms, is far less drum-focused. A lot of what I did was not starting with a beat, which was a serious shift for me to iron out,” he informed. “New Freedom Sound is trying to have the instruments take over roles in the pieces that aren’t conventional for that instrument.”
As for the possibility of New Freedom Sound bringing him fans who aren’t familiar with Jawbox, he has a different perspective. “If there are other people who are into it and who don’t know me from Jawbox, I’m not hearing from them. But if you look at contemporary classical and jazz music, it’s more opaque than punk. The classical and jazz music worlds aren’t the same as the punk scene. Those ideologies are geared toward a distinction between performer and audience,” he said. “In punk, performer and listener status is supposed to be the same. The magic of someone like Steve Albini is that he was better at it than us, but he wasn’t better than us.”
“I’m not sure if we are gaining new listeners from other scenes, but the people who follow me are hearing things they don’t always hear,” he continued. “We are bringing the horse to the water. Many people who like New Freedom Sound have been clear that this is new to them, and they don’t know what to do with it. But if you can sit still for 15 minutes, there’s something in there for you.”
That might be the challenge for listeners who come to New Freedom Sound by way of the concise explosiveness of Jawbox. “Movies hide time better than music. A three-hour movie like Spike Lee’s X might not feel like three hours. But with music, it is different. At three minutes into a New Freedom Sound song, there’s no ending being set up. That’s one of the things I love about long music. It makes me do something else as a player. We were listening to ‘Espresso’ all summer in the shop. But a ten-minute version would be tough. You can’t do that for that amount of time. ‘Savory’ is already five minutes long. Three isn’t enough, and six would be too much,” he explained.
Despite the current joys of New Freedom Sound and Jawbox shows from time to time, Barocas’ peace and enthusiasm are hard-won. The road to New Freedom Sound was a bumpy one, with Barocas playing in a few instrumental bands after Jawbox broke up and even taking a break from making music altogether. “After Jawbox, I don’t play with singers much, aside from one-offs for friends. I don’t want singers because there is too much focus on them,” he said.
Barocas married in 2003, and he and his wife moved around a lot for the first few years. They owned a stationery and bookstore in Minneapolis from 2005-2008. “I played a little, but I didn’t enjoy it. I was in a band called the Million, and it was a very good local band, but I was very unhappy at the time,” he shared.
Fortunately, Zach Barocas rediscovered his love for the drums. “When Jawbox got booked for Jimmy Fallon, I got a rehearsal space to practice for that performance, and I also started Bells. The time I wasn’t playing was a drag. I never got rid of my drums, but I had no ideas for a while, and I had lost my sense of possibility. As other parts of my life got straightened out, I realized that playing is essential. It’s a spiritual and transcendent thing to do. And the goal is to do that for listeners, too,” he said.
Post-Jawbox, Barocas was in the instrumental collective the Up on In, who recorded with Robbins and made one record. Bells are mostly inactive due to band members moving. Robbins also recorded two of their releases and played bass on their last record. “I was having a hard time getting along with bass players for reasons only I can take the blame for,” he laughed.
“Bells deliberately didn’t take part in the music business. Bandcamp was on the rise. People were getting worried about the move to streaming. There were many reasons to make records and play shows if you could afford to. It was interesting to see how many people would show up. We would play Brownies and a hundred people would show. Bells was good for me because I was coming off a period of not playing at all,” he said.
The Jawbox reunion shows, and more to the point, seeing how he and his bandmates have grown as musicians, also played a critical part in Barocas’ fire returning. “J. is such a better guitar player than he was when we wrote those Jawbox songs. His new record [Basilisk] is so good. Jawbox did a residency and dedicated a night to a record, and some of those songs were just… I love them, but some are not up to the level of his most recent work,” Barocas noted.
Since disbanding after the release of their self-titled record in 1996, Jawbox tour occasionally and will perform at this year’s Best Friends Forever Festival in Las Vegas in October. Although Jawbox never became the smash Atlantic Records was hoping for, their longevity is ultimately the greater reward.
