When two horn players and a drummer walked onstage Saturday night at the Southern Café and Music Hall, it was a surprise to hear them start playing house music, dubstep and even rap. It was more surprising to see one musician place a traffic cone in the bell of his saxophone. These sights and sounds are par for the course at a performance by Brooklyn-based “Cave Music” trio Moon Hooch.
Moon Hooch consists of two horn players, Mike Wilbur and Wenzl McGowan, and a percussionist, James Muschler. The band, who formed at the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York City, frequently performed in Subway stations.
Moon Hooch’s style might as well be a genre of all its own, where acoustic, DIY ethic meets dance music paired with the inventive, improvisational spirit of jazz. Throughout their performance, Moon Hooch took almost non-existent pauses between songs, hammering out high-energy dance tunes to keep the glow-stick-clad crowd moving nonstop.
“No. 9,” one of the band’s most recognizable songs from their debut album, featured a saxophone with a traffic cone protruding from its bell to create a new and unusual tone, nearly driving the crowd into a frenzy of awe, disbelief and excitement.
Another surprise came on “Contra Dubstep,” in which a contrabass clarinet was played in a way mimicking the rumbling bass-tone “wubs” characteristic of dubstep music.
Many of the songs performed by Moon Hooch throughout the night featured the use of a drum machine to add depth to the group’s sound, as well as distortion and effects to both the musicians’ instruments and the occasional vocals.
Moon Hooch has found a method of innovative music-making to span the influence of both jazz and house music, discovering the rare space between the two genres. Their strategy worked wonders live — the reaction to a Moon Hooch performance was a palpable environment of fun, observable not only in the crowd, but onstage with the band as well.
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