Twenty6 Productions & DSP Shows Presents: Lucky Moon Zooz at Asbury Hall | JUN 10

Twenty6 Productions & DSP Presents: Lucky Moon Zooz ft. Too Many Zooz, Lucky Chops & Moon Hooch at Asbury Hall – Buffalo, NY on Saturday, June 10th, 2023

Asbury Hall
341 Delaware Ave
Buffalo, NY 14202

Tickets: $27 ADV/$30 DOS
Doors: 7:00pm
Show: 8:00pm
Ages: 18+

Ticket Link: https://tixr.com/e/64278

ABOUT TOO MANY ZOOZ:
The curious thing about being a fan of brasshouse? You’re pretty much talking about being into one solitary but extremely unforgettable band: the amusingly monikered Too Many Zooz.

The musical style was “branded” by drummer King of Sludge, who recognized that there was no worthy existing classification for the New York trio, whose other two members are the equally unclassifiable Leo P (saxophone) and Matt Doe (trumpet).

“Brasshouse is a high energy musical conversation,” Matt insists. “Though I honestly don’t think there is a good way to describe it in words. It’s about many different feelings and sounds and emotions.”

Or as KOS so decisively puts it, “I don’t really care about what’s happening in music — I just make art that I enjoy making.”

It’s exactly this indifference to convention and trend that has garnered Too Many Zooz a fanbase that KOS describes as “wide-ranging and fanatical.” One of those fans? In 2016, Beyonce asked them to perform with her at the Billboard Music Awards…and it’s quite possible they got just as much attention as did she.

After two years, a gazillion live performances and four EPs, their debut album Subway Gawdz (an unsubtle reference to their birth in the underground stations of NYC), was released to enthusiastic acclaim in 2016. Its sound was truly like nothing else, with inescapable grooves that take in dub, soul, funk and ska, utterly exhilarating horn blasts that shoot right up your spine, and, of course, equal doses of fun and attitude.

And right now, TMZ are riding higher than ever, surely poised for the leap into genuinely widespread international recognition that was likley inevitable since they first set foot in an NYC subway station. Indeed, following a deal with Ministry of Sound, their single “Warriors” racked up major play on Radio One (if you think you haven’t heard it, when you hear it, you’ll quickly realize you already have), followed by high-profile remixes from the likes of Armand Van Helden and KDA.

Then, UK sensation Jess Glynne penned lyrics and added vocals to morph the song into “So Real (Warriors),” which has been generating massive buzz while climbing the European charts. In the meanwhile, a live video for “Car Alarm” has furtively racked up more than 500K views in one week.

But surely signaling their mainstream “arrival”? A Canadian KFC commercial featured the band and their songs — so don’t be surprised if listening to their music suddenly makes you hungry.

Though they’ve also been up to more serious matters. Leo, in fact, was asked to play at the BBC Proms Charles Mingus tribute at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall in August 2017 — certainly no small honor.

ABOUT LUCKY CHOPS:
Lucky Chops comes at you with every hue on the rainbow.

Lucky Chops is big, brassy, and unapologetically bold. The six piece band has united audiences in more than 30 countries in thousands of shows, hard driving grooves and potent singable melodies. The irresistible groove that is Lucky Chops is led by co-founder Josh Holcomb’s soulful trombone, Daro Behroozi’s soaring sax and Joshua Gawel’s powerful trumpet.

Born in the streets of New York City’s multicultural melting pot the band pays homage to America’s New Orleans brass band tradition while fusing their sound with eclectic rock, Caribbean, Arabic, Eastern European, funk, jazz, ska, gospel, and EDM.

“Our strength is having individual members who get to express themselves as part of a whole that is more than the sum of its parts,” says Behroozi, a Brooklyn native whose polyglot Iranian/Dutch/French/German background has led to his interest in everything from Middle Eastern sounds to the tradition of the Balkan brass bands.

Starting in the underground halls of New York City’s subway stations, Lucky Chops first learned to entertain by busking for crowds from all over the world. Their talent did not go unnoticed, as a video of their mash-up of Lipps, Inc.’s “Funkytown” and James Brown’s “I Feel Good,” which has amassed hundreds of millions of views across social media and led to an online subscriber base almost two million strong.

The band returns to the road for the first time since the end of 2019, and on the heels of the release of their second full-length album, New Day, released in September of 2022. They just returned from a month long, 22 city tour of Europe and will soon be heading back out for a tour of the US in early 2023.

ABOUT MOON HOOCH:
Moon Hooch started in the NYC subway platforms in 2010. They are currently touring the world.

“I‘m realizing more and more every day that you can make anything happen for yourself if you really want to,” says Moon Hooch horn player Mike Wilbur. “You can change your existence by just going out and doing it, by taking simple actions every day.”

If any band is a poster child for turning the power of positive thoughts and intentions into reality, it’s the explosive horn-and-percussion trio Moon Hooch. In just a few short years, the group— Wilbur and fellow horn player Wenzl McGowen and Ethan Snyder—have gone from playing on New York City subway platforms to touring with the likes of Beats Antique, They Might Be Giants, and Lotus, as well as selling out their own headline shows in major venues around the country.

Though the band—whose members initially met as students at the New School—turned heads in the music industry as relative unknowns with a charismatic, unconventional sound (they play with unique tonguing techniques and utilize found objects like traffic cones attached to the bells of their horns to manipulate tone, for instance), they were already a familiar and beloved sight to strangers in New York, who would react with such joy and fervor to their impromptu subway platform sets that the NYPD had to ban them from locations that couldn’t handle the crowds. NY Mag once referred to their sound as “Jay Gatsby on ecstasy,” while the NY Post fell for their “catchy melodic hooks and funky rhythms,” saying they had “the power to make you secretly wish that the short [subway] wait becomes an indefinite delay.”

While the band’s busking days are behind them now, the lessons they learned from all those platform parties helped guide their approach to recording ‘Life on Other Planets.’ “What we discovered playing in the subway,” McGowen explains, “is that the more focus and the more energy you put into the music, and the more you listen to everything around you and integrate everything around you into your expression, the more the music becomes this captivating force for people.”

The band followed up ‘Red Sky’ by releasing the ‘Light It Up’ EP in 2018. Recorded in bucolic Williston, Vermont and co-produced by Tonio Sagan (grandson of famed astronomer Carl Sagan), this collection of three songs was a foray into a more electronic and studio-produced sound. Full of horn textures, big drops, and throbbing bass lines, these tracks extend the possibilities of their subway instrumentation. Between ‘Red Sky’ and the ‘Light It Up’ EP, the band uses an evolving arsenal of electroacoustic techniques to utterly demolish any and every possible barrier that could stand between your booty and the dance floor.

“When we were playing in the subways, we were playing entirely acoustic,” explains Wilbur. “It was just two saxes and a drum set. Then Wenzl acquired a baritone sax and we all started getting into music production and incorporating electronic music into our live shows.” At their performances, the band now plays through what they call a Reverse DJ setup, in which the live sound from their horns runs through Ableton software on their laptops to process recorded effects onto the output. In addition, to flesh out their sound on the road, the band began utilizing Moog synthesizers, an EWI (an electronic wind instrument that responds to breath in addition to touch), and other exotic woodwinds like the contrabass clarinet and bass saxophone. Wilbur has even added vocals to his repertoire on some tracks (something the subway never allowed him to do).

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