“Our story is one good fortune after another, but not what we expected, from being able to buy back our records to playing reunion shows. But if we had been more popular, we might have meant less to the people who loved it. You could say hi after the show. That doesn’t happen if we are famous. The label wasn’t working overtime to make ‘Mirrorful’ a hit, but it’s had a longer life than many songs that were hits,” he said.
“I was worried about the reunion at first,” Barocas admits. “I wasn’t sure I could play these songs for 90 minutes. But we aren’t the only ones who were there who were 50. The whole audience was, too. When we played with Jawbreaker a couple of years ago, it was different because they weren’t all our people. Same for Primavera. The audience probably enjoyed it but didn’t think about it much after. When we played with Stone Temple Pilots in the 1990s, we did 25-minute sets. That was an anomaly for us, being on a tour of that scale. Now, we are so secure in what we do. I practice once a week to make sure I can still physically deliver, but we are so much more secure in the shows at the festivals.
“When I’m playing ‘Chinese Fork Tie’, I’m playing with enough energy so that a person 100 feet away can enjoy it, especially for people who already know it.”
But it is not the same for everyone in the band. While J. Robbins is making new records and touring regularly, the other original band members, Kim Colletta, Bill Barbot, and Barocas, are not. The band also added Brooks Harlan, who has a history of working on several projects with Robbins on guitar.
“J. rewrote [Jawbox classic] ‘Static’, and he plays acoustic shows. Some changes have had to be made to account for not remembering things, but J. has to at least come close in the live setting. For Brooks, it is different. He gets to play in one of his favorite bands, and he’s been with J. since Channels. Brooks is a pro. He is always working, playing in other bands and running his business.” Barocas explained.
It seems like the life changes have made playing together more enjoyable. “Kim and I retreat into lives that have nothing to do with Jawbox. We like playing together now. We didn’t always. Now, it’s family. We don’t always agree, and I know I can support them or push them to go even harder. The whole operation is more relaxed than it was in our twenties,” he said.
Zach Barocas has a deeper appreciation for being able to keep playing Jawbox, coupled with an awareness that there will be an end. “There aren’t any new songs, and I don’t see how there would be. Who’s writing a new Jawbox song? If I write, it’s going to sound like New Freedom Sound. If J. writes, he will keep it for the J. Robbins band. We play the old music because it still sounds good. I’m the youngest of the original members. At some point, it will be inadequate and undignified to try to go out and do this. I strained my rotator cuffs in 2019. I exercise to make sure I can keep doing this,” he noted.
But even with an awareness of an inevitable end, Barocas is still pushing himself and open to being inspired and moved in deeper ways than he would have imagined. He recalled seeing one moment of being overwhelmed by the power of a Peter Gabriel concert. “My wife got us tickets to see him at Madison Square Garden last year,” he recalled. “My relationship with his music is singular. No one has mattered as much to me in as many ways as his. I cried at the show. It was amazing. It was that moment during ‘Digging in the Dirt’ when you are waiting for the moment it explodes and he sings. ‘This time, you’ve gone too far.’ There was a moment where everyone on stage was improvising, and the lights went to strobes, and it cracked me wide open.
“I had always reserved that ‘Digging in the Dirt’ experience for myself on my own. I couldn’t believe that my experience had become common. What I learned was that I feel a lot more about that stuff than I think, and the only way I’ll learn that about myself is by experiencing it.”
At the same time, he is providing others with that moment of transcendence. “People come out to see Jawbox because this music became part of their lives, and even now, it signals that level of appreciation. Peter Gabriel reminds me of a time when I wanted to hear that instead of drums and guitars. There is recklessness in our listening in our teens and 20s. It still resonates because you know it to have been awesome during that time,” he said.
This is why Zach Barocas has a more nuanced view of the territorial nature of indie fandom in the 1990s, terrain Jawbox certainly knew. Some fans turned their backs on them when they signed with Atlantic Records. “Part of that being territorial that seemed immature is part of what brings us back now. I don’t have that feeling about music anymore. I hope what people experience at reunions is a very personal and private experience that they don’t have to tell everyone about,” he notes. “We have all been at a show as a musician or attendee where there is just a small group of people, which lets you have a personal experience. It’s a bigger waste of time to work my ass off for 20,000 people who don’t really care about what we’re doing.”