the hum / By Bob Doran

Dead Beatz

Band of Brotherz, plus The Nucleus reunion and other back-to-school music

(Aug. 26, 2010)  San Francisco-born drummer Jay Lane has had a multifaceted career, to say the least. After playing ska with The Uptones and funk with The Freaky Executives in the ’80s, he joined forces with Les Claypool in the original lineup of Primus, which indirectly led to meeting Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir and forming Ratdog. On the side, he helped form a ’90s-era East Bay aggregation called Alphabet Soup.

“Kenny Brooks, the saxophone player, had all these jazz gigs popping up and we kind of made it into hip hop jazz and played all these lounges and little clubs and stuff,” Lane recalled, calling from his home in S.F. “Alphabet Soup was a real nice mix of those two elements: hip hop and jazz. That’s basically what we’ve been trying to carry over to this Band of Brotherz thing.”

Band of Brotherz chopped V-Dub COURTESY OF BAND OF BROTHERZ

GALLERY >

Band of Brotherz finds Lane reconnecting with A-Soup lyricist/rapper Zachariah Mose, aka Iron Monk. “It was about five years ago when Zach came over and played me some tracks he’d made on a laptop that really caught my ear,” said Lane. “He’d really honed his songwriting skills. … I got excited and told him I wanted to do a band with that material, a new Alphabet Soup kind of thing. He suggested the [Brotherz] name. We worked on some more tunes together. Then we decided to do something with some Grateful Dead samples, doing them hip hop-style. We incorporated that into the first project.” The result: an iTunes album, DeadBeatz and Murderous Medlys, and a bit of touring.

Fast-forward to today. Ratdog is on hiatus while Weir plays with the Dead spin-off Further, and Lane is about to go back on the road with Claypool in a resurrected Primus. But first, he’s hitting the road with Band of Brotherz 2.0, a crew including Zach and friends and a live band. They start their Ganjapalooza 2.0 tour with a tie-dye hip hop show this Thursday at Red Fox.

Along somewhat similar lines (but sans tie-dye), a show Sunday at Humboldt Brewery with Oakland hip hop duo Zion I with DJ/producer AmpLive mixing live instrumentation with samples and conscious MC Zumbi.

It’s a busy weekend for HumBrews with BrownChicken BrownCow StringBand, an old time band from West Virginia (via Hawaii) on Thursday, The Nucleus (see below) on Friday, and more stringiness Sunday with the “high octane hootenanny” sound of Poor Man’s Whiskey from San Fran plus local alt-grass by The Bucky Walters.

As noted last week, the college students have returned, which, says Darin of Moo-Got-2, means time for the “annual back-to-school funktacular” with the MG2 electro-funksters taking over Jambalaya Saturday night. “It will be Moo-Got-2 with special guests Matty D and Friends, which is actually the original Nucleus lineup (check with PC b4 printing that),” says Darin.

PC, aka Nuke drummer Pete Ciotti, confirmed that saxophonist Matt Dickson will be up from L.A. for the big Friday night show at Humboldt Brews: The Nucleus 10th Anniversary Reunion combined with a CD release party for their Quicksand disc. “We’re going to bring in everyone who’s been part of the band over the years — Matty, Swiz, Brian Osper, Lenny [Pettinelli] — everyone,” said Pete, taking a break from prepping pizza’s at Big Pete’s (his place in Northtown) where the daily Arcata High rush was pending.

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