Picture four monsters sharing a tub of Jiffy Pop over an open flame—that dangerous, beautiful moment when you're not sure if you're about to get perfectly popped kernels or a kitchen fire, but you're committed to finding out together. That's what happens when these four get in a room: controlled chaos, collaborative combustion, and the kind of musical conversation that happens when everyone's holding the pan handle at once.
The beauty of monster jazz is nobody's trying to be polite. There's no "after you" at the bridge, no gentle suggestions about dynamics, no passive-aggressive eye contact about tempo. Just four players who've spent enough time in the trenches to know that the best music happens when you stop being precious about your ideas and start treating the bandstand like a shared kitchen experiment. Some nights you get gourmet. Some nights you get scorched. Most nights you get something in between that tastes better than it has any right to, served with the kind of chemistry that only comes from musicians who trust each other enough to occasionally make terrible decisions together.
Featuring
Ben Bjorlie grew up in a household where the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra wasn't just background music—it was the family business. His mother played cello, his father played bass, and by the time Ben hit fifth grade, he was starting on clarinet, eventually landing spots in the National Honors Band and every all-state ensemble that would have him. Then at 13, he picked up his dad's bass and started learning Stanley Clarke and Marcus Miller tunes by ear, which is the musical equivalent of...
The house in Orangeburg, South Carolina, was a frequency spectrum unto itself. The Isley Brothers and the Manhattan Transfer and Dolly Parton and Mozart — all of it moving through the same rooms, all of it landing in the ears of a kid from Queens, New York, who had been transplanted to the Lowcountry and was trying to figure out which signal to lock onto. His mother had graduated from Jamaica High School of the Performing Arts, and she made sure Will and his siblings sang. Gospel was the...
Jay Sanders grew up in Nashville, which means he grew up understanding that music is labor — that behind every song on the radio is a session player who showed up on time, read the chart, and made someone else's vision real. But the Nashville that shaped Sanders wasn't the one on Broadway. It was the one in practice rooms and living rooms where Reggie Wooten talked about fundamental vibration and sacred geometry and the Music of the Spheres, where the instrument became a doorway into...
Vic Stafford's drumming résumé reads like a musical travelogue written by someone who can't sit still: Asheville native, Donna The Buffalo anchor, Toubab Krewe founding member, sound engineer, session player, and general rhythmic architect for whoever needs someone who understands that groove isn't just about keeping time—it's about creating the gravitational field that keeps everyone else from flying off into space.
After helping build Toubab Krewe's West African-meets-American-rock...
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