LIZA WAKEMAN

At 26, Liza Wakeman is already has a decade of experience with local band behind her. This you classically trained violin player has also had more success nationally than almost any other musician currently on the local scene. As a teenager, Liza was the one constant member amid constant personnel changes in Julian Koster's band Chocolate USA. Liza made two records with Chocolate USA, All Jets Are Going To Fall and Smoke Machine which were released on Bar None. Liza also played on two records by Alva. Their debut, Fair Haired Guillotine was released on John Zorn's Japanese imprint, Avant. A new EP just came out on Menlo Park. Liza is currently stalking local and regional stages as both a solo performer and as a member of November Foxtrot Whiskey, who also have just released a CD.

Liza is no stranger to critical success. Both Chocolate USA and Alva received their fair share of critical praise. Tampa alternative news magazine, Weekly Planet, named Liza Wakeman "Best Classical Musician" of 1999 while November Foxtrot Whiskey was honored as best band. With all this activity and attention swirling around Wakeman, the time is right to find out more about this prolific local musician. I recently sat down with Liza at her Seminole Heights home to talk about her various bands and plans for the future.

ALVA

"Unless some kind of crazy miracle happens," Liza states bluntly, "I don't think there will be much of a future for Alva. The other girls have finished their master's degrees. Aida Ruilova lives in New York. Michelle Anderson lives in Atlanta. We haven't even played together in a year and a half. That's when the new CD was recorded. It's been tied up with printing delays and arguing and other such things. It's probably going to be our last release."

"We got together about four and a half years ago," Wakeman relates as we go back to the beginnings of Alva. "We got together just for fun. Our original idea was to just do something different. Since all of us had been classically trained and we wanted to take advantage of that."

"With Alva," Liza explains, "one of us would come up with a riff or something and the rest of us would piece it together. We were infamous for writing a song in fifteen minutes."  Their early rehearsals and song writing experiments produced a collection of macabre neo-classically flavored pop tunes. Sonically and lyrically, they brought to mind the twisted dry wit of Edward Gorey. The musical miniatures that populate Fair Haired Guillotine are like arsenic centered sweets; appealing while appalling. The band sent their demo tape to John Zorn because they were fans and hoped to get some feedback. Instead, they were signed by Zorn's Avant imprint.

"We got pretty serious pretty fast" Liza confirms picking up the story. "Three months after we started we got signed by John Zorn. It was fun. We got a lot of really good press and did some fun tours with Neutral Milk Hotel and Olivia Tremor Control."

"The first CD was childish, playful and a little creepy" Liza observes. "Slattery For Ungdom  is pretty creepy too. There is that tape loop vocal that's like a fingernail on a chalkboard. But not in a bad way. I think with more time together the execution just became better and a little more complex. It became a little less ditty-like."

More than just geographic isolation contributed to the downfall of Alva. The perennial curse of rock bands, business and artistic differences played a major roll too. "The new disc is on Menlo Park Recordings," Liza says. "I wanted to put it out on Avant, but Avant has stopped putting out records. I wrote a couple of pieces for the record. One was called Overture and the other was called Coda. They were very much complementary pieces to me. I wanted Overture to be at the beginning and Coda to be at the end. Michelle was in total agreement with me. Then I got a copy of the master."

The original mix of Slattery For Ungdom opened with the first 30 seconds of Coda, which had been tacked on to the beginning of another song. The rest of Coda and all of Overture had been excised. "They had a complaint that more than 50% of the record would have been solo violin if those songs were included," Liza said relating the labels thinking.

"Part of the reason I didn't want to sign with Menlo Park was Aida and Mark were up in New York," Wakeman continues. "We were out of the loop. They had an image of what they wanted and that was the way it was going to be. I understand that, but I had a vision and Michelle had a vision of what that record should be and we were both ignored" In the end, Liza pulled both pieces from the CD.

VIOLIN SOLOS AND BEER

"In a way, it was a good thing," Liza reflects on the hassels over her pieces for Alva. "It kicked me into doing this solo thing. I couldn't let these songs sit here and do nothing! Up to that point in time, I thought they were my best work."

"My solo thing is trying to have more of a classical feel with electronic effects," Wakeman explains. "Stephanie Kalim of Weekly Planet dubbed it Liza Classical, which I like. It's like classical but I can play it in bars and people like it. Right now, I only have a digital delay pedal. What I do is write with the delay. It's like having another part. I can do a loop on the violin then play flute over it."

"I just did a solo tour of the east coast," Wakeman continues. "I did 24 shows and opened for John Entwissel, Mr. Bungle, Brian Richie from the Violent Femmes. Of course the tour was a financial disaster. The first two weeks I was sitting on a high horse, the second two weeks I was begging in the streets. The second two weeks were the Northeast. The gas was more expensive, the food was more expensive and less pay. The whole south, they feed you and give you free drinks and usually pay you pretty well." "Overture," "Coda" and two other songs are on the Violin Stuff cassette that Liza sells at her shows.

NOVEMBER FOXTROT WHISKEY

"November Foxtrot Whiskey came into being in a very cool way," Liza says as we switch to talking about her current band. "Chocolate had been dead for quite awhile and Alva was on life support. I didn't really have much going on and everyone else either didn't have anything going on, or didn't like what they were doing. Arron Lepley and I were at the Rubb and we realized we had a whole band sitting right there, talking about not having anything to do. So we did something."

"We have four Classically trained musician in our band," Liza says, "and one who just plays music constantly. Jeff Beyer, our drummer has his degree in percussion performance. Our percussionist, Damon Dougherty,  almost has his degree in composition and Arron is almost through his composition degree. I, of course dropped out of college in 1993. We all have a lot of different things that we're interested in and we're just hitting them one at a time." Sean Dougherty and Dylan Bell rounded out the original line up of the band.

The self titled November Foxtrot Whiskey CD sound a bit like Neil Young circa "Comes a Time" hanging out with a gypsy caravan somewhere in Central Europe. The guitars, vocals and harmonicas have a lazy country feel. The violin and keyboards have a distinctly European flavor. The disc has also been compared to the Billy Bragg and Wilso collaboration Mermaid Avenue. "Our CD has a lot more country than we play now," Liza continues. One of our goals is to try to do something in every style we can master. We've started dipping into covers just for fun. We have to do something to keep things interesting."