Hazmat Modine

Dirty Linen

This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen #129 (April/May 2007).
The full article is in the magazine, available on newsstands, by subscription, and at the Dirty Linen webstore.

Hazmat Modine

A Little Pathos on the Side

by Chris Heim

Descriptions of Hazmat Modine's debut CD, Bahamut [Barbes 881626903025 (2006)] are perfect illustrations, to use a term from international cinema, of the "Rashomon effect." They range from klezmer to calypso to rock steady. Mention world music. No…retro. Check that…it's actually blues. Even the name conjures confusion. Is it a person or a group? Are they Baltic, Tuvan, perhaps Romani?

Hazmat is a group whose name is cobbled together from the shortened form for "hazardous materials" and a company that produces heat transfer equipment. The name, perhaps as apt a description as any for the band, may be like a greased pig slipping through everyone's hands, but the music definitely sticks. Glowing reviews and slots on public radio's "Mountain Stage," "World Café," and "All Things Considered" greeted the CD when it surfaced in early fall of 2006.

Hazmat is the brainchild of musician and visual artist (painting coordinator at the New York Academy of Art) Wade Schuman. Schuman describes himself as a "baroque personality" and his band reflects that -- of many times and places yet none at all, erudite but down to earth, well-versed without being pedantic, at home with both Borges and the Beatles, sincere yet dryly witty -- in short, a melting pot of his own and larger American musical and cultural experiences.

Inspired, in part, by an older brother with eclectic musical tastes, Schuman took up harmonica at 10 and eventually worked up a small career as a sideman, including on Joan Osborne's debut, Relish. But after moving to New York, Schuman said he thought, "There's no money in this, so I'm going to do what I want, what I wished I always could do and hear."

[cover #129]