It's a happy, unlikely state of affairs that the remarkable proto hard bop quartet Mostly Other People Do the Killing has stuck it out as long as they have. They seem, after all, to be guided by some awfully tight strictures in style and concept. Composer / bandleader Moppa Elliott delights in dipping into various jazz styles while titling his tunes after Pennsylvania towns and borrowing album cover art from jazz greats of decades past. It all seems a concept that, in less stubbornly creative hands, might have been dropped after a record or two. But MOPDtK released three records on Elliott's Hot Cup imprint before arriving at their first truly essential album, The Coimbra Concert, a two-disc set recorded live in Portugal and released in 2011 on the Clean Feed label. During that time, Moppa's men (trumpeter Peter Evans, saxophonist Jon Irabagon and drummer Kevin Shea) have become increasingly in demand. It's a happy, unlikely wonder he's been able to keep it together.
Following Coimbra the band returned to its home label with Slippery Rock!, which felt a bit of a disappointment. They thrive on live energy and their studio albums are sort of blueprints for the off-the-cuff medleys and interpolations that make their concerts so vital. On top of that, the material for Slipper Rock didn't feel fully gelled. It had started as an idea for a fusion project but the band backed off from the idea. The music, perhaps, hadn't found a footing by the time they recorded it.
But if morphing into a fusion band didn't quite work for them, the next step did. Red Hot finds them shuttling all the way back to the earliest days of jazz and adding three more members (the first personnel change since before the first record). David Taylor's bass trombone gives them the necessary brass edge to pull off some Dixie, and Brandon Seabrook on banjo and Ron Stabinsky on piano provide both credibility and amazing anachronisms.
The music Elliott wrote for this expanded MOPDtK is certainly borne of New Orleans but as is always their way it keeps coming off the hinges. Extended solo passages traipse terrain Buddy Bolden never dreamed of, but that's the point. Mostly other people adhere to tradition like it was the law. Elliott and company update the music, insinuate themselves into it and then renegotiate the deal. Red Hot may well be the most inspired reinvention of the cradle of jazz since Henry Threadgill's arrangements of Jelly Roll Morton and Scott Joplin 35 years ago, which is no small potatoes.
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