Origin
Mike Doughty (who billed himself at the time as "M. Doughty") was a folk singer (he attended Eugene Lang College with Ani DiFranco, where they studied with Sekou Sundiata and played around the school together), slam poet, sometime music writer, and doorman at the old Houston Street location of The Knitting Factory, then a nexus for such avant-garde artists as John Zorn and Marc Ribot. He put the band together from instrumentalists he met as they came through the club.
He met sampler player Mark Degli Antoni (recently graduated with a composition degree from Mannes College of Music) when they both participated in a performance of Zorn's "game piece" Cobra. This same ensemble also featured Jeff Buckley. Doughty brought a stack of CDs over to degli Antoni's house one afternoon. degli Antoni had invented a technique to combine live performance with real time manipulation of his created samples. Together they sampled iconic riffs from Raymond Scott, Carl Stalling, Howlin' Wolf, and The Andrews Sisters, among others. These, along with samples from degli Antoni's own orchestral works, Screenwriter's Blues, became the foundation of Soul Coughing's musical identity, powering Doughty's half-sung, half-spoken vocals.
degli Antoni, Doughty, Boston-based upright bass player Sebastian Steinberg, and Israeli drummer Yuval Gabay (a collaborator with Zorn, and David Linton) played their first gig, as "M. Doughty's Soul Coughing", at the Knitting Factory on June 15, 1992, a late-Monday night slot that Doughty cadged from his boss because nobody else wanted it. In 1993, he founded a club night called "SLAW" at CBGB's 313 Gallery, which was meant to emulate the popular jazz and hip hop club Giant Step, but eventually became a showcase for Soul Coughing. Posters for SLAW were headlined "Deep Slacker Jazz" (a parody of The Who's slogan "Maximum R&B"), which became an enduring description of the band's sound.
Read more about this topic: Soul Coughing
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