The Carlo Rossi Gang Are Plucky Teens Powered by Jazz Music

All Photos courtesy of the band's Facebook

This article originally appeared on Noisey Canada.

It’s late afternoon on a Sunday and I’m walking along the quiet unsuspecting street in Vancouver’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood where jazz sextet the Carlo Rossi Gang are rehearsing before tonight’s show. I have the bitchy automated voice from the Google Maps app barking directions in my ear, but as soon as I get within a block radius of the rust coloured residence my ears grant me a new compass. The sound of jazz is rattling the windows and drifting down the street. The house they’re practicing in now, and will be performing in later, is chalked to the brim with gangly boys holding brass instruments. Empty jugs of Carlo Rossi wine line the windowsills, and it smells like weed and jambalaya. They all come together here, once every couple of weeks, to host an everyone welcome jazz-rager they call the Sunday Classic. They are adamant that their friends not only invite other young bloods, but also include their little siblings, parents, and grandparents to create a non-exclusive environment where the power of jazz can bring people together.

Members of the Rossi Gang range from late teens to early twenties, all of them live, eat, and breath jazz. It all began when Sky Lambourne (trombone) Joseph Abbott (clarinet) met a man named Pablo who showed them how to play swing guitar. “We started playing swing, gypsy swing, like Django Reinhardt style. That was one of my first doses of jazz. Pablo, his friend Mike, and us would be playing guitar, it all came together in this jazz band we were starting. But those two guys were older, they didn't want to mob as hard as we did all the time,” explains Lambourne. Abbott and Lambourne’s jazz project molded together with a trio that Noah Franche-Nolan (pianist), Aaron Levinson (drummer), and Noah Gotfrit (bassist) had going, their close friend and musical collaborator Zak Youssef taught himself trumpet to join the group.

The passion these six feel for jazz and jazz history has them practicing their scales, quoting influencers of the genre, and took them on a two-month busking road trip to New Orleans. During which they played jazz to fix their car, they played jazz at a stranger’s funeral, and they found refuge in the backyard cabin of a voodoo practising horn enthusiast named Ms.Pearl. They started playing on the street and were taken by the cosmic energy live jazz creates, how it can will even the most stoic passerby to dance, smile, or buy them beer. The Rossi Gang also maintains that having to cut their teeth on the street forced them to adapt a style that was good enough to get them paid. I witnessed the persuasive power of the music these boys make first hand later that evening when the show started. They played for over two hours, and by the end of the night the joint was jam packed with people from ages ten to sixty, everybody was showing their teeth. The show ended with a room of forty or so teenagers moshing and screaming along to a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In." It was bizarre and beautiful, like jazz itself.

Noisey: When did you first discover jazz music?
Aaron Levinson: We've been playing for three or four years. You discover new shit everyday.
Sky Lambourne: Jazz is huge.
Levinson: It's fuckin' ridiculous, and it's only like a hundred years old.
Joseph Abbott: There's so much, you don't even know where to start. I could listen to a trap song, I mean I love to do that. I could listen to a trap song and I would have a pretty good history of trap. I would have a trap compass. But you don't even know where to start with jazz.
Lambourne: One of our first discoveries was when we were busking and first learning and not knowing exactly what we were doing. I guess there was a good enough energy that people wanted to give us money. We would go down to Granville Street late at night and play jazz.
Levinson: We were young and shitty, but it was jazz.
Lambourne: We would make maybe eighty bucks between the three of us…
Levinson: … spend it on pizza and wine and records and shit
Lambourne: That has always been a big part of the Rossi Gang, playing on the street. It's cool 'cause we drove down to New Orleans with the busking.

