Bands Like Zappa Ben Sommer

Today I talk to composer and trombonist Dave Nelson. I feature a track off his last album Logistic Minutiae – which is a suitably geeky title for a jazz/fusion composer

Today I talk to Jeremy Savo of the Philadelphia-based band Out of the Beardspace. If you’re in the area, go see their show on January 11 with past BandsLikeZappa feature Statospheerius. And also check out their new experimental EP.

Ben Sommer:  I’m here with Jeremy from the band, Out of Beardspace. Jeremy, first of all, tell me about the band, and if you don’t mind to start with this out of left field name you guys came up for yourselves.
Jeremy Savo: Well, the name is Out of the Beardspace, and it comes from an idea and the idea is of the beard space, and it’s a simple idea. It’s just when you stroke your beard, you are in the beard space.
Ben: Got it.
Jeremy: So if you think of the famous statue of the thinker, it’s basically you are in thought, and so out of the beard space simply means that it’s a creation that you make, so it’s something that came of your thoughts.
Ben: Are you guys hirsute, all have beards or any facial hair of some kind?
Jeremy: Actually, only one of us does.
Ben: Oh. My favorite music blog these days is BeardRock.com. They have a similar gimmick. Everything is facial hair themed.
Jeremy: Yeah. We haven’t gone there. I’m actually not sure we can go there yet. We are pretty young.
Ben: Oh, well, how old are you guys?
Jeremy: Our oldest member is about to turn 22 and our youngest member is 18.
Ben: Oh, wow. So your music style is very progressive. You’ve all got chops obviously. Usually kids with those kind of chops and who are playing such a harmonically, rhythmically, adventurous music have some sort of jazz background. Is that true with you guys?
Jeremy: We actually have a rock background. We all went to a place called The School of Rock, but one of the main themes of this School of Rock was Frank Zappa.
Ben: Oh.
Jeremy: And so we all basically, throughout our teenage years, spent a lot of our time learning and performing all sorts of different songs from all sorts of different genres, but mostly with a rock background and then it’s been actually in more recent times that we’ve all gotten into jazz.
Ben: School of Rock, what is this? I’ve heard of this, but who runs this?
Jeremy: Well, when we went there, it used to be ran by a guy called Paul Green who actually founded this school and he created this school, which is now across the country. But we all went in Cherry Hill and most of us, but actually all of us except one of use was in something called the All-Stars. There were all these schools all over the East Coast and the All-Stars brought together. It was like an audition group. It brought together the best of the schools, and through that we got to go on tour and play with some people like Jon Anderson from Yes and Napoleon Murphy Brock from Frank Zappa and John Wetton from King Crimson.
Ben: Wow, and so I’m looking it up now as we talk, so it’s a Philly area kind of thing. Is that true?
Jeremy: That’s what started it, but it’s as far as California and Texas now.
Ben: Right, right. So I’m so out of step. I mix up that stupid movie with the School of Rock. Now, I’ve heard it mentioned several times. In fact, there is this girl. I forgot her name. She’s a young bassist, kind of a hot shot. She has played with a lot of progressive musicians. I follow her on Twitter. I think she went to School of Rock, too.
Jeremy: Julie Slick?
Ben: Yeah. That’s the one.
Jeremy: Yeah, her and her brother.
Ben: So it spawned some minor stars, so that’s pretty cool as you guys are carrying on the tradition. Did you guys go to college?
Jeremy: Well, currently, none of us go to college full time. Three of us go to college part time, which means basically we each take two classes at the community college down the street. But I used to go to college for Music Industry briefly and Sam, our keyboard player went to Berkeley for two years and Zack, our other guitar player, went to school for music for two years. We kind of all pulled out from that a little bit to more concent

This week I speak French guitar virtuoso & composer Julien Beyleix – the man behind Unfrethead.

