MTO Vol. 1
Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra
Sunnyside
Since the bebop movement of the mid 1940s, jazz has been an intrinsically serious music. As a result, today's jazz (not counting bastard offshoots like smooth jazz) has earned a reputation as either moldy artifact or high-minded product of the academy. Regular folks tend to think, not without justification, that you need some special knowledge to appreciate what has often been deemed America's classical music. Jazz is elitist. Jazz is exclusionary. Jazz is sophisticated. (An old friend used to call me a "jazz ass," which he preferred to the more acceptable "jazz snob.") What jazz is most often not is … fun.
Steven Bernstein has made it a mission to render jazz fun. He achieved a high degree of success with his quartet Sex Mob, which took pop tunes by Prince, the Stones, et al, and greased 'em up into bawdy barroom romps. He gets even more ambitious with the Millennial Territory Orchestra, a nine-piece ensemble that took shape at the New York nightclub Tonic in the late '90s.
MTO is modeled after 1920s and '30s Midwestern "territory" bands, smaller — and wilder — units than the big dance orchestras of Ellington, Basie Henderson and the like. As is his wont, Bernstein turns the concept upside down, or at least sideways — his is a decidedly postmodern version of the territory band. While much of the music does have a marked early Swing Era flavor, it's mixed in with skronky blowouts, gutbucket throwdowns and boppish flights. And, as far as I know, no Kansas City territory band ever did brassy rave-ups of Prince's "Darling Nikki" or the Beatles' "Cry Baby Cry." MTO straddles the fine line between reverence, irony and whimsy. Case in point: "Happy Hour Blues" shifts from quaint, old-time swing (replete with strummed banjo) to breakneck bop punched up by discordant horn voicings.
MTO includes some unique talents, including bass, drums, three reeds, trombone, and Bernstein on trumpet and the delightfully sleazy-sounding slide trumpet. What gives the music a certain extra sonic oomph is the addition of guitarist/banjoist Matt Munisteri and violinist Charlie Burnham, neither of whom play their instruments in conventional jazz ways. "Darling Nikki" makes good use of scratchy violin tones, while Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," played here as a woozy shuffle (and with a regrettable vocal), showcases a seductively cagey slide solo that concentrates heavily on single strings.
Bernstein, who emerged from the New York avant-garde scene, has an uncanny knack for mixing the old and the new, the familiar and the unusual, the pleasant and the harsh. He mashes it all together and makes it, that's right, fun. (www.sunnysiderecords.com) 4 stars
—Eric Snider
These Stars are Monsters
INKWELL
111/East West
Orlando's My Hotel Year and Tallahassee's Believe in Toledo were two of the better, more rock- and power-pop-savvy acts to be drowned by the tidal wave of Floridian emo trendies. Here, those bands' former frontmen — Travis Adams and Davey Pierce, respectively — team up to return with a nearly perfect collection of fun, melancholy and extremely current pop-rock tunes. Monsters' beauty lies in both its big, obvious hooks and its tiny eccentricities. The album is full of the inside humor, stylistic farting about, quirky choices and lyrical individualism so glaringly absent from most Drive-Thru Records Generation fare; Adams and Pierce aren't afraid to put the infectious heartfelt anthems out there, but they do it in their own way, to enormous success. Inkwell plays the State Theatre on Fri., Aug. 4. Check out the lead music feature for more. 4 stars
—Scott Harrell
Telephono/Soft Effects EP
SPOON
Merge
Now that you can hear indie faves Spoon in Jaguar and cell phone commercials, it's time for a little history lesson courtesy of this two-disc reissue. Telephono is Spoon's 1996 debut and the Soft Effects EP is a five-song sampler from a year later. On both releases, the band is more clearly indebted to predecessors than on its later, more skeletal and spacey albums, with the angularity of Wire and the atmospherics of the Pixies as touchstones. If you haven't fallen in love with this band's music, don't start here: This doesn't approach later classics like Kill the Moonlight. But for devotees — such as myself — hearing these long-out-of-print discs for the first time is sublime. Spoon may not have hit its stride just yet, but you can hear the origins of a very special band in every spastic groove. 4 stars
—Cooper Levey-baker
This article appears in Aug 2-8, 2006.