Seattle’s Finest Polyrhythmic Pop Ensemble, or Who Are Pollens?
{This article previously appeared on Another Rainy Saturday on July 25, 2013.}
Somehow, a (now) seven piece collective of former art school students that seems to have little interest in contemporary pop music has emerged into one of Seattle’s finest pop bands. But that seems to be the unlikely case of Pollens. At this moment, they are the band that interests me most in Seattle.
Pollens released an excellent debut LP late last year called Brighten and Break (put out byGerman label Tapete), which blends gorgeous, multi-part harmonies with syncopated rhythm influenced by African percussion and a sense of repetition. The result is a very successful album that sounds unlike anyone else making music in Seattle right now.
“Helping Hand” is the first song on the album and also my favorite. It has several layers on top of one another but is rhythmically propelled by percussion and background harmonies. The vocals, which sound gorgeous, include lyrics like, “If allowed through the thick of them, visions make decisions, ritualed repetitions.” As a pop song, it’s flawless.
When I met Pollens co-founder Hanna Benn for an interview at an unusually quiet Belltown bar, she explained the band is “very much collaboration between two composers, Jeff Aaron Bryant and myself, and arranged with these other people who are a collective of composers themselves.”
Bryant and Benn met at Cornish College of the Arts in 2008, and she explains she met Bryant during her final semester at Cornish and he had wanted to study music and she was his tutor. She explains, “When we met… I was really in deep with classical music. I was in school for classical composition and it was what I wanted to focus on. Jeff wanted to collaborate on these pop songs, which was out of my element.” She added, “Then, over my last six months of school, I had more things to say about it. All of a sudden, we had this collaboration. I like to say that Pollens is the seed of Jeff Aaron Bryant that I wanted to nurture with him.”
Benn said in our interview, “We weren’t thinking of it as a pop band, just an experimental music project with singing and clapping and computers; very simple.” She said there have been as many as twenty different people in Pollens at one point or another, but the band formed around six members, Benn and Bryant plus Lena Simon, Whitney Lyman, Kelly Wyse and Adam Kozie. It was when Kozie offered to be the drummer, and subsequently impressed them at a rehearsal, that they became a “band.” “It seems like such a commitment when you add a drummer,” she noted.
Benn is a classically-trained and educated composer who notes she shares a birthday with Stravinsky and mentions his The Rite of Spring as a favorite piece of music. She tells me of the band’s origins at Cornish, “Lena and Whitney and Jeff and I were all composition majors. I was the only one who strictly classical, everyone else was composer/performer. Adam was jazz drumming/jazz percussion and Kelly was classical piano at Cornish.”
When I tell her that I like the multi-layered sounds from Brighten and Break, which are very catchy, she says, “It’s funny that you can think you’re being minimal but it comes out really dense.” As far as influences, she tells me, “I know that Jeff and I are both very inspired by trance music; especially North African or West African drum patterns. I’ve spent a lot of time [with] gnawa music, music from Morocco that is very dense. It’s really romantic for me, the repetition, because it creates this focus.”
To date, she described the process of Pollens’ songwriting as, “Jeff and I would write all of the music and create demos and then have a rehearsal and hand out parts… Jeff and I already know about 80% of how it goes and let everyone else flesh it out.” As far as how the other members contribute, she says, “When someone gets a part, everyone is a high level musician themselves, they make it fit their body and suggest something like, “’How about this, because I know more about bass?’” She sees Pollens being likely more collaborative in the future, saying, “Sometimes we will just ‘jam’ and we’ll compose together. I think we’ll do that more in the future now that we have a solidified group, we just haven’t done it much yet. It has just been Jeff and I but in the future, it may be that we all collaborate on a sound.”
Bryant also lives in New York right now (after leaving Seattle for grad school in Los Angeles). Benn doesn’t see this as impacting Pollens as a project much, saying “I feel like it might even work better because we have a lot more space and it isn’t as immediate.” They collaborate through e-mail now. She also noted, “But with that space, I have like 40 songs I need to sift through, which is very exciting.”
Pollens added a seventh member of their collective in guitarist Mike Sparks, from the band By Sunlight, who can play with the band more on stage than Bryant could. Benn said, “It’s hard to get us all together because we’re now a Seattle band and it’s very difficult with Jeff’s schedule to get him here and it’s very expensive. [Mike] has started playing guitar with the band, and now he’s in the band. Now there’s a pool of seven people. It’s pretty interesting.”
The members of Pollens do have other musical projects and creative outlets. For example, Lena Simon plays in the band Tomten and has a solo project called Kairos and Whitney Lyman also writes and performs songs under her own name (she also helped create a fantastic pop album with musician Andrew Boscardin called Supersonic Parachute.) That’s more than encouraged, Benn said during our interview. “We’re adamant that this is a collective and everyone in this band is super-talented, therefore, if you have to miss rehearsal because you have a show, that’s wonderful.”
Each Pollens show is calibrated for its unique crowd, even if the songs they play are the same. Benn notes that at least one upcoming show will feature a string quartet. As far as what is coming up for the future of Pollens, she says, “I just wrote a piece for symphony and Jeff just graduated in music technology and that’s all Pollens, too. The next record will be trying to bind that and be honest of where we’re at.”
As for the present, she tells me, “We’re not looking for fame; we’re just playing music together.”