Ben Sommer: Hi, this is Ben Sommer with BandsLikeZappa.com. Today I’m talking to Julien Beyleix, who comes all the way from France. He is basically the one-man machine behind the band, Unfrethead. Julien, I want you to say hi to the audience. Tell us a little bit about yourself, your music, and also your mysterious band name.
Julien Beyleix: For one, I’m Julien from France; maybe you’ve noticed by the accent. I’ve played guitar since 12 or 13 years old. The main idea behind Unfrethead was basically Fretless Project due to buying a Vigier fretless guitar. The name came from when I was looking for some kind of music that was unfretted that had some heavy metal music influences. That’s how I came up with it.
Ben: Did you manufacture your own fretless guitar?
Julien: No, the special guitar that I used on this project was made by Vigier Guitars, which makes French hand-made, very top-of-the-line guitars. I bought it because one of my greatest guitar influences played on fretless guitars. It’s Ron Thal, also known as Bumblefoot. He is actually the lead guitarist for Guns N’ Roses now.
Ben: Oh, Buckethead, you mean?
Julien: No, the guy who came after, Bumblefoot.
Ben: Oh, Bumblefoot. What a fun name.
Julien: Yeah, exactly.
Ben: Did you take your name after Buckethead and Bumblefoot, too, to try to come up with a neat stage name?
Julien: Yeah, something like that. I was right in front of my computer trying to build up my first MySpace page. I chose my name very quickly in front of the login page.
Ben: Oh, excellent. That’s a good story. Regardless of the fretless instrument, how would you describe your style? What music influences you? Who are your favorite artists?
Julien: It’s a melting pot of many, many, many influences. I’m a great fan of string guitar music players like Steve Vai, etc. But, on the other hand, I like very progressive music and un-metal music. And while simply learning guitar, learning music, I started to add other influences, like more metal music. Devin Townsend might have come right after all that influence; but it should come from within, not just sit in the music.
Ben: I don’t know who that is.
Julien: He was a singer with Steve Vai in the early ‘90s on the album, Sex & Religion. After that he created his own death metal project called Strapping Young Lad.
Ben: Oh, I’ve heard of that band, sure.
Julien: He is a very charismatic singer. He has his own career and his own sort of stuff that is very unique. I think it was really the first metal band that I really dug outside of being a teenager. It’s the first heavy metal band that I was really digging. That and maybe Meshugga too.
Ben: Meshuggah is a great European band. I’m curious. What did you do before this? What are you doing separately from this? Is this your main project that you pour all your energy into? What’s your history?
Julien: I played guitar early in my own corner before this. I was just playing guitar with a local band. As far as what the goal is, it’s like a side project to me.
Ben: Do you make a living from music?
Julien: No, I worked a little as a computer engineer.
Ben: Me, too.
Julien: Then I stopped because it was very boring to me. I started giving simple guitar lessons and tried to make a living with that.
Ben: Do you do that now or did you try that and then fail, or give up?
Julien: No, I didn’t really give up. It’s always cool giving lessons to…Sometimes I learn a lot from students.
Ben: Oh, so do you teach full-time?
Julien: Yes.
Ben: Oh, good. Interesting.
Julien: I use more time for the music now, but I had a full set of giving lessons in the past.
Ben: How is the scene for your type of music in France?
Julien: I think there has been a good response for a while for basic guitar. I think there’s a really French audience for guys like Bumblefoot or Mattihias IA Eklundh from Freak Kitchen, which

Ben Sommer: Hi, this is Ben with BandsLikeZappa.com. I’m here with Joe Deninzon from the band Stratospheerius. Joe, why don’t you just say hi, and just give a little introduction about yourself, the band, and what you guys are all about.
Joe Deninzon: First of all, thanks for having me on your program, and my band is called Stratospheerius. I play the electric seven-stringed Viper violin, and basically, Zappa’s one of our biggest influences. In fact, we performed a few of their songs live. The band is hard to describe, but it’s a mixture of Zappa, Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Police, little flashes of Dave Matthews but not too many, and I’m the lead singer of the band, and it’s prog, rock, funk, jam music with the influences of gypsy music and classical music as well.

