Friday Five: Blou Reed, J Rowe & Jordan Schug, Petalwave, Stephen Oduro, This Is Not a Franchise
Friday Five highlights music by Washtenaw County-associated artists and labels.
This edition features jazz from Blou Reed and J Rowe / Jordan Schug, indie rock by Petalwave, funk by Stephen Oduro, and stoner metal by This Is Not a Franchise.
Blou Reed, House of Stairs: Live at Blue LLama
A million years ago I was in the jazz industry, where puns and neologisms were all too common, especially with album titles: Saxual Healing, Revel With Out a Pause, Our Mann Flute—that last one is so of the times that you need to click the link to see it to believe it (and perhaps read an explainer if you've never heard of the 1966 James Bond parody Our Man Flint). This. List. Is. ENDLESS. (Also, Herbie Mann should be in the Imaginary Jasssss Hall of Fame twice: for bad album names and cover images.)
So when I started seeing the name Blou Reed pop up at area clubs, my jazzdar started beeping warning signs. Sure, the music might be good—Sonny Rollins has a song called "Sonnymoon for Two" and he's one of the greatest tenor saxophonists of all time—but could I overcome my jazz-world PTSD? After hearing the title track from Blou Reed's forthcoming album, House of Stairs: Live at Blue LLama, and watching the song's release concert livestream, not only do I love the band, I've come to love the name. It's not just because this sextet's densely layered sound is so engaging but also because it references so many things at once: the blues, saxophone reeds, Lou Reed, maybe even blowing (jam) sessions if you misread the name sometimes, which I do. In other words, there are many levels to Blou Reed's pun—and the band's music.
Tenor saxophonist Elvin Sharp is from Ann Arbor though his studies have taken him to East Lansing. When not at MSU, he's leading the Blou Reed sextet, which also includes Cole Oswalt (tenor sax), Zach Sommerfeld (guitar), Kaes Holkeboer (keyboard), Dylan Sherman (bass), and Drum Genie (ahhhhhh, more wordplay—on drums!) The promo blurb mentions Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers as an influence as well as the hard-bop-meets-funk blend associated with Roy Hargrove. There's not a lot of outright funk in the Blue LLama livestream—I've yet to hear the album—but the band does groove hard, and their interplay is so mature even if their chronological ages aren't. (Everyone appears to be in their teens or just out of them.)
I particularly enjoyed the work of Sommerfeld, whose percussive guitar comping and solos seem to be as much influenced by rock and funk as jazz. I also thought he looked familiar, so I looked him up—yep, he's a graduate of Skyline High School in Ann Arbor, and I remember seeing him rip at school functions and being really impressed. Color me impressed yet again.
Anyway, Blou Reed is an awesome name, these kids are incredible players, and I'm looking forward to hearing House of Stairs in full. Just kinda disappointed they didn't name the album The Blou Mask.
J Rowe / Jordan Schug, Missant
This band is based in Detroit but has connections with Ann Arbor. Co-leader and double bassist Jordan Schug is a U-M grad, as are trumpeter Ben Green and flutist Steve Wood. The group's foundation is Schug and drummer/co-leader J Rowe, and Missant grooves like it was built from the ground up. There's a beautiful '70s vibe about the whole record, mostly due to keyboardist Ian Haubert's playing on electric piano and Mellotron, but it's also because you can tell the group was inspired by the more hypnotic jazz-fusion and prog-rock bands from the era. Rowe and Schug composed everything—with an assist from Garden City keyboardist Ross Westerbur on the single "The Deep Rolling: Magma"—and the layered arranging is excellent, too. Gorgeous melodic strands comes at you from all directions but they're blended into a gorgeous whole. Throw in the outstanding recording by Warren Defever, which keeps things spacious but punchy, and Missant is a tremendous album.
Petalwave, Grove Sessions
I don't usually write about straight-up demos—or in the case of Petalwave's Grove Sessions, lo-fi recordings from band practice. But I can hear the bones of really good songs here, so consider this blurb a teaser for the Ann Arbor indie-rock band's eventual studio recordings.
Stephen Oduro, "What You Do"
Stephen Oduro, "I Thought I Found You"
Stephen Oduro is a U-M grad who's back in the New York/New Jersey area playing with The Ruckus, but these two singles were made with his fellow Wolverines and members of the college band Joe and the Ruckus. Trumpeter Ryan Venora, guitarist Alec Greene, and recording engineer Sam Uribe, who also played with Oduro in the avant-R&B band .SSJ, joined the singer and multi-instrumentalist—he plays drums, piano, guitar, and bass here—for these two slinky funk tunes.
This Is Not a Franchise, Blue Plate Special
This Is Not a Franchise was an Ann Arbor stoner-rock band, according to the group's Bandcamp bio, but that verb tense indicates the trio is no more. That makes the five-song Blue Plate Special the ensemble's debut and swansong. The record is instrumental, but just because there are no vocals, it doesn't mean the songs don't tell stories: Every tune was inspired by a tale, which you can learn about by clicking on each track on Bandcamp or buying a download and getting a PDF. The stories were either overheard or conjured by the band's weekly meetups for Sunday morning breakfasts at a local diner—allegedly. The cover art features a fictional diner, and this is the only clue the band gives in the record's promo notes for where this unnamed local diner may be: "We'd meet at a diner, so nondescript that we're not sure it even had a proper name, beyond referring to it as the diner over off of 4th, behind the autoshop with so many lights out that the sign at night read 'to hop.'"
I dunno if the diner is made up—the stories might all be conjured from thin air, too—but I'm leaning toward it being fiction since the only diners on 4th—be it Street or Avenue—in recent years are the former Cloverleaf at the corner of 4th Avenue and East Liberty Street and The Jefferson Market at the corner of 4th Street and Jefferson Street. But the latter is pretty descriptive and the former—now a Dunkin'—is nowhere near an autoshop.
Most of the songs are slow headbangers with psychedelic flourishes, with the exception being the almost boogieing "Hair on Fire." The closing track, "Dorothy Meets Hatchet Head," springs from a breakfast convo where the This Is Not a Franchise musicians imagined what would have happened if Wizard of Oz's heroine hadn't returned to Kansas but instead landed in a nightmare world and met a man who was born with an ax on top of his neck—and they become good buddies and save people from a burning building.
Christopher Porter is a library technician and the editor of Pulp.
Comments
I came to these Friday Five…
I came to these Friday Five collections thanks to the Byte Club, and I'm hooked! These selections in particular were the perfect background music to get some writing done—nothing I would have picked out on my own, but all music I now want to hear more of. Thank you!