Summer Music: Greyboy Allstars Release New Album

Speaker 1: 00:55 [inaudible] Speaker 2: 00:58 That was the gray boy. All-stars with Comodo. All-stars the title track from their new album, the gray boy, all stars are Carl Denson on sax and flute and vocals too. I believe Robert Walter on keys, Elgin park guitar, crystal will base an Aaron Redfield on drums and with us now we have Carl Robert and Elgin. Thank you so much for joining us on midday edition. Speaker 1: 01:23 All thanks for having us. Alright. Speaker 2: 01:25 Hi there. So now the song we just heard coma Dale stars is great, but unlike a lot of your songs that has vocals, tell us what the song's about. Speaker 1: 01:35 This is Elgin and I'm. Yeah. I wrote the lyrics and Carl sang it beautifully and we sang it sort of as a group vocal, you know, we just wanted to make something that, that had sort of like a positive message. I think, um, I think the overall feeling for the record was trying to create something positive that people could kind of have a good time too, but also it was our responsibility to contribute something that had some politically minded content appropriate for our times that we're living in and not just kind of sit on the sidelines and just watch the thing go down in flames. So, uh, just trying to, you know, let people know they have power to change their lives and get together and make a positive change. [inaudible] I think it really speaks to the, uh, the idea of everybody getting out there and boating for one thing, we released it. Then I heard it the first time I thought this is a great get out and vote single. So that made me happy. Speaker 2: 02:41 So let's go back to your roots a little bit. What, what has influenced the gray boy or star sound? Speaker 1: 02:48 This is Carl. I met DJ gray boy back in 1992. He came to a show that I was doing in orange County, California. And, um, through a friend of mine, I met him through a friend and he was doing his DJ thing and he wanted some live instruments. I think the coolest thing about it was when we met, we started talking about music and the word Boogaloo came out of both of our mouths almost simultaneously. So that kind of sealed the deal for he and I. And then, you know, a year later after we had done, we had done a couple of recordings together. I walked into a garage and Robert and Mike were there. Where were you guys at that point? Um, musically in terms of the whole soldier has Google thing. Speaker 3: 03:38 I was, I was just getting turned on to it. So I, I loved like the meters and James Brown and, and I had a Ramsey Lewis record and a Herbie Hancock record, but I didn't have those like prestige and blue Lou Donaldson and rusty Bryant, you know, Boogaloo, Joe Jones, all that stuff kind of came from Gray's DJ grade boys, like mixed tape he made for us. Right. And I was like, Oh my God, what is this music? And where's this been all my life? Cause it did, it had all the things I liked about funk music, the tones and the, and the, it was felt physical, but it also had all this great improvisation. And I just thought that was such a cool combination. And then after that, I got obsessed with it and I would try and find all the original records that he was given us and find out who played on those and kind of follow it down the rabbit hole of that whole style. Speaker 1: 04:24 Yeah. I think this is Elgin late eighties and early nineties. I was living in San Francisco and sort of one of the first places that this sort of resurgence of soul jazz, rare groove stuff was happening in San Francisco with a record store called groove merchant up there in the lower Haight. And they used to have these, they used to have these DJ nights up there. Um, I think maybe even before it was going on in San Diego, which was at Nikki's barbecue pit, so I'd go there and it would be a great mix of diverse mix of people from the lower Haight, like projects in the lower Haight, all the way up through like, you know, hippies and, you know, just like a really cool, interesting group of people. And it was the meters and all these, you know, sort of instrumental tracks that were super funky, kind of like, I was always like, well, cause I'd always heard of James Brown, but now it was sort of the meters and that kind of thing. Speaker 1: 05:16 And then when I met grey, like through a friend of ours, um, down in San Diego and he turned me on to like, you know, grant green Boogaloo, Joe Jones, um, you know, more of, you know, maybe some less Montgomery, although these other guys were like blue, basically like blues guitar players, sort of playing a kind of a common mix of like almost like country music and folk music, you know, and blues. And so that for me was a great entry point cause I wasn't really a jazz guitar player and I still don't really consider myself a jazz guitar player. So it was sort of a great entry into playing great dance music, you know, which I'd never done before. Yeah. So you sort of started in the classic of, in the garage starting point. How do you, how do you describe your sound? I like the term West coast Boogaloo, which is the name of our first record. Speaker 1: 06:06 And I really think that, you know, that identifies us to me like what we really are