“Gang of Three” started out as one of a set of compositions I think of as “short bits” – brief tunes that could be strung together with other tunes to create ever-changing suites. One of the inspirations for this was The Metronomical Society, a collection of live tracks by Egg. I’ve loved the Egg studio albums since the 70s, and hearing how differently the pieces were played live was a revelation. Soft Machine Volume Two is another great example — each side of the album is made up of a bunch of short compositions that transition smoothly into suites that could be rearranged differently.
“Gang of Three” originally ended before the improv section, though I think that one of the earliest suites did include a free improv there. My original idea came from messing around with a bass line with one section in 11 and another in 10. For some reason, I connect it in my mind with Led Zeppelin’s “Four Sticks,” though it’s not really very similar. When we first started learning the piece, I mentioned that and Randy came up with a great drum part for it.
I wanted to expand the trio’s sound, so I started loading a bunch of essentially random samples into my looper, and those became part of the improv as well. It was only much later that I added the short bits that punctuate the improv sections. I had fun assembling these collages, throwing in animal noises, political speeches, samples from Star Trek, Dr Who, and Wallace and Gromit, along with old public domain music from 78RPM records (courtesy of Archive.org). There’s also a little bit stolen from the CD that came with one of my Chinese language lesson books. All of these are brief, as well as being repurposed, so count as Fair Use.
Here’s a version we recorded live in Jim’s living room back in 2018. Did we really play it this fast?
The title, of course, is a reference to Chairman Mao’s rivals during the Cultural Revolution, who were called 四人帮, or the Gang of Four. We were performing as a trio, so “Gang of Three.” This track was one of the staples of our live sets, and a lot of fun to play.
For the final studio recording, I didn’t use the looper, but assembled new collages from the original samples, playing around with them a bit in the process.