one-liner: crowdsourcing

The band has started to have this long overdue discussion: How do we describe ourselves? It hasn’t been too critical to really get this exactly right, because usually we just play our music, a jazz standard you’d associate with Ella Fitzgerald to a bluesy swinging remake of Radiohead. But now that we’re going to invest $40 in some new business cards, we want to make sure we can have some kind of quick description of our music and our style. We have ideas, but I think we should crowdsource this a little. How would you describe us?

I started with what I’d put on our website: “a jazz quartet with jamming qualities and a jam band with jazz sensibilities.” But that’s maybe too esoteric, and I couldn’t honestly tell you what it means to “jam” and I’m pretty sure that isn’t what we’re doing all the time. Tim piped up with something about the range of styles, moving from jazz to funk to blues to rock as the mood strikes us, and that we can play something exuberantly joyful or painful and ironic with the same passion and volume. But then how do you fit that on the business card?

I’ve also thought of “ruining jazz traditions one remake at a time,” or “playing jazz in a way that even our family likes it.” Or sometimes I think it should just be “playing music the way we want because it’s fun.” But that might not entice someone to book us for a wedding.

So we’re open to ideas. We’ll keep working on it ourselves and we’ll try to squish it onto the little card with our webpage. If you give us something we can use, we’ll give you a free business card.