People used to dance to jazz, but somewhere along the line jazz got stuffy. We’re taking jazz, funk and soul, and putting a ’90s angle on it with hip-hop loops and dance beats. We’re taking jazz to the dance floor again.”
It’s as succinct an explanation as any of what Liquid Soul does, courtesy of deejay and founding member Jessie De La Pena. And that musical blend has made the 10-member Chicago group all the buzz among New York tastemakers and record-company executives, who this week took a close-up look at the band in a highly anticipated gig at Manhattan’s SOB’s club.
The group will be back in time, though, for its long-running Sunday night engagement at the Double Door, where Liquid Soul draws a multi-culti audience every bit as diverse as the music, including hip-hoppers and jazz buffs, kids in hoodies and models in evening dresses, Dennis Rodman and Uma Thurman, Cypress Hill rapper B-Real and rock cover girl Joan Osborne.
The band typically weaves De La Pena’s vast stock of dance records into a series of Liquid Soul sets, which run the gamut from fierce, full-on jazz to Sade-like pop-soul. Although the band has been lumped in with the 8-year-old European acid-jazz movement and outfits such as the Brand New Heavies that fuse live horns with turntable beats, Liquid Soul is among the first to make a successful go of the style in the Midwest and has forged an identity distinct from many of its trans-Atlantic predecessors and counterparts.
“We’re not your standard Chicago pop band, and we’re not a typical acid-jazz band,” says keyboardist Frankie Hill. “Most acid jazz is kind of light. What we play is hard, in your face.”
Much of that muscle comes from saxophonist Mars Williams, who writes the bulk of the group’s original music (although lately it has become more of a group effort), manages its business affairs and supplies a touch of mayhem when he uncorks a solo from behind his ubiquitous wraparound shades.
“I thrive on chaos,” says Williams, who previously played in the Psychedelic Furs and the Waitresses and also performed side by side with such jazz giants as Roscoe Mitchell and Hal Russell, and who now somehow manages to find time for a half-dozen bands and projects besides Liquid Soul.
“I like being able to juggle different things. Anything can be worked out. It’s just that there’s so much different music in me, I need to get it out.”
The last line faintly echoes John Coltrane, who once used similar terms to explain why his saxophone solos were of epic length. And while Williams would cringe seeing himself compared to the jazz legend, he does share at least one characteristic with the master: the way his shattering, scorched-earth solos leave their distinctive imprint on every ensemble with which he works.
“I don’t think I change the way I play, but what goes on behind me changes,” Williams says. With Liquid Soul, the context is radically different from most of his other projects in that his frequent foil is not another horn player, but De La Pena.
“He’s grown into thinking like a musician,” Williams says. “He’s learned how to work things into the same key as we’re playing, and we’ll feed off each other — I’ll start doing these circular breathing patterns, and he’ll start looping a James Brown scream to sync up with me. Or I’ll develop a solo out of a groove that he comes up with, or even a spoken word thing that he’ll throw in.”
De La Pena says he’s learned to adjust to working in a band. As an in-demand deejay, he programs music as many as seven nights a week at clubs around town, but in Liquid Soul he has developed a common vocabulary with the band’s superb rhythm section — drummer Dan Leali and bassist Ricky Showalter.
“A lot of drummers can’t lock in with a deejay,” De La Pena says. “We have drummers sit in occasionally, and it’s like a train wreck. I used to concern myself only with beats per minute and break beats, but now I’ve learned about chords and bridges and how to read music. And it’s cool, because this way I get to have more input.”
The group was cruising along nicely with its regular Double Door gig, and last year released a fine live CD, “Liquid Soul,” on its own Soul What Records. But the interest of celebrities such as Rodman, who had the group play at his birthday party at Crobar earlier this year, has given the band a 15-minute shot of pop-culture fame.
“It’s a blessing we got recognized,” says Williams, “but I don’t want to be seen as riding anyone’s coattails. We stand on our own.”
And Hill says that for all the glamor of the Crobar night — during which Rodman, Eddie Vedder and Blues Traveler’s John Popper partied and performed with the band on stage — Liquid Soul still didn’t rate in one respect.
“Everybody was having a great time,” Hill says. “But then when Dennis and the other guys all went back to the VIP room, we couldn’t get in. We’re not big enough stars.”
Passing the acid test
In his first book, “Kaleidoscope Eyes” (Citadel), rock journalist, rabblerouser and former Chicago Sun-Times pop editor Jim DeRogatis persuasively argues that psychedelic music did not die in the ’60s. Instead, DeRogatis draws the connection between Ken Kesey’s acid tests and My Bloody Valentine’s guitar tapestries, the Byrds’ “Eight Miles High” and De La Soul’s “Three Feet High and Rising,” Pink Floyd and Portishead, Amon Duul II and Husker Du.
He stretches credulity by including bands such as the Velvet Underground, Culture Club and the Beach Boys under the psychedelic umbrella, and never quite gets around to providing a handy, one-sentence definition of psychedelic music — which may be impossible. Instead, DeRogatis makes room for just about any record that creates its own universe by manipulating sound, lyrics, texture and space. This is not “drug music” so much as music that works like a drug, that prompts the listener to experience the world in a new way.
The acid wit that characterized DeRogatis’ Sun-Times’ columns is in ample supply. We’ll leave it to readers to discover the exact nature of the pithy swipe directed at one of DeRogatis’ former employers (page 31), or to determine exactly which artists are being disemboweled when he writes: “But contrary to what many of these bands’ fans seem to think, drinking Bud Lite and doing the awkward white person wiggle is not a psychedelic experience.”
DeRogatis will sign copies of his opus at 3 p.m. Saturday at Tower Records, 2301 N. Clark St.
