INTERVIEW: Freekbass will bring a little this, a little that to NYC
Photo: Freekbass will bring songs from their new album to NYC’s Rockwood Music Hall. Photo courtesy of the artist / Provided by Press Junkie PR with permission.
Freekbass & The Bump Assembly, the funk masters who recently signed to the new Color Red imprint, are ready to make America funky again. They will bring songs off their new album, All the Way This. All the Way That., to the Rockwood Music Hall tonight, Sept. 13 at 10 p.m.
Audience members should expect some of the new tunes — a little This, a little That — and some of the classic songs from the band’s previous six albums.
“We’re out touring for our new album on Color Red, which is the label we signed with recently, and so we’re going to be doing a lot of songs off the new album,” Freekbass said in a recent phone interview. “We’re kind of excited because Sammi Garett, who is the female singer in our band, it’s her hometown, so it’s kind of like her hometown show, too. I’m from Cincinnati, Ohio, but she’s from Brooklyn and the New York area. Her parents live in Manhattan, and it’s actually her birthday today as well, which is pretty ironic. So it’s going to be a hometown show in a way, and it should be really, really good. We’re really excited. We’re going to be in New York all week doing a bunch of recording and stuff, so this is going to be the capper to the rest of the week.”
Freekbass & The Bump Assembly’s new connection to Color Red has inspired the band and their artistic output. They hooked up with co-producers Itaal Shur and Eddie Roberts (Color Red founder) at their Colorado recording studio. They spent a week at high altitudes and banged out an impressive label debut.
“It’s been great,” Freekbass said. “That’s the one really cool thing about the Color Red album is that the way we recorded this is we recorded everything live, and what I mean is [literally] everything you’re hearing. There were no over-dubs done. If someone made a mistake in the last 10 seconds of the song, we went back as a whole group and re-recorded everything, straight from scratch. And it went straight to tape, like literal analog tape. We went straight to real tape, and because of that, re-creating these songs has been really great because it’s not like we’re having to do interpretations. A lot of times when you record an album nowadays, you’re trying to do an interpretation of what you think it would sound like or the closest you can get to sound like it is on the album. These are really nice because literally what we did in the studio, we’re just re-creating verbatim live. And because of that, it’s translating really well live, which is really nice. That’s why we’re pretty excited to keep continuing to play these songs in the live medium.”
Freekbass, who is known for energetic live performances and wonderfully elaborate costumes (think feathers, scarves and sunglasses), came to Color Red because of a few singles the band released independently. The tunes started to get some buzz, and the label showed interest in signing them.
“So when Color Red got in touch with us, we went out there and recorded,” he said. “Not only did we record, but we actually wrote the majority of the material at the studio. So we went out to Denver, Colorado, for a week, which is where Color Red studio is, and … the songs we did out of Color Red were produced by Eddie Roberts, who fronts the band the New Mastersounds. He’s also one of the partners at the label, so we would get up 9, 10 in the morning out there, start writing until about noon. Around noon until about 3 or 4, once we figured out what we wrote, we started rehearsing the songs, and by 4, 5, 6 o’clock that night, we’d start doing real takes of the songs. It’s a very creative process out there in Colorado. There’s a big home with the studio in it, so you’re sleeping there, living there, writing there, everything.”
Freekbass, who obviously plays bass for the band, grew up in Cincinnati, a city that is heavily geared toward the funk sound. James Brown, for example, set up the label King Records in the city back in the 1960s, and many of his hits were recorded there in the Midwest.
“Ohio has always had this really strong funk element,” Freekbass said. “When I was a kid, it was right when Nirvana and Green Day and all that kind of stuff was starting to break, but I was more into stuff like Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. And all those songs were obviously samples of funk stuff, and a lot of that was recorded right here in the Midwest. That’s kind of where my journey started, and that’s what got me into the kind of music I’m doing.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Freekbass will perform tonight, Sept. 13 at 10 p.m. at the Rockwood Music Hall in New York City. Their new album is called All the Way This. All the Way That. Click here for more information and tickets.
