Mourning Kipp Kocay, Brilliant Winnipeg Songwriter
Mourning Kipp Kocay,
Brilliant Winnipeg Songwriter
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Kipp Kocay, Winnipeg musician, passed suddenly in early April at 34. His loss represents our loss of one of the most original and sophisticated singer-songwriters the prairies has produced in years. This is not hyperbole. High praise is almost always in high supply after an artist’s untimely death. And, to be frank, within Kipp’s whopping body of work (he released five albums, with a sixth written but unrecorded) there are ephemeral tunes; charming ones written when he was still a kid where guitar work is patchy and Dashboard Confessional influences had yet to entirely give away to deeper stuff. Less memorable ones, a few years later, where the tropes of wine, women and song are piled on a bit heavy. But Kipp, as he matured, also wrote some unforgettable tunes. That’s something that can be said about very, very few musicians. At his best, he crafted songs as fine as classics by John K. Samson and Lenny Breau. And he sang them beautifully, with a soulful voice hoarse from heartache (real or vicarious) and decades of late nights. His passing is devastating for those closest to him, and Kipp had many dear friends. However, Winnipeg has yet to reckon with what a void his loss leaves in our artistic community.
Kipp wrote some unforgettable tunes, but unforgettability must often still defend itself against obscurity. Last week I sent an email to a veteran local music critic to inform them of Kipp’s passing. I included a link to his 2011 album Knowledge of Love. They agreed with me that he showed brilliance, although admitted he wasn’t really on their radar. I don’t bring this up to embarrass anyone. Indeed, until Kipp’s passing, I admit even I hadn’t dug back to Knowledge of Love, from his catalogue’s middle years. Judging by the album’s number of streams, too few have. Written when he was 24, Knowledge of Love is just Kipp, a guitar, and a curious lack of reverb. At its best, where it stays for most of the album, it’s an exceptional work of a singer-songwriting that the jealous musician in me resists accepting was recorded live by someone shy of 25. I’ve listened to it about 20 times in the past couple weeks. Throughout, I’ve tried to stay objective about, and personally detached from, my late peer’s work. This would seem like a callous exercise under the tragic circumstances if the album didn’t emerge more impressive upon each listen, and my affection and respect for Kipp greater. It shows a prodigious grasp of jazz, folk, and country’s forms and grammars. And Kipp is always there, his personality too strong to be overwhelmed by his looming influences. Take songs like “Oceans of Blue” or “Moon-struck Blues,” throwbacks to melancholic jazz ballads of the ‘40s and ‘50s. There’s something quaint about a 24-year-old man working in this old-fangled style at a moment when indie rock still reigned supreme. Almost campy. But these ballads are delivered, in Kipp’s enviable and husky baritone, with as much sex and charisma as anything Broken Social Scene or Arcade Fire were singing at the time. They’re also a whole lot better than many of their tunes. A whole lot better, even, than a handful of the standards canonized by the jazz songbook. That so few Winnipeggers have nevertheless heard Knowledge of Love is one of the best refutations of musical meritocracy I can think of.
Before further waxing lyrical about Kipp, I should admit to my interpersonal biases both for (and somewhat against) him. I first met Kipp when I was 17. He was an established member of the first circle of artists, or wannabe artists, I was ever introduced to. These new friends delighted me the first year I knew them. They offered refuge to a long-haired stoner like me from Kelvin High School’s hierarchies lorded over by tall Crescentwood kids wearing Roxy and Juicy apparel. I remember sharing one of the hardest laughs of my life with Kipp at a party somewhere in Winnipeg's West End, surrounded by other budding musical talents like Stefan Braun and Aaron Johnston. I can’t remember the joke’s lowbrow details, but I remember Kipp kept it riffing, like the good improviser he was, until I couldn’t breathe. I also remember thinking that this cravat-wearing guitarist (Kipp, I mean), who chided me for my lack of knowledge of Hemmingway while drinking wine straight from the bottle, could be a bit of a blowhard. A wit and a near-whiz at the guitar – but did this South End kid have to out-bohemian us at every turn? I gradually receded from that circle of friends owing to grudges, mine and others’, that by now (I hope) have lost all feeling. At that age, love triangles can proliferate within friend groups so much they start to resemble valknuts.
