One night of the band's two-week "Controlled By Radar" tour found Scott McGill, Michael Manring, and Vic Stevens booked into a jazz club in Boston. The fusion trio quickly adapted, adding some choice jazz standards to their set list but with a twist. They performed these classsics their way - a mixture of straight up jazz, fusion and skronk. The crowd was blown away by the originality and the band's audacity. As the band continued their tour the list of standards in their set grew and the response was always overwhelming. It was decided that the band's third album would be a collection of contemporary jazz standards done the MMS way. These are three virtuoso musicians that had individually and collectively already made their mark in the world of fusion. Why not go back to their roots ?
If the band was going to cause a fissure in the fabric of the jazz community why not go all the way. Noted guitarist and texturalist producer David Torn (Jeff Beck, Kaki King) was asked to mix the album. The man behind the Splattercell project was given free reign to take the unmixed session tapes and "do his thing" and that is exactly what he did. The results defy all the standards of what a jazz album should sound like. It's a mutated soundscape that will make the trio villains to some and hopefully heroes to many.
John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, and Sonny Rollins, among others, composed timeless classics that have been ingrained into the souls of jazz listeners for a generation. "What We Do" takes these compositions, breaks them down and reconstructs them both musically and sonically. It offers a unique and controversial interpretation of these tunes that is pure MMS. What We Do is a punk jazz manifesto for a new generation of jazz fans around the world.
The first pressing of What We Do features a bonus live CD recorded at the band?s first gig together. Recorded at Orion Studios in Baltimore, MD on 4/7/01, it features an electrifying performance of the band's group and solo material. |
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