Born in Nicosia, raised in Brooklyn, a rising jazz star with a drug addicted past tells THEO PANAYIDES that he now lives for his music
We’ve interviewed Alexi David once before at the Sunday Mail. It’s no secret to say so, since he has the interview prominently displayed on his website (www.alexidavid.com), in a section called ‘Drugs’. That was in February 2004, a piece by Alexia Saoulli that began with a stark proclamation: “Alexi David is a 26-year-old man suffering from a chronic incurable illness. He is a former heroin addict, and this is his story.”
Seven and a half years later, Alexi David’s Patriot Act are on tour in Cyprus, playing various gigs including the Jazz Festival in Nicosia – and I’m at Kala Kathoumena, the folksy-by-design hangout for young arty types, pale serious girls and self-proclaimed bohemians. I hear the American accents even before I’m introduced to their owners – all of them veterans of New York’s cutthroat jazz scene, consummate musicians who can play anything “from heavy metal to bebop”. Phil Stewart (drums) is affable, bearded and (I’m repeatedly informed) Canadian; “He’s Canadian” is the band’s all-purpose in-joke. Geoff Vidal (saxophone) is down-to-earth and forthcoming; he comes from a family of carpenters in Massachusetts and gives off a sleeves-rolled-up vibe, like he’s about to take out his bevel and put up some shelving. Tom Abbott (clarinet) is very different, a cool customer with a chilled, appraising look. And of course, right at the end of the table, is the front-man himself, Alexi David (double bass, bouzouki, gong, tambourines, sirens, whistles, etc) – the only native New Yorker, and the only Cypriot. “I’m a kid from Brooklyn, and a kid from Nicosia at the same time.”
He is, to put it mildly, unusual. His combination of long hair and receding hairline gives him a wild, almost feral look, like a runaway hermit. He wears a blue T-shirt reading “I [Heart] KY” – a souvenir from Kentucky, though also of course a play on New York’s famous slogan – and what looks like a cross around his neck though it’s actually an Ankh, the ancient Egyptian symbol of reincarnation. He cradles a bouzouki, and plucks it occasionally as he speaks.
Even here, surrounded by his band and talking about his music, he seems almost excruciatingly ill-at-ease (I can only imagine what he was like talking about his drug addiction in 2004). For long stretches he’ll stare at the ground, rocking in his chair as the gruff voice rises and falls, plucking out his words from a thicket of “like”s and “you know”s. His whole body seems to seethe with some barely-suppressed energy, now pushed inwards defensively, now coming out in waspish exclamations. I’m irresistibly reminded of the actor Christopher Lloyd as eccentric scientist Doc Brown in Back to the Future – the eyebrows knitted in a permanent frown of concentration, the voice barking suddenly in triumph or protest.
He is, however, totally uninhibited, whether about himself or Life in general. He wears his insecurities on his sleeve. ‘Are you a happy person?’ I ask at one point, and Alexi grunts, plucking a couple of notes on the bouzouki.
“No. I am not a happy person. No. I stress out too much about things. I worry. I don’t live in a state of ignorant bliss. Some people can ignore the world’s problems or what’s going on around them, they shield themselves from it – I can’t do that. And I’m sensitive to things, so I let things bother me.”
Like what?
“Like with the world, or maybe something somebody said to me on the subway. I let things bother me. But the sensitivity’s also good for music, you know? You’ve gotta be able to feel something to play something. I’m not a laptop, you know? … But no, I’m not a happy person. No. It just goes up and down. Very moody.”
You should try doing yoga or something.
“Did you say yoga?” he barks, and for a moment I’m afraid I might’ve accidentally set off some obscure rage. “Maybe one day,” he concedes, “if I can concentrate on it. But, uh, you know – I think maybe one day, if I have a good relationship with a woman again, maybe I’ll relax.” He thinks about it. “Maybe I’ll relax.”
He went back to New York in 2005, having spent some years in Cyprus getting clean (more on this later) and slowly getting back into music. “I had some hits and misses here,” he recalls of the early 00s. “Also just learning how to deal with people,” he adds, a little shamefacedly. “Learning not to treat my side-men as an asshole.” He looks around at the other band members: “Hopefully I’m OK now.”
Since going back, he’s worked solidly on becoming known as a musician (even going to music school at the ripe old age of 28). New York is wildly competitive, a mecca for musicians from all over the world who know – in the words of the song – that if they can make it there, they can make it anywhere. Alexi makes part of his living fixing and restoring electronic equipment (mostly “vintage tube amplifiers”), meanwhile hustling for as many gigs as he can find. What does he do for fun? “I guess hang out in pubs with my friends, when I have some time. I mean, I don’t have any other hobbies. Music just takes up all your time, you know?”
“He loves cats!” calls out Geoff from across the table.
“Yeah, I love cats,” agrees Alexi. “I love my cats. I love animals.” He looks at the ground again. “I don’t date a lot, you know? I’m kind of a – kind of a – kind of a… whatever. A loner, in some ways.” He looks around at the others. “These guys lead similar lives, a little different. I mean he” – indicating Tom – “has a baby on the way”. He indicates Geoff: “He has a wonderful live-in girlfriend”. And Phil? “He’s Canadian.”