I re-befriended Kipp over a decade later, after I moved back to Winnipeg. He was a close friend of a close friend. So, it was only a matter of time before one of us, being jesting and jousting types, cornered the tipsier one at a party for verbal sparring. When that happened, I confronted someone who seemed at once improved and sadder. Improved certainly as a musician. Country, jazz, rock, blues: you name it, the guy could play it on the guitar. He had a cool, new album under his belt, Heart like Mine, though he seemed quieter, more modest and self-deprecating. He still wore scarfs and sang about wine (occasionally en Franglais) but his virtuosic drinking skills justified that motif. And even where he traded in old love songs’ lyrical tropes, he was infected with humour and self-parody (hear “Steely Biceps,” for instance).
Modesty is supposed to be a virtue, but it’s often purchased by unpleasant experiences: artistic rejection, breakups, fall out from unsustainable lifestyle habits, dead-end jobs. Kipp had experience with those things. After working a slew of grinding jobs, Kipp had taken a job as a cook at Ruby West’s. I gather he’d come to really enjoy it, was good at it. Of course it wasn’t his calling, though you wouldn’t have heard him making such complaints. Kipp also played popular shows at venues like Forth and the Time Change(d), often doing covers of Tom Waits or Elvis Costello. These shows were lively and well received, but didn’t much address Kipp’s biggest professional problem: his growing songbook remained under-recognized outside his friends and a tight, devoted circle of fans. “Kipp always had a group of people there at his shows there just to see him. And there were definitely people who wanted him to play his originals,” says Matthew Rajfur, a lifelong friend and band-mate of Kipp’s. “But it gets tiring playing your own tunes and worrying whether people will show. So the covers were less pressure. Still, we had lots of fun and never played anything note for note.”
Kipp seemed bored by the self-promotional tools that can feel like a must for getting ahead today in the Canadian music industry: grant-writing, social media advertising, loud displays of one’s progressive stances more hashtagged than they are sincere. (I’m told he once proclaimed Winnipeg to be his biggest ambition, a sentiment both touching and depressing for a talent as fine as his.) His sharp wit seemed to aim inward more than before. “Every traffic ticket, every bill… just obstacles in the way of me buying some new cowboy boots,” reads a self-satirizing Facebook post by Kipp this past February. “The next person who calls me a curmudgeon is getting a kiss,” reads another from around the same time.
Kipp was known for his loyal, almost doting friendships. “He wasn’t driven by ideologies, but he was driven by people,” says Aaron Johnston, a close friend of Kipp’s since childhood. “And more than simply “people”, it was individuals around which his values revolved… Kipp had many dear friends, and one of his virtues was his way of making them all feel special, the centre of his affection.” Matthew Rajfur seconds this sentiment: “Even if I hadn’t seen him in a while, he always made me feel like the prettiest girl at the dance.” Ultimately, Kipp’s bohemianism – I think there’s no other way to describe it – didn’t seem like a snooty challenge to us basic folk with more basic middle-class aspirations. Rather it seemed like a lifeworld he was creating for himself and a select few where things like beauty, mischief, revelry, conversation, and, in particular, friendship were paramount. (And maybe puzzles, “babes”, and shitposting too.) Kipp boasted to someone I know that “pleasure” was his only guiding principle, but this seems partially like an effort by Kipp to promote his image as an aesthete. As Aaron reflects, “Kipp maintained an almost stubborn code of ethics when it came to his relationships, and what it meant to be a true friend. Relationships were everything for him.”
