Brian Slattery Photo
“Do you have any scissors?” asked Justina Sullivan, cellist for the Tet Offensive.
“I have a lot of scissors,” said Brian Robinson, the band’s singer and composer. “Why?”
“Because I might need to cut off some of my fingers,” Sullivan said. She meant the fingers off her tiger suit. She was planning to wear it for the video the Tet Offensive was making on Monday night of the Robinson-penned song “Black Tiger,” for a chance to win NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Contest.
The band members convened in Robinson’s office — he’s the manager of the Yale Symphony Orchestra — and gathered around. Drummer Jef Wilson set up his electronic drum pad on the desk itself. The rest of the group gathered around. That meant, in addition to Sullivan on cello, James Park and Jess Oddie on violins and Julia Pucci on viola.
In other words, the Tet Offensive is a rock band.
“I’ve always bridged both worlds,” said Robinson, who graduated from the Mannes College of Music in 2003. “In high school I loved rock music but was always singing classically. But when I went to music school it didn’t feel right, because I didn’t like singing opera.”
Playing rock didn’t feel entirely right either, though. “I wanted the control of a composer,” Robinson said. “In one band I wrote out the part for a bass player and he quit immediately.”
Then, in 2002, a friend was putting on a tribute to Kurt Cobain at the Knitting Factory and asked if Robinson would fill a slot. He suggested Robinson do one of Nirvana’s songs with a string quartet, slow and pretty.
Robinson took him up on the idea of using a string quartet. “But I’d heard so much Bartok at the time, and Shostakovich, and Messiaen, and Carter, and I knew an audience didn’t know that a string quartet can grind. So I said that I would do it, but I would do it fast and heavy.”
Robinson had no idea how the Knitting Factory crowd would receive it. But “the audience totally dug it,” he said, “and I knew that I had done something.”
Over the years, he scored a handful of rock songs for string quartet. Eventually, a time came when someone asked him to do an entire set of music, and he started writing original songs.
So the idea of the Tet Offensive has been a long time coming. In the past year, though, Robinson says the concept has really gelled; the group reached “full maturity in the summer of last year. Almost everybody except for the cellist and drummer are alumni of the Yale Symphony, so I knew them from there. Justina is a friend of a friend. She’s a Julliard grad who lives in Orange and wanted to do it regularly. And Jef I just know from the neighborhood as a drummer.”
Why not just have a regular rock band?
“Well,” Robinson said, “because this is what I hear in my head.”
Tiny Desk Bound?
In the rehearsal, the musicians were serious. They ran passages until they were tight. They tuned chords. They made sure they had their dynamics sorted out. But every time there was a chance for humor, they took it.
Most of the jokes, though, came from Robinson himself, who ran the rehearsal with enthusiasm and wit. As he fielded questions from the group and coordinated the camerapeople (and a certain reporter), he quipped, “right now so much is happening in my brain that I must be insufferable to all of you.”
As the cameras got ready to roll, Robinson explained what “Black Tiger” was actually about. The lyrics can read as a wry take on a self-destructive, alcohol-fueled romantic relationship. “You take the cup up once again,” the words go, “put it to my lips and then / I realize I can’t think / pick it up and take that drink.”
But the song is actually about the cycle of sleep deprivation and coffee addiction that so many parents of young children succumb to. The title of the song is even taken from the specific type of Keurig coffee pod Robinson drank so much of when his kids were younger.
“It’s basically a song about being really tired,” he said. “That’s my sense of humor, is to be silly and then layer another layer of silly on top of it.”
But as the cameras rolled, the Tet Offensive got serious again, performing for three bystanders as though we were a club. As soon as the last flourish of notes was over, Wilson shook his head and smiled.
“We should run through it a bunch more times,” he said. “Entrances. Exits.” All the band members laughed a little in agreement, and then got down to work.