Ben: Yeah. Cool. Now, it’s an excellent and very interesting instrumentation you’ve got, with mix of song styles. I’m not sure if you’re a violinist or fiddle player. Oh, you’re like Jean Luc Ponty or you’re like Dave Matthews. I mean, in this case I guess there is that element of that Dave Matthews angle. You’ve got that bit of a jam band element where you guys rock out and then take trade solos, and then you’ve also got absolutely the prog and jazz fusion element. The precedent there is – I guess – Ponty. I’m not sure who else.
Joe: Well, in the worlds of progressive rock, bands like Yes, King Crimson, that’s old school progressive rock and they influenced us a lot, but not so much as a lot of the newer bands out of that genre, but jazz fusion, I would say with Mahavishnu Orchestra, Jean Luc Ponty, Return of Forever, groups like that. We take elements of all that, each of those genres of music that we like, we mix them together.
Ben: Tell me about your instrument. You have a name for it. It looks like a tricked out electric fiddle, but you have a different name for it. Tell me about it.
Joe: It’s known as a Viper. It’s made by a man named Mark Wood out of Long Island, and he was the violinist for Trans Siberian Orchestra for a while. He’s manufactured these violins for about twenty years now. And they’re shaped like flying-V guitars, and they have a unique harness strap-on system that goes around your back, so it sort of becomes an extension of your body. And me being a singer, it’s very comfortable to play and sing with this instrument, and it’s a solid body violin.
Ben: It’s the seven strings? How is it strung? What are the pitches?
Joe: Well, the top four strings are regular violin strings, from the highest which is E down to A, D, G, then it goes down to C, like a viola, F and then B flat. And B flat is a whole step lower below a cello.
Ben: Oh, awesome.
Joe: It’s got a range of most of the bowed stringed instruments.
Ben: Basically, it’s a guitar, roughly.
Joe: Yes. I put it in through about sixteen different effects pedals. I have a huge pedal board onstage, if you come and see our shows. Basically, if you put a distortion pedal on it, you get those low power cords on this instrument. It sounds really cool.
Ben: Cool. Yeah. What’s the training like to take that up? I play five-stringed instruments. I’ve tried out a seven and ten-stringed guitar, and it’s not so weird. You can adjust to it. You’re going to learn. Is it the same deal with the violin? Was it pretty easy to pick this up? I presumed you were trained classically?
Joe: Yes and no. I mean classical training is definitely important. I mean it really is a foundation for everything I do, but it takes a bit of adjustment because the angles of the strings are different, the intonation is a little different. It took me about a month of just practicing and getting used to it. It also has frets like the guitar, that’s the other thing and that takes getting used to for a violinist.
Ben: Doesn’t that make your life easier?
Joe: It does in a lot of ways.
Ben: Why did they put frets on it? I

Up this week is LA-based band Drool Brothers!


Ben Sommer: Hi, this is Ben Sommer with BandsLikeZappa.com. I’m here with Chuck Mancillas from the LA-based band Drool Brothers. Chuck, tell us a little bit about the band and where you guys come from.
Chuck Mancillas: We were born and raised in Los Angeles, California. My brother and I started the band. We’ve been together since we came out of our mom. So we also have Joe Kramer. My brother’s name is Tom Slik. It’s Joe Kramer on guitar and Tom Slik plays bass and Dan Marfisi is a multi-instrumentalist who plays with us on live gigs and I’m Chuck Mancillas and I play drums and sings, and we are a bunch of studio geeks that like Frank Zappa.
Ben: Oh, it’s seems like in past years you’ve been struggling through the 80’s and 90’s trying to make it as a pure rock and pop act and you had kind of given up on that and so not only is this your part-time gig and band, but also it seems like the whole reason for being, if you will, of the band is, I don’t know, sarcasm, mimicry, mocking.
Chuck: Well, it’s not that we are mocking, but it’s just that we can write about anything since we are not part of anything. We are not accepted into any social circles. There are no conditions based on what we do and we’ve geared our lives in a manner that we could do whatever it is that we want to do sonically. We don’t have to have to look in certain way. We don’t have to play in Silver Lake. It’s just a great thing. We’ve already been through things. We’ve been part of putting the band on Los Angeles and we’ve even had careers in music at a certain point in time and did the showbiz thing and tried to make a lot of money out of it, and it’s just refreshing to have like-minded individuals that are grounded enough that we are, “Let’s do this for pure fun.”
And sometimes what comes out of it is not necessarily sarcasm, but just making fun of ourselves on what we’ve been through and it just kind of hit other people over the head. Sometimes some people get it and some people don’t. A lot of times there is nothing to get. It’s just a sonic experiment. So a lot of people lead in to that. We get hate mails, but we also get fan mail. We even have some dedicated fans, a couple.
Ben: What are some of the most memorable hate mail pieces you have received?
Chuck: Oh, we got a review. It was really bizarre, but this guy, and I won’t say the name of it, but he has a good magazine as well as a little Internet radio thing, and when we released our first record, he loved it and he played it and so we sent him the second record when Kasio Montigo came out. And then when he reviewed it, he put it in his magazine as one of the worst things he has ever heard in his life and so that’s pretty fun.
Ben: Maybe this guy didn’t get it when he heard your first album when he realized you are under-toned and your attitude in your second album, he woke up to it and said no.
Chuck: Yeah, yeah, the second album is more clear on some of the negative things that we see in Los Angeles and maybe the club scene in that Los Angeles. Maybe that’s why I wrote they are laughing at you, man, because the band is set up and sometimes they are playing and sometimes there is no support for each other. If you are narcissistic and it’s everybody for themselves instead of it being in digital experience it’s more like with the hierarchy strength. So I think that is a little bit more prevalent in Kasio Montigo.
Ben: So definitely you mentioned Zappa with that attitude about not giving a hoot, ridicule and everything including yourself. So you are very much in the Zappa tradition.
Chuck: Yeah, we hope to make people think a little bit.
Ben: Yeah, are you in the middle of recording anything? Have you anything coming up you want to plug?
Chuck: Yeah, yeah, we sure do. We just finished an EP. It’s a 4-song EP. We are going to try releasing fewer songs

