Busty and the Bass bring unique vibe to stage
In September, Montreal nine-piece band Busty and the Bass released their debut full-length album, “Uncommon Good,” a smooth and assured recording showcasing the collective’s horn-and-keys-driven take on hip-hop, jazz, slow-jam soul, and classic funk.
The group’s members — Scott Bevins (trumpet), Mike McCann (trumpet), Chris Vincent (trombone), Nick Ferraro (alto sax, vocals), Louis Stein (guitar), Milo Johnson (bass), Julian Trivers (drums), Eric Haynes (piano and keyboards), and Alistair Blu (keyboards, synth, and vocals) — originally met in 2011 while attending the jazz program at McGill University.
“In first year, actually in the first week of school, our guitar player Louis decided to just sort of invite people over for a jam, and that was the first iteration of the band, where we all just got together,” Haynes explains.
“We were all studying jazz, but I think we were all interested in playing other styles of music as well, so it was a good excuse to do that outside of our program. For the first little while with the band, we were actually just an instrumental band — we would write our own instrumental songs and then also play pop songs, like a Beyoncé song, but instead of someone singing the melody, it would be on a horn or something like that. We did that for a few years before we started adding vocals and writing songs with vocals.”
On “Uncommon Good,” the followup to the group’s 2015 EP, “Glam,” the band worked with Grammy-winning producer Neal Pogue (Snoop Dogg, Aretha Franklin, Outkast), who travelled to Montreal from his home base in Atlanta to work with the band.
Haynes said the band was thrilled to work with Pogue. “That was a really cool experience, because he helped us find our sound in the studio. It’s tricky in some ways, because a lot of the stuff that we do live doesn’t necessarily translate over into recorded music, so he helped us find our vibe.”
The album was recorded over 18 months at a studio owned by the band’s record label, Indica Records.
“It was nice, because it’s a very comfortable and informal vibe where we could just spend extended periods of time there when we weren’t on the road. I guess that was part of the reason why the album took us like a year-and-a-half to make, just because we were in and out of the studio whenever we weren’t on the road,” said Haynes.
Though Pogue’s influence can be heard on the mid-’70s funk of songs like “Up Top” and “Dance With Someone!!!,” Haynes said the group’s distinct sound also owes a debt to newer artists, as well as the band members’ varied backgrounds.
“Neal had us checking out a lot of those older records, like Earth, Wind and Fire, and Parliament-Funkadelic, but we’re also really inspired from modern music as well, whether it’s Frank Ocean or James Blake,” said Haynes.
“That’s definitely an important part of our sound, is that it’s such a blend of so many disparate genres. There’s hip-hop and soul and jazz — and all that kind of stuff, it reflects how we all have such different backgrounds. I mean, I’m from Calgary, but we have members from New York to L.A., we’re sort of like half-Canadian, half-American. So we all have a lot of similarities in the sorts of music that we like, but also have a lot of variation in our backgrounds, so we’re all able to bring different things to the table and hopefully combine them in a unique way.”
Highlights of the group’s busy year so far included their recent European tour, soldout release shows in New York and Montreal, and an opening slot for Anderson Paak on the main stage of the Montreal International Jazz Festival in front of more than 30,000 people. The band also performed at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas earlier this year, as well as at the Great Escape festival in the U.K., while FLARE magazine recently called them one of the “six Canadian artists you need to have on your radar.”