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Ekoostik Hookah

Jammin’ to Jamaica

By Bram Fulk

From touring throughout the state and the region to numerous performances a year in the capital city, to their incredibly popular biannual Hookahville music concert in Thornville, local band ∂koostik hookah has established itself as one of the city’s most successful home-grown musical acts. On March 14, Hookah will take the stage at the Newport with Devon Allman’s Honeytribe. Then the band will head down to Negril, Jamaica for a little spring break fun in the sun – a trip that, if you’re interested, you could tag along for. Recently, vocalist/keyboardist Dave Katz spoke with UWeekly about the Newport concert, the history of Hookah and the pending trip down south.

UW: When you next perform at the Newport, you guys are going to have Devon Allman’s Honeytribe opening for you. For those who aren’t familiar, can you tell me a little bit about Devon Allman before we get into what you guys will be doing?

DK: Devon is the son of Gregg Allman from The Allman Brothers. Anybody who hasn’t seen him, his voice is very reminiscent of his father’s voice. He’s got a pretty strong rock and blues quartet – it has a real good sound. Hopefully everybody will get out early for it. And, as far as we go, we’ll be doing our normal Newport thing. We’ll be blowing it out for about three and a half hours and it’ll be a fun night.

UW: You guys have been around the Columbus music scene for quite awhile now.

DK: We got together in ’91.

UW: How has the Columbus music scene evolved since you guys first got together?

DK: Well, I can only speak from an outsider’s perspective because I don’t actually live in Columbus – I’m from up around the Cleveland area myself – but Columbus has always been a pretty good scene as far as there’s always a lot of new, up-and-coming bands. I’m that facilitated a lot by OSU being there so there’s always new blood coming out of the scene there and there’s always clubs to play and the crowds have always been receptive to new music as far as I recall [from] when I lived there, which was awhile ago. For us, it was just a great place to come out of, basically. There’s a big college base there; there’s just a lot of people in general being a big city. It’s also really close to a lot of other pretty big cities which, every time we come to Columbus, you can count on people coming from a lot of other areas into the area to see bands in Columbus and I’m sure that goes for any band that comes into Columbus. I would say that Columbus’s music scene has always been pretty hoppin’.

UW: How have you guys, how has Hookah evolved in the last 17 or 18 years?

DK: (laughs) That’s a good question. Hookah has kind of – we just do our thing, you know. We’ve never had a grand plan for anything. We’ve never sat down and mapped out our career or anything like that. We just kind of take what’s there and play where we can and, you know, for a long time we really hit the road real hard – [for] probably the first 15 years or so we were playing a lot, sometimes getting up close to 200 nights a year. In the last few years we’ve kind of backed it off a bit [and] we don’t play as often, but we try to make sure every show is as big as it can be, as good as it can be and there’s just never been a plan. We just go out and do it and we’ve been lucky that people have taken a liking to our music all these years and we’ve continued to have new fans come into our shows. There’s always new blood coming in and for that we’re thankful.

UW: For the new blood – for someone who’s never heard of ∂koostik hookah or they’ve only checked out your music online and they’ve never seen you live, how would you describe a Hookah show?

DK: I would say that, if you just look at any publication – anybody that’s written about us or reviewed us, they’re going to say we’re a jam band. To me, a jam band can be any number of different genres of music. It’s more accurately describing the people that come to our shows and that would be a more accurate description of the type of people who attend our shows. I think our strength is in our songs; we do jam as well – a lot of improvisational stuff going on – but we back it up with strong songs. It’s not going to be all up tempo – we’re going to play fast stuff, we’re going to play slow stuff – we’re going to mix it up. You’re going to get rock ‘n’ roll, you’re going to get psychedelia, some blues, some blue grass, some folksy stuff – you’re going to get a big mixture of stuff. I don’t think you can wrap it up in a nut shell what we’re going to sound like, but I think you’ll go away singing some songs. That’s for sure.

UW: Now, after you guys head out of Columbus, you’re going to be heading to Jamaica. What do you have going on down there?

DK: This is, I believe, the fourth time the band has gone down to Jamaica for a really extended period of time. We go down there, we set up some packages. We’re still hoping some people will sign up and go; we have a lot of people going, but it’s always good for more. You can go to our Web site which is www.ekoostik.com to find out information on how to go down. We’re going on Ohio State’s Spring Break so, it’s going to be a fun time. We’ll play three shows during the week – two on the beach and one up on the cliffs in Negril. And, in between that, we’re having a relatively-impromptu – it can’t be completely impromptu if I’m telling you about it – an open jam session [so] we’re encouraging people to bring guitars and drums or whatever they want down there. There’s a great jerk shack there called ‘3 Dives’ – it’s owned by some friends of ours – and they have the best food in Negril and we’re go there and have a big bon fire, sit around all night and play some tunes. You know, just have a general good time partying down in Jamaica basically.

Originally Published: March 11, 2009

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