Sexmob performs at the Jazz Station - Eugene
Legendary NYC band Sexmob returns to Eugene. Celebrating 25 years reimagining music from Prince to James Bond to Duke Ellington to the Grateful Dead.
- Steven Bernstein slide trumpet
- Briggan Krauss alto saxophone
- Tony Scherr bass
- Kenny Wollesen drums
Still thriving and evolving 25 years after its founding, the visionary quartet Sexmob continues to explode all preconceived notions of what an instrumental jazz band can be. Emerging from the Knitting Factory scene of the mid-’90s, slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein, alto/baritone saxophonist Briggan Krauss, upright/electric bassist Tony Scherr and drummer Kenny Wollesen have changed the game with their raw, improvisatory groove and swing, endlessly inventive arrangements and uproarious sense of fun, exhibiting high musical standards while blithely blowing past all rigid boundaries of genre and taste. From their 1998 debut Din of Inequity onward, they’ve formed one of the truly enduring and substantive artistic bonds of their time, a quartet chemistry (often plus guests) that retains every bit of its freshness and capacity for surprise. “At this point,” declared NPR First Listen, “Sexmob is a collective ideal.”
A Sexmob gig does not have a setlist. A song doesn’t simply start and then end, followed by applause. “That’s never happened once in 25 years,” Bernstein declares. Instead, loyal fans come out to hear a band embracing perpetual risk, following the tradition of the late Don Cherry, whose idea of musical collage and “endless beginnings” remains the highest principle.
Similarly, Sexmob does not “cover” songs: as Bernstein has said, they “Sexmob” them. On Din of Inequity it was Prince, Leadbelly, Ellington, Hoagy Carmichael, The Cardigans, “Macarena” and more. On Solid Sender (1999) it was Nirvana, the Stones, the Dead, ABBA, more Ellington — but as on the first album, Bernstein originals in the mix as well. With Theatre & Dance (2000, also featuring Jim Black on drums) came a sustained look at Ellington (via a commission from choreographer Donald Byrd), and with Sex Mob Does Bond (2001) came the film music of John Barry (and Bernstein’s original riposte “Dr. Yes”).
In essence, Bernstein and friends do what jazz musicians have done from the start, playing popular songs in their own transformative way. And in the process they’ve broken ground regarding form and structure, arrangement and re-composition (areas in which Bernstein has achieved distinction apart from Sexmob). “Jazz was louder than any music of its time; it was played on a more psychedelic plane than the average vaudeville or minstrel song,” Bernstein once told journalist Ted Panken. “That’s what I’m trying to do with Sexmob.”