Kipp (right) and Aaron (left)
It’s my impression that Kipp conquered his youthful pretence like most real artists do: by not just discarding the early posturing, but by authentically becoming the personas he emulated in his distinct way. Kipp mastered what at first sometimes seemed like cliché, he became the real deal. But it took time. His first album, So Wired Up (2006), is fun and features some nifty, jazzy math rock on the acoustic guitar. It’s a poignant trip down memory lane for anyone who hung out with him in that era, and evokes the loves and longings I experienced and shared with those in my adolescent circles and Kipp’s. It’s also a spectacle of teenage vulnerability over loads of mashed open chords and power chords; in other words, pretty standard emo stuff. At one point this wired up performance of emotional insecurity becomes sort of self-referential, questioning the performer’s sincerity. “I’m a whore and a harlot, a lush and a charlatan,” he sings in a nicely alliterative line. “Why should I hope for someone as heavenly as you, girl?” He seems to fess up that the soft boi shtick is a continuation of horniness by other means, and hopes it will seduce anyway. (It often did; one of my best friends just reminded me that in high school he showed up to party to court a girl only to find she, Kipp, and his guitar had already parted together.) Contrast So Wired Up’s chest-torn-openness with the more Apollonian sweet talk of later songs:
“Give me a heart that’s golden, give me a silver dream, give me Mercury’s sandals and Michael’s wings, give me your bitter tear drops and the dew from a rose, and let me plant a kiss upon your little nose, and give me love, real love, right now”
”Spanish Dream” (2014)
“I’m looking for the woman who rode away, tell me stranger, did she pass this way? She speaks broken English, and her lips are as red as scarlet sage, and when she sings the songs from her homeland, the mavis hides his head in shame”
“The Woman Who Rode Away” (2014)
“A man’s gotta work, and a girl does too, ain’t no secret, everybody know it, it’s just what you gotta do, In that red house they would, stay up late drinking wine, he’d play his guitar for her a little off tune, a little out of time, in that red house in the countryside”
“Red House” (2014)
Kipp’s still singing here about love, he usually did. But by now he’s developed a command of time-honoured songwriting cadences. He’s learned to sing the blues, name-drop Biblical figures he had faith in as poetic devices, and woo a more mature ear. His eclectic use of old conventions, his mild musical conservatism, could have drowned out his emerging voice. It could have made him insincere or simply postmodern – a mishmash of influences where authenticity resigns itself to the pleasure of playfulness pastiche. But that wasn’t usually the feel. As far as I know, Kipp never attended university and he rescued himself in the end from snobbery. Still, he possessed a deep appreciation for musical and literary canons, and lifted from them forms and fragments he could reanimate and personalize. I doubt this St. Norbert troubadour would ever have said “ain’t” unironically in conversation (though he might have, say, quoted Rimbaud in line at McDonald’s). However no one could deny that, like Red House’s hero, he was a working guy. He laboured long hours not just as a gigging musician, but at the real blue-collar vocations. He did sing out of time and out of tune sometimes, but I didn’t mind and nor would you. His loves were legendary, and his deep if critical affection for Winnipeg and the prairie environment made him one of their ideal poetic reporters. Kipp was a romantic in the corny and the classical sense, which is to say in the term’s full sense.
Although it wasn’t just the warm and fuzzy tropes surrounding the romantic artist that applied to Kipp. The tragic ones did too: self-destructive lifestyle choices, an untimely death, inadequate recognition in his lifetime. At his poppiest, Kipp wrote several songs that could have been hits for John Mayer. (A much harder feat than it sounds.) At his most sophisticated, he wrote the stuff of standards – songs like those mentioned and “Prisoner of Love”, “Apple Blossom Tree”, and “Don’t Love You” among others. There is a casualness, sometimes even clumsiness, to their production that will throw off those who prefer the totalizing engineering style that’s steadily coming to prevail over today’s pop music. But the songwriting, that endangered art, is there with these tunes. They should be heard and are begging to be covered. Kipp is missed terribly, and remembering him will be effortless for most who knew him. But it will be a struggle – against ignorance, against inertia, against stupidity – to ensure his music achieves at least part of the wider legacy it deserves.
- Conrad Sweatman, Winnipeg-based arts professional