Things are tight for a jazz musician in New York, both metaphorically and literally. Once the tour is over, Alexi has two weeks to move out of his apartment, find a new one and move in – which sounds like a major operation but in fact the apartment is “a New York apartment”, meaning a tiny space (shared with three or four roommates) with a minimum of personal clutter. “My living space is the size of my mum’s kitchen. Literally,” he says with a chuckle – a reminder that the family are quite well-off, or at least prominent in Cyprus. His dad is Theo David, a well-known architect (and a decent double-bass player in his own right) whose designs include the new GSP Stadium. The family moved back and forth between Cyprus and New York in the late 70s, and Alexi – though born in Nicosia in 1977 – grew up in Brooklyn, in the now-trendy Park Slope neighbourhood long before it became trendy: “I used to get mugged at knifepoint in my own stairwell!”
What was he like as a young child? “The same as now,” he replies, “except a lot less confident. I’d get bullied around in school, but I wouldn’t stand up to people as much. Now I’ve become rather confrontational… I have a really low tolerance for bullshit from other people. A very low tolerance.”
Why did he get into drugs as a teenager? “Oh, you know. The usual. Low self-esteem, you know, you hate yourself, can’t talk to girls – I still can’t! Things like that, you know? There wasn’t any in the family, it wasn’t like that”. On his website – a touch provocatively – he links drug addiction to upbringing (“the amount of love received from [one’s] parents”), but shrugs dismissively when I ask if he blames his own parents. “They made mistakes, like everyone else. You know, some kids are more sensitive to certain things than others, and I was one of them… It’s not their fault, you know? They don’t always see warning signs”.
What kind of warning signs?
“I was shy. I wasn’t good in school. There was a lot of…” he shrugs again. “You know, sometimes people should pay more attention to certain things.”
By the age of 18, he was a junkie. The drugs, quite simply, offered an escape – from his life, his problems, his discomfort in his own skin. It was like “when you get drunk for the first time in your life, you’re like ‘oh good, I don’t have to deal with anything now, everything is fine’. It’s a very liberating experience. Especially with heroin though, because heroin creates an intense apathy.”
Really? I thought it was supposed to be a rush.
“No, no – you get an initial rush, but I mean mentally it makes you feel apathetic to everything around you. That’s why you’ll stab your mother if you have to, to get money – you don’t care. Your brain doesn’t care. You don’t care about showering, don’t care about sex. You don’t really care about anything except, uh, getting more”. He plucks a few more notes on the bouzouki. “Thankfully, despite my idiocy, I was smart enough to realise that the more heroin I did, the less I cared about music… So I made a choice. I’m like ‘OK, you can’t do both at the same time, so you pick: music or heroin?’ And I just said ‘All right, I’ll pick music’. I think I just loved it more.”
That was later, of course, after the ‘lost years’ of 1995-2000 – “Lost years? Oh no, they were pretty busy!” says Alexi, and laughs mirthlessly – when he came back to Cyprus and spent two years at the Ayia Skepi Therapeutic Community. “Were it not for them, I’d be dead now,” he says frankly on his website, and waxes lyrical when I ask why he didn’t choose a rehab centre in the US: “There isn’t a place like Ayia Skepi in the United States – and if there was, it would cost $5,000 a week. In America, they just want to make money from you. Here, it was free! Thanks to the Bishop of Limassol, it’s free. Don’t have to pay a cent.”
What was it like? “Really intense psychotherapy. Daily therapy sessions, group therapy. And work, you know? You learn to work, you learn to do things, you learn to be responsible. It’s like the Army without guns – it’s boot camp! It was, you know, intense.”
That, I assume, is why it worked for him – because Alexi David is himself very intense, because heroin acted as a counterweight to his own turbulent, highly-strung personality, because he had to burrow deep within to extract a way of living with himself. Fortunately, he had (and has) a secret weapon, which is music – a better, healthier form of escape. That’s his new drug of choice, “when you have really good musical moments onstage with somebody, you know? Like, forget about all the other bullshit and you just, you know… You’re just in the zone, you know?” I know – or at least I can imagine.
“Most people are selfish and narcissistic. If I’m wrong, tell me why the world is the way it is,” says Alexi David. He’s not exactly easy-going. He’ll rant about libraries closing, “Jesus freaks” on subway trains, US health care (or the lack of it), billions paid to Wall Street while millions starve in Africa. “I have pedestrian rage,” he admits half-jokingly: if he’s walking down a New York street with his double bass, he’s liable to start yelling “Move it!” at oblivious tourists blocking his way, or women chatting on their phones. That’s just who he is. He’ll never be the type to sit back with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book. He’s sensitive, volatile, something of a loose cannon – which is also what makes him such a good musician. Would he call himself extreme? Would he say he has an extreme personality? Alexi hesitates.
“I don’t put limits,” he replies. “With the exception that I want to please the audience – without kissing their ass! – I put no limits on what I do.”