because we're like this weird, we always go out and tour, um, at the beginning of the band and you know, the whole acid jazz thing was happening, but we were really the only ones doing what we did. And it was this, this like, um, purity of sticking to the, to this kind of, um, jazzy or format where we didn't get, we didn't really get lost into the, like trying to be a dance man or trying to be a funk band or trying to be something else. We were always kinda like, let's be a jazz band that people dance to. And I really feel like that created the determined West coast Boogaloo and, uh, and that's pretty much what we still are. Yeah. I mean, I think throughout, throughout the early days of our band and I think all of us are slightly like have those sort of a punk rock spirit to like neither of, none of us wanted to belong to anything ever. Speaker 1: 07:10 And I still don't think we do, you know, it's like, we really weren't part of the acid jazz scene and we weren't when we're in we're in as much as Carl would like to think of us as a jazz band, we're not really a jazz band and we're not really a rock band and we're not really, I mean, we're a lot of, we're not really a lot of things, but the one thing we are is a Boogaloo band. So in, in a very, in a very simple sense of the word, you just listen to the records, grant green life wasn't, you know, you know, uh, Joe Jones, Melvin sparks, Rubin Wilson, you listened to these records. That's what we are. We're not, we're not really trying to be part of any contemporary moment in time. I'm not, anyway, we're just five guys playing this style of music period. That's how we've lasted. I know, I thought it was going to last like three days. That's why I changed my name. Like, well, at the end of the week, I'll just go back to my name 25 years later, here we are Elgin park. Yeah. But it is kind of black American music genre that you've taken and molded into your own creative form. How do you, how do you say that you sort of did that to, to, to develop into your, your own version of something that you will love Speaker 3: 08:31 To me? This is Robert. One of the things that happened is we attempt at least from where I'm at, I was starting as a really trying to be faithful to that and really learn that the music I heard those records and I was like, this is so cool. I want to kind of figure out how to do this. So at the beginning it was a, to me, it was like a tribute to these things and maybe trying to shine some light on this music that was less popular, but by the act of doing it for so long and in so many shows and playing on the road, I feel like we've internalized that. And now we can really speak that language in an authentic way. That's not imitative, you know, but it, it took some time and like over the years, we've all gotten better at it. I think, Speaker 1: 09:12 Talk to me about the San Diego music scene back in the early nineties and how the gray boy, all the stars got started. Speaker 3: 09:19 If I'm not mistaken, DJ gray boy already had, um, Wednesday nights going at a place called the green circle bar in downtown San Diego. But there wasn't really it scene for this particular kind of thing, except for gray had this night on Wednesdays. And we started playing. He would play before us. We play a set he'd play in between. We play a set and then he'd play after. And it just kinda snowballed from there. We started playing, taking little trips out to San Francisco and we went to Europe a couple of times and it kind of organically grew into a band. Speaker 1: 09:51 Yeah. And at one point in San Diego, we literally could work seven nights a week playing this music. It was, it was amazing period that we actually just played around town in San Diego all the time. It was amazing. That was so dream from the gray bar, L 1994 album West coast Boogaloo. So now it's been seven years since your last album, where did the idea of this new album come from and what made you get the band back together? Again, we never stopped playing together and that's the beauty of this whole process. Speaker 3: 10:49 We were in Houston and we had a gig that was supposed to be out outdoors and there was a rainstorm. So the, the thing was canceled for rain. Um, and we had all been thinking it's time to write some new music. And luckily we were, you know, we had a night off all of a sudden, so we decided to rent a little studio and start writing music. And we wrote about half the album and that, that one night off, um, you know, we could have just sat around the hotel, but we were like might as well just play. And, um, and it came together really fast. And I think that's part of the charm of this album is that we did it so quickly and nothing's too over considered. And it just felt like we wanted some music that we could play live to freshen up the set lists. And that's kinda what we made. We just made some music that we wanted to play. Speaker 1: 11:39 Well, it's a good thing. We've got your new album, the gray boy, all stars and you album Comodo, all the stars, which is out now, Carl Vinson, Robert Walter, and Elgin park of the gray boy ELLs stars. Thanks so much for stopping by. Thanks for having us. Speaker 4: 11:54 Thank you. Thank you. Speaker 5: 13:28 [inaudible].