The EBB and the Flow is probably the most innovative band Wesleyan has heard in a long time. If it seems impossible for jazz, rap, funk, hip-hop and Latin rhythms to combine into one sound, you just have to listen to the band’s CD, “90 Bucks, a Bag, and a Bagel Sandwich”—recorded live in one weekend at Harvard—to hear how well this can be done. Mike Berger ’08 (MC), Dave Eastman ’07 (Guitar), Micah Dubreuil ’07 (Keyboards), Luke Mecklenburg ’07 (Bass) and Christian Komecki ’08 (Drums) are five extraordinary artists whose music pulsates with energy and whose shows are too exciting to miss. To hear some of their tracks, check out their website at www.myspace.com/theebbandtheflow. They are currently looking for a second vocalist to bring in yet another element, R&B, to their band.
The band was kind enough to talk with me earlier this week at Dave’s apartment in Hi-Rise.
JB: How would you describe your sound?
Luke: Mostly funk. At our last show, a bunch of people were trying to decide what it was. It was a lot of fun. They were yelling, “Oh it’s jazz-funk-hop…jam!”
Micah: We’re all coming in from different backgrounds and styles. Mike does hip hop, I do funk, Christian does a lot of Latin, Luke does a lot of stuff, and Dave does a lot of jazz and fusion.
JB: How do you incorporate all of your styles into the songs?
Christian: I wish I could tell you. We don’t have a process yet.
Micah: Basically someone starts with an idea, either fully developed or somewhat developed and we work with it and play around with it. Usually we work in parts and try to build a whole song structure out of it. Sometimes they come together in a practice or two and sometimes they take much longer.
JB: Do you improvise parts of your songs?
Micah: There is improvisation, but most of our stuff is really orchestrated. Sometimes we combine the improvisation and the hip-hop stuff, but it’s generally more structured and more laid-out. We have parts that are more “jammy” but I don’t really like that word.
Dave: Hip hop keeps us grounded.
Luke: We would be a much more bizarre band without Mike.
Christian: Mike grounds us. He is there to say, “You guys might really be feeling this, but no one in the audience is going to be feeling this, so you have to bring this back.”
Mike: [At the same time] The freestyle element to a hip hop show is a
classic element. It’s very important.
JB: Are all the vocals rap?
Mike: I can write singing parts but I have no idea what I’m writing. That’s why we’re in the process of recruiting some vocalists, because I can’t sing at all.
Luke: I’m excited for these singers because it will add a totally different dynamic to the group. We’ll be able to do a lot more R&B stuff, which we’re all big fans of. But you can’t do that without soul voices.
Dave: It’s a side of the group that we’ve needed for a while.
JB: What has your experience been like playing at Wesleyan?
Micah: It’s a really good scene here. You have a lot of people who want to come out and dance and have a good time. It’s hard to find a good venue, but when you do, generally they’re a good size and there’s alcohol.
Luke: The school makes it very hard to find a good venue. We’re always having to do shows that are unpublicized. We can’t tell the school about them because there’s going to be people drinking, it’s going to be loud, and it’s going to be late at night. They wouldn’t approve it.
Christian: We usually try to get a keg out to our shows. Most Ebb and the Flow shows have had alcohol at them.
Micah: We don’t want to make the keg the sixth member of the band!
Luke: It’s not for us, though, it’s for the fans.
JB: Which venues are good?
Christian: We played Psi U a couple of times. They’re off-campus now, so technically they’re out of jurisdiction. It’s the police that’s busting us now instead of public safety.
Micah: They’ve also started charging us a two hundred fifty, five hundred
dollar rent.
Luke: There are places that will let us play for free.
Christian: The Bayit’s been very good to us. We’ve done Alpha Delt. Buddhist House has been nice.
Luke: Alpha Delt has been very nice with their stage lending. They don’t really like us to play there necessarily, which is fine, because we’re not their type of music. But they’ll always help us out.
Christian: Because we have a PA system and we know Alpha Delt will lend us their stages, if we want to play a show, we’ve been pretty successful in just saying, “Ok, let’s play it!”
Dave: At the same time, we’ve gotten really comfortable with our audience here, so we want to expand to club shows. We want to put ourselves in an atmosphere where we have to rely on ourselves musically without relying on a drunken audience.
JB: Which has been one of your best shows?
Micah: We had an EP-release party at Science House which went really well. It’s not a huge space so a lot of people packed were packed in, jumping up and down. I could touch people.
Luke: That’s the essence of an EBB show: communication between the audience and the band.
Christian: That show was the big celebration of our band. We got all our friends to come to that show. At Wesleyan there’s a rich [musical] community. We had a violinist, a didgeridoo player, a saxophonist…
Micah: [Often] we bring in a lot of different musicians we know from around campus to keep it interesting. We incorporate them into solo sections or we extend certain jams or we teach them melodies.
JB: What are your shows like?
Christian: We like the party atmosphere. We like to get a laid-back partyatmosphere.
Luke: The nice thing about playing a house is that people aren’t just coming in and out. People are there for the set, they’re there for the party, they’re there to be there for a while. We try to do a full show. It’s not just a list of songs. We think about the set list pretty heavily ahead of time and about what will create the best experience for the audience.
Christian: We focus on making [the show] an event. We had a dance competition at one show. You can color in our album when we release it.
JB: Do you ever play shows with other bands?
Micah: [It’s hard because] there’s not many hip-hop or funk bands on campus. There’s a lot of rock. Fan bases are really different. A lot of time our fans will be like “What the hell is this?” about the other band and then their fans will be like “What is this?” about us.
Christian: Before we solidified what we were doing, we had to learn to playsets with indie rock bands.
Mike: We had some classic shows with Chris White [“Isto”]. He takes out his guitar and just plays acoustic. He’ll open for us and we’ll go on ten minutes after him and he’ll have fifty-five, sixty, seventy people sitting on the floor with him.
Micah: Singing along.
Mike: They’re enthralled and they love him. If you don’t know about Chris White you really need to check him out. He’ll probably keep doing his thing after Wesleyan. I think he has a really good chance of making it in the industry.
JB: Do you have any funny stories from past shows?
Mike: We did an outdoors event first semester. We were two songs away from finishing and I said [to the audience], “Yo, stick around we got two more!” As soon as I said that I turn around and there’s a large policeman like five feet away from me. He was like, “You’re done now,” and I was like “We’re done now!” That was one of the few times I’ve had a cordial and respectable interaction with a policeman. They did not arrest anyone or hurt anyone physically or mentally. It was a good time.
Micah: Random P-Safe were hiding out in the shadows and they were like, “Is everything cool? Were the cops messing with you?” They were totally there to protect us.
Luke: At another show, some people from Middletown got thrown out and someone pulled the fire alarm. We were rocking out, and we didn’t understand the fire alarm had gone off because we were on stage and [the music] was so loud. We heard it, but it was like matching with what we were doing.
Dave: We thought the alarms were just cameras or something.
Luke: You get confused when you’re on stage.
Christian: The really cool part for us was that almost nobody left.
Micah: Yeah; it took them like twenty minutes to go in and turn off the alarm and about twenty-five people stuck around to see us finish. And it was cold outside!
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