Avant-garde bluegrass? Contemporary roots music? Chamber folk? What exactly does the EZRA collective play? As you’ve probably guessed, the answer is a bit of everything. There are four of them: Jesse Jones (guitars and vocals), Jacob Jollif (mandolin), Max Allard (banjo) and Craig Butterfield (bass). These guys from Oberlin, Ohio, love to have fun with musical codes and genres. But, really having fun! Jones has all sorts of invented instruments at his disposal. You can hear them on this album: a xaphoon, a chaladoo, a daxophone, a mandocello and others, played by one of the two guest artists on the recording, Mark Stewart from Bang on a Can. Xak Bjerken, who plays both normal and toy pianos, is the other member of this totally pumped-up trad band, but above all, he plays an instrument that has long remained an idea and a myth: Robert Moog’s Rothenberg microtonal organ synthesiser!
Let me tell you about it: In the 1960s, mathematician and music theorist David Rothenberg conceptualised an electronic musical instrument made up of 478 keys capable of playing octaves divided into 31 equal parts, as many microtones. The instrument was to be manufactured by Robert Moog, which was done in part, but never in such a way as to be functional. In 2022, Rothenberg’s widow donated the instrument to Cornell University’s Center for Historical Keyboards. There, electronic instrument specialist Travis Johns decided to create it for real, starting from the original’s carcass and using today’s technology to make the venture feasible. In October 2023, for the first time in history, this instrument came to life in a concert.
That’s all it took to ignite the flame of inspiration in Jesse Jones, who immediately saw the potential for incorporating this sonic weirdo-beast into an album project. The result is Earth to EZRA, an often disconcerting sonic proposition, but just as danceable and coloured by simple, authentic folk. The 50-minute album will take you from the dirt roads of the Midwest to the artist studios of a New York loft, and back again…. Admittedly, episodes of free and random improvisation testify to the avant-garde side of the band, but it remains surprisingly smiling. Experimental artists be warned: it’s possible to explode forms without making people gnash their teeth! That said, for all the emphasis placed in press comms prior to the album’s release on the famous resurrected Moog-Rothenberg, its presence in the sound fabric remains essentially discreet. I would have liked a lot more.
I didn’t know much about this group, but the impressive musical and technical quality of all the performers here has put them on my radar.
What would happen if you put a one-of-a-kind microtonal Moog synthesiser and a mad instrument inventor in the middle of a progressive bluegrass band? Here’s the answer, and it’s really fun.
Jesse Jones, guitars/vocals
Jacob Jolliff, mandolin
Max Allard, banjo
Craig Butterfield, bass
Guests :
Mark Stewart, xaphoon/chaladoo/daxophone/guitar/mandocello/percussion/vocals
Xak Bjerken, pianos/Rothenberg Moog organ