Tell me about New Orleans, what made you decide to go there? What did you do?
Zak Youssef: One day we were just hanging out, right here in this living room probably, and we were like let's just go to New Orleans, let's do it.
Levinson: We took a couple months to drive down. Our car broke in LA so we had to busk for like a week and store all our shit. We saved up a thousand dollars from busking and bought a new van to get to New Orleans.
Lambourne: The day we got there we didn't know where we were going to stay, so we talked to this musician we met on the street. We said "Man we're looking for a place to sleep, you know anywhere?" and he said "Yeah, there's this crazy old lady in the Bywater named Ms.Pearl, she'll put you up for really cheap.” So we drove over there, and she was nuts.
Lambourne: It was weird. There were some other people staying there that were freaky, and she was yelling at her neighbours all the time and doing voodoo curses on them.
Youssef: One time she was angry at the neighbour because they were telling us to be quiet playing music in the yard, and she's a big supporter of music all the time everywhere. So she cast a spell on the neighbour. She had a big bowl of powder and was throwing it around and casting a spell.
Lambourne: When we were there we helped her unload a life-sized alligator model that she was going to use for getting money as a voodoo woman street performer.
Noah Gotfrit: In New Orleans there are buskers that play music on the street, but there's also a whole bunch of other kinds of buskers— they call them crate monkeys. They do all kinds of crazy shit on the street for money. There's one guy who dresses up in an Uncle Sam suit and he stands still with a little toy dog on a leash for hours. There's another guy who's like bumblebee from Transformers in this little car suit, and you think it's a remote controlled car, but then he gets up and it's a guy.
Lambourne: There's this other guy named Magic Mike who's a busker pimp. He rents out these busker costumes and collects money from the performers, 50% of the profits.
Youssef: Ms.Pearl hates Magic Mike. Continued below… Gotfrit: Another cool thing Ms.Pearl does is for the people in the neighbourhood or in the bunkhouse who pass away. New Orleans has this great tradition of jazz funerals. There are these societies, called Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs, a lot of people, traditionally, not so much anymore, were part of these societies.
Abbott: It originated as an insurance thing.
Gotfrit: Yeah, yeah so people would pay the monthly member rate and then if something bad happened the club would help you out. One of the things they would do was pay for your funeral and hire a brass band. The brass band would march your coffin from the church to the graveyard and on the way there play these slow dirges. At one point the band stops playing for a second, then the drummer comes in and starts building, then the band comes in, and starts building and they start going crazy. Then the mourning period is over and everyone dances and it's the most beautiful thing. Ms.Pearl puts on these funerals for people who aren't part of a club or can't afford it. She said before we got there she had this vision of a brass band coming just to play this funeral because she couldn't find anyone to play. She had manifested us because there was this crazy guy named Jake, staying at the bunkhouse; Shake Jake the crazy poet. His friend had just died, and he was fucked up about it. Ms.Pearl wanted to have a funeral for his friend to help Jake get through this trouble. We didn't really know the songs. It was freestyle. We all learned how to play these songs and this style within two weeks.
Levinson: We weren't very tight.
Lambourne: But it was a start, though! We made her happy and we made Jake happy. Now Ms.Pearl wants us to play her funeral.
Abbott: Not only that but she also said she would haunt all of us until we did. Why do you think jazz got lost on this generation?
Lambourne: I don't think it has been lost, obviously people are more into pop but that's always been the case—jazz has always been a counterculture. One of the big themes of our shows is bring your Mom, bring your Grandma, bring your Grandad, bring your little brothers and sisters, bring your babies, bring everybody. Don't make this some teenage thing, don't make this some grownup thing. If you want to hear the music please come out, we made that really clear. [Jazz musician] Wynton Marsalis talks about how he thinks one of the biggest problems, and not just in jazz, but in the world, is the generation gap and that disaffiliation between generations. And that makes sense, if you're not connecting with people who are older than you or younger than you.
Levinson: He said the generation gap was created when the idea that, being young meant something, was sold to young people. You know, the idea that your parents are somehow bad, and this romantic image of being young, that's what created the generation gap.
Youssef: The point is humans have been around for millions of years, so we're all one generation really.
Noah Franche: Little did you know Tricky Z has been studying philosophy at Capilano College for the past year.
Abbott: When you're listening to jazz, you need to listen. You're not going to get anywhere if you aren’t listening, it's not like radio music where you put it on and even if you're actively avoiding it, it gets stuck in your head. It's improvised music, so there's a lot more melodies and rhythms happening. You need to pay attention. I think popular music is getting a lot more primal. Like, electronic dance music is primal, it's all going more and more in that direction of being 100% about feeling it.
Lambourne: The feeling is forget your worries, woohoo, it's 2010 again, we're going up, fuck it, yolo, the party never ends. Jazz has a lot more feelings than that. If there's any reason why younger people aren't as into jazz it’s because people live in a way where they want to forget everything all the time, they literally want to blow their mind out with pop music so they don't remember how bored they are. Jazz takes patience, focus, and energy. It's got a lot of different moods that people don't want to deal with.
Levinson: Also, how much money do people spend marketing, say trap music, to our generation versus how much money is spent market jazz to our generation. There's none of that in jazz music, it's all word of mouth about people who can blow your mind with their talent and that is still barely getting through to anybody.
Abbott: Jazz is a human thing, it's made spontaneously. There aren't any computers involved in jazz, there aren't any marketing motherfuckers in jazz. Jazz is a very human art form.

Maya-Roisin Slater is writer and reporter based in Vancouver. Follow her on Twitter