This week I talk to Keith Horn – an original and amazing composer and recording artist. Imagine the best of Frank Zappa crossed with Steely Dan and System of a Down. That’s Keith Horn. Enjoy



Ben Sommer: Keith Horn is a composer and a songwriter out of LA and the story is, I’ve been running this podcast and a blog at BandsLikeRush.com for almost a year, and I had been meaning for ever since the get go to start up its sister site at Bands Like Zappa, essentially these are one of the two favorite musical vices. The goal is to feature like-minded artist. So I found Keith on this website called Jango, which is, and I don’t know how to describe it, it’s basically kind of like a Pandora but for fans of undiscovered music to go and plug in their favorite artist and then every dozen or so tunes that come through a brand new and really unknown person comes out. Basically these artists sign up in a database.
 
I forget what I was looking for, but probably Steely Dan or Rush or Frank Zappa – and you came up. This was months and months ago really. I heard this song “Chicken Little”, and I was blown away. I said, “Wow! This is striking stuff.” It’s very well produced and original sound. And Keith, I have to chastise you. I’d tried very hard initially. I had probably spent a half an hour at one point trying to find you, locate you, contacting you months ago and I gave up.
Keith Horn: Oh, I’m so sorry. The only thing that was out there was a few of the songs. I didn’t have a website up yet. It barely hit MySpace and MySpace was kind on its way out at that time, so I was ignoring it. Just last week, I finally put up my Facebook fan page, so I was hard to find.
Ben: You were. I remember I looked at the MySpace. It seemed all I could find was the Keith Horn, that and the LinkedIn profile. But anyways, so I took another shot…
Keith: My apologies for my invisibility.
Ben: That’s all right.
Keith: I’ve remedied it now.
Ben: So you are still on Jango, and it looks like you have or you’re going to release your first album. Was Jango just a test run of the same material you are releasing now or is it new you are working on?
Keith: Yeah, it’s the same stuff. With Jango, I had put up I think four or five out of eight songs that are on this first album called “Rock Scissors” and I’m just finishing it now. Actually, just ten minutes ago, I was just listening to the final mixes that my engineers sent me today to send off to CD Baby and to upload to Tune Core, so I can get it up on iTunes and Rhapsody and whatnot.
Ben: The way I usually run the podcast, I usually insert two tracks of my liking, so the listeners will be hearing this before probably you speak. But why don’t you just kind of give us a synopsis of where you think your music is at, your inspiration, a little bit background about your life. It seems like you have an interesting background on music from what I read.
Keith: Well, my background is kind of a trial and error in a lot of different types of instruments over the years. When I was a kid, about nine or ten, I started plinking out on the piano, and then I saw ‘Back to The Future the Final Scene’ and it made me want to play guitar when I was nine years old.
Ben: The Chuck Berry scene?
Keith: The Chuck Berry scene, which is to this day with just this classic scene, and I just love of it at 9, and I said, “Man, I’ve got to do that. That’s great.” So I started playing the guitar at home and I started learning saxophone in school, so I was learning at school how to read music and I was just messing around and learning by ear at home on just the family keyboard and my guitar. I kept pursuing guitar. I kept practicing. I got really good at it and I found out that I couldn’t make a living playing guitar when I was about 18. So I went in to college at Western Michigan University and I studied percussion.
Ben: But wait, back up. How come you