Jazz purists duck and cover. JAZZ PUNKS just struck, hell-bent on returning the music to the people. Combining hard-bop chops and garage rocks defiant attitude, this Los Angeles combo shreds the jazz canon and pieces it back together with themes and riffs lifted from iconic rock ‘n’ roll. After several years developing their sound and earning an avid following in LA’s Southland scene, the Punks deliver a scorching jolt of energy with their debut album SMASHUPS, slated for release May 15th.
Built on a conceptual framework requiring superlative craftsmanship, an iconoclastic spirit and a love of musical mischief, JAZZ PUNKS’ audacious book bristles with acoustic smashups like “I Can See Miles,” a felicitous pairing of The Who’s “I Can See For Miles” with trumpeter Miles Davis’ “Pfrancing.” Featuring pianist Danny Kastner, drummer Hugh Elliott, saxophonist Robby Elfman, guitarist Sal Polcino and upright bassist Mike Polcino, JAZZ PUNKS merges a diverse cast of players with a stylistically expansive range of credits.
Refined on stage during their steady gig at the venerable Glendale jazz-spot JAX, the Punks crew has essentially created a new genre that exists outside of fusion and straight ahead jazz. Funded mostly by grueling, four-set nights on the LA club scene, the album features a program of daredevil mashups that sound, on paper, like malicious bar bet gone bad. But on stage, JAZZ PUNKS perform astounding feats of alchemy, like “Led Gillespie,” which weaves Led Zeppelin’s “Misty Mountain Hop” together with Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop anthem “A Night in Tunisia.”
What’s most astounding about the force tunes together that don’t naturally cohere. At its most intricate, the band delivers a wild ride to the dark side on “Creep Train” by combining Billy Strayhorn’s immortal theme for the Ellington Orchestra, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” with Radiohead’s “Creep” and “Paranoid Android.” On “Heavyfoot,” the band interpolates the riff from the Beatles “She’s So Heavy” into a fantastically bent version of Wayne Shorter’s classic “Footprints.”
Check out the audio player in the upper right hand corner of the page to check out a few tunes off of Smashups
