Be-bop uber-jazz weaving the threads of recorded music history into a tapestry of jazz-affirming swingfulness.

10 MP3 Songs
JAZZ: Jazz quartet, JAZZ: Free Jazz



Details:
Moppa Elliott's Mostly Other People Do the Killing Releases Second CD, "Shamokin!!!" on Hot Cup Records, October 2

New York's Terrorist Be-Bop Uber-Jass Quartet featuring:
Peter Evans (trumpet), Jon Irabagon (saxophone),
Moppa Elliott (bass and compositions), and Kevin Shea (drums)

"Embracing post-modernism's all-inclusive, hyper-speed aesthetic, Elliott and company use their encyclopedic knowledge of genres and styles to enrich their statements in intersecting layers, avoiding the rote jump cut clichés of their fore bearers. One of the most infectiously vivacious releases of the year, Shamokin!!! reveals a new wrinkle in the tradition. Historically aware and virtuosic, the wily Mostly Other People Do The Killing is an ensemble to watch."
- Troy Collins, All About Jazz

"Elliott offers a humbly progressive blueprint for the future of jazz: His band goes way out, but doesn't forsake the thrill of playing in the pocket"
-Hank Shteamer, Time Out New York

"[Elliott] lays down vibrant rhythms around which the horns jostle and cajole taking the pieces to riotous levels while maintaining reference points to earlier periods to depict the illustrious evolution of Jazz."
-Cadence Magazine

Mostly Other People Do the Killing is a quartet founded on the idea that not only is Jazz still alive and vibrant, but it can and should be fun, engaging and thoroughly contemporary. Under the playful pseudonym, "Leonardo Featherweight," Elliott writes, "Rather than settling into one style or historical period, MOPDTK fuses the entire spectrum of Jazz and the various forms of improvised music it has spawned into a single, seamless melange of Uber-Jass."

Their second album, "Shamokin!!!" is a dense jungle of musical signifiers held together by the adhesive qualities inherent to the Jazz Tradition. Elliott's unique and original method of composition uses instantly recognizable gestures from the American aural lexicon to set up expectations in the ears of the listener. Once established, MOPDTK deviates from these expectations as rapidly as possible, only bring them back in myriad transformations and abstractions. The tunes themselves range from bossas to bugaloos, rock to smooth Jazz, and swing to disco, often within the same composition.

Each of the four members of MOPDTK is a product of the institutional Jazz Education system with additional influences immediately recognizable. Peter Evans, who attended the Oberlin Conservatory with bassist, Moppa Elliott, was a Classical trumpet student who has since become a rising star in the improvised music scene. He recently released his first solo CD, "More is More," on Evan Parker's psi Records label and is lauded for his vast arsenal of highly-developed extended techniques. Jon Irabagon, a Chicago native, studied at both the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard after completing his undergraduate work at De Paul. His affinity for pop music and tenure with the rock band, "Bright Eyes," is evident in his playing as is his encyclopedic knowledge of Jazz saxophone masters. 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. The chaotic elasticity and overwhelming density of his drumming belies not only his training at Berklee and the New School, but his admiration for drummers as disparate as Jeff "Tain" Watts and Stewart Copland.

Bassist Moppa Elliott is the composer and leader of MOPDTK. Born into a family of academics, Elliott's childhood soundtrack was the vast catalogue of Jazz recordings played constantly by his father. In addition to exposing him to the music itself, Elliott's father would often narrate Jazz anecdotes as one might tell bedtime stories. This early and extensive Jazz education would come to serve as the basis for Elliott's compositional style: one rooted deeply in the the sound of 50's and 60's Classic Jazz recordings.

Yet Elliott's compositions, and the treatment they receive at the hands of MOPDTK, are more than a nostalgic romp through the Blue Note years. Each tune, curiously titled after the quaint and sometimes absurd names of towns in his native Pennsylvania, uses familiar melodic and harmonic material, but takes a "deviant course not prescribed by convention." (Cadence Magazine) By layering musical references that make it clear that this is not nostalgic music, MOPDTK combines more than the last one hundred years of Jazz history.

Often compared to "noted Dutch ensembles" such as the ICP Orchestra and post-Ornette quartets like Sex Mob, Mostly Other People Do the Killing differs drastically in approach and execution. Both of these accomplished groups use musical juxtaposition as a device to create tension and excitement. Typically, this is achieved by combining the unique, steadfast, personal style of a soloist with a contrasting accompaniment. MOPDTK's concept differs in that the members themselves create contrast within their own playing by rapidly shifting between improvisational genres in a technique they refer to as, "light-switch Jazz." Their ability to become musical chameleons is the result of their emulation, admiration, and deconstruction of the Jazz tradition.

"We're often told in school to not play everything we know all at once, but that's exactly what we try to do: play everything we know all at once, as rapidly as possible, and then do it again." By "everything we know," Elliott is not referring exclusively to the music known as Jazz and the various offspring it has spawned, but to the totality of recorded sound of the last century, all of which is now available at the touch of a button or the firing of a synapse. The members of this quartet don't try to hide the fact that we are all immersed in and influenced by a sea of music and sound: blaring forth from passing cars, hypnotizing us into a consumeristic trance in stores, and narrating our lives through the Top 40 on the radio. All of this has a place in music today, and it is inescapable.

Again, under the guise of Mr. Featherweight, Elliott writes, "Mostly Other People Do the Killing has created a Jazz-affirming album brimming with spontaneity and awash with originality, uniting the many divergent threads of Jazz to weave a virtuosic tapestry of swingfullness."

100 years of Music History in every byte!