Jeff Sipe

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Drummer Jeff Sipe is never at a loss for musicians to perform with. In addition to his work with the Jeff Sipe Trio, he’s performing dates with Leftover Salmon, Keller Williams, the Jimmy Herring Band, Jeff Coffin and sometimes bluegrass artist Larry Keel.

“I also recently sat in with Mike Gordon, so I’m still in touch with the Phish boys,” says Sipe, while traveling to Myrtle Beach, S.C.

A resident of Brevard, N.C., Sipe has a long history in Knoxville. The Atlanta-based Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, of which Sipe was an integral member in the early 1990s, was a regular at Knoxville’s legendary (and new defunct) music club Planet Earth. More recently, he’s teamed up with Knoxvillians Vince Illagan (bass) and Mike Seal (guitar) for the Jeff Sipe Trio.

Sipe, whose father worked with the CIA, was born in Berlin and spent time in Thailand and Vietnam before his family settled in Virginia at the outset of his high school years. He had been playing drums for three years when he had an epiphany.

“I was 14 years old and I was listening to Grand Funk Railroad,” says Sipe. “There was this beat that I couldn’t figure out and I sat down with it and it involved a level of independence (his limbs working independently) that I had not achieved before. So when I successfully worked my way through this song I got this feeling of, ‘Wow, I taught myself something nobody’s ever showed me before. I got it on my own!’ It was such a revelation to me. I’d never been good at anything my whole life. I decided this was something I could probably do for a living. I remember the day and realizing maybe there’s a chance I could actually do something with my life ... It’s pitiful!”

Sipe laughs.

Yet his path wasn’t just being a drummer, it was being a drummer who defies the limits of genres. When he relocated to Atlanta and joined the highly improvisational Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit, he found cohorts with similar ideas.

“When I first got going I really wanted to be in a progressive rock band,” says Sipe. “I was listening to Mahavishnu (Orchestra) and Shakti, the Who and Deep Purple ... I really enjoyed the power of the rock world and I really enjoyed the nuance of the jazz world and I really enjoyed the precision of the classical world. To me all of that is interesting to try to bring it into one fusion approach. Playing with Col. Bruce (Hampton), Oteil (Burbridge), Jimmy (Herring), Matt Mundi and Jeff Moser, those guys (in the Aquarium Rescue Unit), it seemed all that was perfectly fine. It seemed there were no taboos culturally or genre-wise. It just seemed we just played the next thing we should play.”

As part of the group, Sipe took on the name Apt. Q258 (part of the address of radio preacher the Prophet Omega). When the act disbanded in the mid-1990s, he joined bassist Jonas Helberg and guitarist Shawn Lane for a trio that toured Europe.

Sipe says there are moments when playing music with skilled improvisational musicians is more than just playing.

“When you have the ability to play open-ended where the intros are long or the outros are long or the solos can go on forever it allows for a transcendent state of mind and one time I actually had an out-of-body experience. I actually saw myself from above and I noticed that I was hovering above my physical body and watching myself play. And when I realized what was going on I was back in my body in a split second. It was kind of like a lucid dream and then a wake-up into yourself.”

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel
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