Home >  A & E

Wednesday, March 26, 2003

By Ed Masley, Post-Gazette Pop Music Critic

Drummer Shaun Gilmour was looking for something to keep him busy last December when his band, the New Alcindors, took a leave of absence so guitarist Kurt Edwards could stay home enjoying the latest addition to his family.

Three months later, the groove-intensive jazz band Gilmour formed with Berklee-educated saxophonist Scott Boni has already weathered a name change, put a record out and played more out of town than in town.

"We were talking about having two months or three months off," he says. "And I thought, 'Well, that's enough time to throw a little something together and have a little fun.' "

An early version of the band recorded some tracks to DAT in Gilmour's living room "and before I knew it, I had seven, eight gigs. It sort of took off faster than I thought it would."

In January, The Scoville Unit played its second gig in Pittsburgh, a show that's now available on CD as "Live at the Memphis Lounge 1.31.2003."

Soon enough, though, Gilmour got an e-mail from a lawyer telling him that a punk band owned the name The Scoville Unit (which for those who don't do chili peppers, is an index of how hot a chili pepper is).

It took about an hour and a half, he says, to brainstorm through enough ideas to arrive at the clearly superior New Soul Theory.

"We had to do it quick and clean," he says, "because we're starting to get around a lot. We're starting to play a lot of places and I'd have hated for this to happen, like, a year from now when we were even more established than we are, where New Soul Theory shows up in Ithaca, and we've played there three or four times, and nobody knows who the hell we are now.

"It was a nightmare, though. I had to change the Web site, all the graphics, all the posters, had to buy a whole new Web domain."

They'll be repackaging the album, too -- same title, different band name.

Gilmour shouldn't have much trouble, though, getting the word out on the name change, being well-connected in the jam world through his work on Internet discussion groups for Galactic, North Mississippi All-Stars and Medeski, Martin and Wood.

"There are probably three to four thousand kids on those lists that I run," he says. "And I have a very high visibility on the list because I have to step in from time to time with administrative things. Or if somebody has a question about something, I'm the guy they go to. So it's kind of cool because when we play out of town, kids will come out to the show to see what my thing's all about."

And with New Soul Theory, he says, "I have a little bit more marketable product for those guys to like. I mean, the New Alcindors, those kids liked, but I think they were looking for a little bit more extension and a little more jazz-oriented take on music."

Although the band is more a jazz band than a jam band, Gilmour says he'll take the jam-band audience.

"The jam-band moniker has bad connotations," he says. "To some people. The people who automatically go 'Oh God, they sound like Phish.' And we don't. We don't sound anything like that, but somehow, the kind of music we do fits in with those kids. Very danceable, very groove-oriented music is taken very nicely to the jam kids."

The idea of being a danceable band is important enough to Gilmour that he tries to stay away from booking jazz clubs.

"We want people to get up and move around and dance," he says. "Have fun and yell and scream. And that's not the typical approach that jazz has taken in the past. ... At State College, the first time we played there, we had 80 people show up for the first show that we ever played and nobody had ever heard of us, and they had to take tables out because people were having so much fun and dancing and moving around. And it really helps us play if the crowd is as into it as we are."

New Soul Theory invites you to dance tonight at Club Cafe (412-431-4950). The show begins at 7:30. Admission is $8.