Racer Session #383 | Sound Underground | July 15, 2017

Greetings, Racers!

This week, we are stoked to have our friends from Miami, Sound Underground, take the Racer stage. This show is part of a west coast tour, and their second of three shows in Seattle. Sound Underground is a compact trio with an expansive imagination - Saxophonist David Leon, trumpeter Alec Aldred and guitarist Jonah Udall draw on a broad array of influences from Cool Jazz to Americana, to Bulgarian folklore and the avant-garde to distill a unique and deeply personal voice. They often steer through inventive textures far beyond the limits of their unconventional instrumentation, creating music that is both serious and whimsical.

Jonah took some time to write a blog post for us this week while the band ventures up the Pacific coastline. Read on below:
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Hey Racer family! We’re really excited to join you for this installment of your series, we’ve heard it’s a very special event and we can’t wait to be a part of it.

We do a lot of travelling as a band, which brings us to a lot of very different places and in front of diverse audiences. This is our third time travelling the west coast (from Los Angeles to Seattle), but we’ve also played in the Midwest, Florida, New York and Eastern Europe. And as an unconventional group, somewhat at the intersection between chamber music and jazz, we find ourselves playing in an enormous range of venues. A big part of our music that I think has been informed by this experience is our disposition to explore the avant-garde and the unexpected by means of familiar sounds. Our instrumentation itself is the prime example of this, three familiar instruments in an unfamiliar configuration. We take a lot of influence from 1950’s cool jazz, American folk music, and some from the music of the Balkans and other places, and try to turn them on their heads and combine them in new ways.

Intimacy is something that is also very important to us in our music. We aim to create a space in our performance that invites the audience to experience the human element of music making with us; the breath, the sounds of hands manipulating instruments. Our music is our small way of giving transparency and human closeness to a world that seems to need them more than ever.

For the participatory session, we would like to explore the idea of intimacy through playing in small groups. We’ll form duos and trios, disregarding traditional instrument roles to create open dialogs. We’ll keep them short so we can cycle through several different combinations of voices. We’re excited to make music with you all!