7–9pm
$12 or b/o
rob chalfen & subconsciouscafe new chamber music
presents
GUTBUCKET
“DRY HUMPING THE AMERICAN DREAM”
Paul Chuffo (drums), Ty Citerman (guitar), Eric Rockwin (bass) Ken Thomson
(saxophone)
Gutbucket is a free-range band. The five-year-old New York quartet is not
only equally comfortable playing in front of 900 sweatily pogo-ing teenage
skate-punks, or a crowd of stoned jamband freaks, or on an anarchist German
art collective houseboat, but also – most importantly – their music fits
right in, too. On Dry Humping the American Dream, the band the Village Voice
dubbed “stomprovisors” thrashes and twitches (sometimes literally) through
10 cartoonishly complex compositions, injecting a shot of glorious
spazmitude into the minimalist cool of Bang on a Can’s hep Cantaloupe label.
Flitting from Latin to thrash to polka to klezmer and back, often within the
space of a few bars, the group veritably attacks their music with the kind
of ferocity usually reserved for punk, despite having earned their jazz bona
fides. “We’re all pretty serious about rock,” says saxophonist Ken Thomson,
“and not just a token throwing-in of some different tunes. It’s something
intrinsic to who we are as people. We’ve all had training in jazz, but we’d
like to move outside that world into the rock world, and actually bring
something new to that.” Though the band might seem rooted in the genre
exploding of avant-squonk (their 2001 debut, InsomniacsDream, was released
on the Knitting Factory house imprint, while Dry Humping the American Dream
was issued in Europe on the legendary Enja label), this might be an easier
move than it sounds.
The four band members are, if nothing else, products of suburban radio.
Bassist Eric Rockwin claims to have learned every Paul McCartney bassline by
heart before his father humbled him with a Ray Brown CD. Guitarist Ty
Citerman was “into everything that was Hendrix and Van Halen and Led
Zeppelin.” And drummer Paul Chuffo learned to play by mimicking The Who’s
Keith Moon. It’s only fitting, then, that the band came together under the
auspices of Columbia University’s WKCR, where Ty had a late-night radio show
and Paul was the self-admitted “crazy guy in the corner smoking cigarettes
and writing papers.” After playing together for four years in the soul-jazz
Ex Caminos, Ty, Ken, and Paul split off in 1999 to form what would become
Gutbucket. Introduced through a friend, Eric and Paul found an instant
rhythmic rapport, and the band was born. Four months later, they debuted
before a packed house at Manhattan’s Baby Jupiter. Gutbucket set to work
building the all-important live rep, gigging first throughout Manhattan,
before spreading across the collegiate markets of the east coast and –with
the release of InsomniacsDream - making the leap over the big pond to Europe
in 2001. “They think we’re jazz over there,” Ty says of the idyllic trips.
Production: Rob Chalfen