For their latest, 2014’s III —“the first real record,” Tavares says—producer Frank Dukes was enlisted to help craft an odyssey of all-original material that presents BBNG as more than just a cover band, and definitely more than just jazz. The album is the expression of a personal and honestly crafted language the group has developed in just four years,and one that will only grow richer in vocabulary. If cover songs are what built their following, the original compositions on III make them not a novelty but a force. At twenty-two and twenty-three, they’re already influencing younger musicians. And they’re only going to get better. “You could tell their level of musicianship was something special,” says Innovative Leisure (IL) cofounder Jamie Strong of first hearing the BBNG demos. The group signed to IL in 2013 after Strong and label partner Nate Nelson
flew to Toronto and saw just their second live performance, but one “which had all of these young kids—eighteen to twenty- one—moshing to essentially jazz music.” There are times to mosh to BBNG, but there are also times where the group will ask itself, “What if we played this quietly?” just for the exercise.They’ve been praised by RZA for their contributions to The Man with the Iron Fists soundtrack, performed behind Frank Ocean at Coachella, and played in front of an audience of one for Bootsy Collins, but they’re not swayed by anything but music. As the YouTube commenter said of their work, “This is brilliant.” BBNG is brilliant, and constantly striving for some combination of perfection and imperfect excellence. If they were a basketball team, they’d be the one that always made the extra pass. “Some of our songs, we honestly have,
like, fifty iPhone versions of the basic structure of the song and fifty different ways of jamming on it,” Tavares says. “Because you never know if this one little change will make something way cooler.” Sowinski says that what BBNG is doing right now is cool, but based on the amount they’ve learned in the past two years, they have no idea what the future holds. When asked what they’d still like to accomplish, Hansen says, “Everything.” They don’t consider themselves a jazz band, but they have a jazz ethic and understand that it takes a lifetime to develop a craft. It’s not about solos but working as a unit and functioning as one band moving forward. Keep the ideas fresh and make sure the sound in twenty years is nothing like the sound today. Either that or be awesome all the time. “Mingus never really changed,” Tavares says.“He was just always amazing.” .
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