Here’s how they describe themselves:
We’re Mostly Other People Do the Killing. We’re named Peter and Jon and Moppa and Kevin. We all went to music school for a while. We play jazz. We like to play all the jazz all the time all at once as fast as possible. Moppa writes the tunes. Except for the ones written by other people. They’re funny. Jazz is funny.
Happily, more young bands have discovered that. Portland’s Industrial Jazz Group and Seattle’s Reptet come to mind.
What they all have the following in common: 1) university training, 2) thorough knowledge of and familiarity with all kinds of music, 3) an ability to weave many kinds of music together, turn on a dime and end up in the right place, 4) total command of their instrument, 5) a burning intensity when they play, and 6) they have a slightly goofy sense of humor…ok, more than slight, and past goofy.
The album package is a hilarious knock-off/send-up of the old Impulse! album cover for Out of the Afternoon,”with Roy Haynes, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Tommy Flanagan and Paul Chambers. Same black, red and white design, same type font…except the name of the label is Hot Cup Records, complete with a cuppa coffee logo. The tag line is The Newer Wave of Jazz Is On Hot Cup!. And so it is.
They also make funny faces in the pictures on the cover.
Meet Mostly Other People Do the Killing. Listen to: St. Mary’s Proctor:
The media release got it right when it said that the band uses a, “musical conception of jazz as ordnance for their attack on musical convention.”
They were winners of the 2009 Downbeat Magazine Critics’ Poll in the Rising Star Ensemble category, if that matters to you.
Bassist Moppa Elliott and trumpeter Peter Evans went to Oberlin Conservatory together. Evans was a classical trumpet student. Elliott teaches music history, theory and chorus at St. Mary’s High School in Manhasset, NY in addition to performing with musicians as varied as singer/songwriters, chamber pop, jazz, and varous circus bands.
Saxophonist Jon Irabagon studied at both Manhattan School of Music and Julliard. He was the winner of the 2008 Thelonious Monk Jazz Saxophone Competition. Drummer Kevin Shea is probably best known as an influential innovator of the indie-rock scene and became known to experimental music aficionados after recording with the band, Storm and Stress, in the late ’90’s. He studied at Berklee and the New School, and admires drummers as disparate as Jeff “Tain” Watts and Stewart Copland.
These are people you should know, and if you don’t, you should get to know.
They are following the trail blazed by people like Lester Bowie and his bands, Frank Zappa…and Spike Jones.
It’s a wild ride, and like most wild rides, you may be scared you might fall off. You won’t. You’ll come back, dazed but happy.
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