Anya Kubilus
Band members, from left: Jason Kutz, Ben Ferris, Mark Hetzler and Mike Koszewski.
Mr. Chair, formed by trombone player Mark Hetzler in 2016, is not your average jazz band. In fact, some would say it’s not a jazz band at all.
Mr. Chair plays a long-form style of contemporary music that reaches far beyond the jazz idiom to embrace multiple influences. Along with fellow musicians Ben Ferris on acoustic and electric basses, Mike Koszewski on drums and percussion, and Jason Kutz on piano and keyboards, Hetzler’s trombone and accompanying electronics create vast aural landscapes that take listeners in previously uncharted musical directions.
That style is evident on Nebulebula, the band’s new CD containing two hours of largely instrumental acoustic and electronic music. The recording, which also will be released as a triple vinyl set, will be unveiled at a concert and release party Sept. 5 at the Majestic Theatre.
“What’s our style? We ask ourselves that question all the time,” says Hetzler, a professor of trombone at the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music. “We strongly consider ourselves a modern chamber music ensemble. We’re classically trained and rely on that structure, but we also weave in an amalgamation of styles.
“At times we sound like a rock band, or feel like a jazz quartet, while at other times we play in a classical chamber style,” adds Hetzler, who grew up in Sarasota, Florida, and started playing his father’s trombone at age 12. “But we’re always striving to play beyond the category.”
The music on Nebulebula has an almost orchestral quality, which speaks not only to the musicians’ training, but also their definite classical influence. The new album features “Gnossienne No. 1” by Impressionist composer Erik Satie with French narration by Marie Salles. But the set also contains Hetzler’s composition “Purity,” featuring hip-hop vocalist Dequadray James White and members of the Mount Zion Baptist Choir.
In fact, the band used multiple collaborators throughout the recording, produced at Madison’s Audio for the Arts, all of whom will participate in the Majestic performance.
Five days later, on Sept. 10, Mr. Chair will appear as guest artists at “The Art of Teaching,” a multimedia performance and panel discussion at Overture Center hosted by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. The session replicates some of the work Mr. Chair did as “house band” for the geoscience classes of UW professor Stephen Meyers. No doubt, parts of Nebulebula will shine through during the performance.
“We consider the album an encapsulation of the band’s first chapter,” Hetzler says. “The next chapter hasn’t been written yet and will likely be influenced by people we haven’t yet even met.”
And the name? Mr. Chair does not refer to a piece of furniture, but was inspired by a 2016 broadcast of a congressional hearing Kutz heard shortly after the band’s first gig. U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren used the title “Mr. Chair” so frequently in her testimony that the phrase took on a life of its own and was adopted as the group’s name.
