This is the story of
Shovin' Sunshine. Three musicians, Wade Summerlin, Jeremy
Slotin, and Billy Shaw got together to experiment with new forms
of jazz and the Avant Garde. Wade and Jeremy had been loosely
playing together in thrash and death metal groups; Billy was
coming back East after releasing his debut avant garde album
called "Sassy". They got together in Jeremy's basement
and started the experiment that became known as "Shovin'
Sunshine", the very first and perhaps only Death Jazz
group ever. They wanted to use the term acid jazz, but
that same year a number of more currently influential players
were using the label, and between their sound and the
identification of this term to their music, Shovin' Sunshine
wasn't convinced that it accurately described what Shovin'
Sunshine was all about. So with little hesitation and even less
dissent, the group chose to define and pursue the theory and
tradition of Death Jazz.
The technical approach to
the production of music was not particularly groundbreaking; the
group was after clear, undistorted representation of fairly
conventional instrumentation: Jeremy on drums, Wade on electric
fretted four-string bass, and Billy on tenor sax. The approach
to the creation of the music was what set this trio apart; Billy
usually charted out melodies and arrangements in advance, he
seldom ever shared the direction with the rest of the band.
Fortunately, everyone seemed to think the same thoughts at
pretty much the same time, and reasonably tight arrangements
emerged from basically extemporaneous improvisations, all of
which was taped. In fact, every time the band ever played the
music was committed to tape.
Regrettably (and we really
do mean this in the most profound sense of the word), the band
didn't stay together longer than a summer. During that time
though, a number of live gigs were performed (including their
now famous performance at the 1993 Nashville Pot Festival), and
many hours of tape were accumulated. The group dispersed to
their respective interests, most notably Wade, who formed the
seminal neo-psychedelic group Cobweb
Strange and has been on tour for the last few
years with several different bands. Jeremy went to music school
briefly then hit the road touring the USA with the trippy Moonwater
band for several years before touring the USA and Europe the
Glam / Shock-Rock band The Impotent Sea Snakes.
Billy moved to Florida (where as it were, he ended up in music
school as well) where he continued to pursue his form of avant
(and later chucked it all to return to Bluegrass and what became
Contemporary Mountain
and Prairie and a series of acoustic pseudo-country
music compositions that began to characterize his music publicly
as anything but avant garde jazz).
So twelve years go by, and
there wasn't much Shovin' of Sunshine. During those twelve
years, Shovin' Sunshine may have been gone, but they were not
forgotten! Band members were asked about their Shovin'
Sunshine experiences throughout the years. Genterine
Records' interest in the band led to Billy getting in touch with
Wade (who ironically had just begun jamming again with Jeremy
again) and the three decided that Shovin' Sunshine still
interested enough people to warrant a rerelease or two. Unknown
to anyone else, Billy had continued to evaluate, arrange, and
master the raw tapes, and continues to do so, including ongoing
digitization and web-based access. What this means to the
Shovin' Sunshine fan is that all of the originally released and
newly available material is going to be re-released on
high-quality CD and in digital format over the web. The quality
of the original tapes has always been considered superb.
Production and distribution in today's digital formats with
modern capabilities is going to kick total ass; we're all
pretty excited about this and we think that you will be too,
once you hear some of what we have to offer.
...what does the future
hold? The band will be re-releasing Shovin' Sunshine's
original studio recording Fire-A-Go-Go digitally
remastered on CD, to be available through the Atlanta-based Genterine
Records. Then the band will release the
first new Shovin' Sunshine recording in over a decade,
recorded live at the Liquid Bean in 1993. Next,
the original recording Death Jazz, originally released as
a short-play EP, will be remixed, remastered, and redistributed
as a full-length CD with additional material taken from the same
studio sessions, and maybe a live track or two.
Why go to all this trouble
for a band that hasn't even been together in like, twelve
years?! Simply put, the answer is in the music itself. If you've
never heard a Shovin' Sunshine song or seen them in performance,
you'd be hard-pressed to call this group "old",
"dated", "nostalgic", or anything else that
came out of the '90's. This music sounds as totally daring,
contemporary, and iconoclastic as anything being recorded today
or anything that's going to be recorded in the next few years.
That's how the music was characterized then, and that's how it's
going to be characterized twelve years from now. That's how
strongly we believe in Shovin' Sunshine. |
