We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

SUGAR ~ SH​*​T ~ SILK ~ SWEAT

by FLACCO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE

supported by
Amp
Amp thumbnail
Amp equal parts hard bop, grunge rock, retro platformer and saturday morning cartoon
Lars Gotrich
Lars Gotrich thumbnail
Lars Gotrich A post-bop record for a post-everything world. Keenan Ruffin's got a guitar tone somewhere between middle-school metal fuzz pedal and spaghetti western expanse — think Bill Frisell and Alessandro Alessandroni, with a dash of Robin Guthrie's alien ambient textures. But he maps that guitar grit onto modern trad-jazz compositions for quintet. www.vikingschoice.org/archive/gritty-post-bop-myst-ambient-tropi-psych/ Favorite track: STABLEMATES ~ coltcomrades.
jazzloser
jazzloser thumbnail
jazzloser FLACCO reaches for the stars, snatches 'em outta the night sky, and extracts their essence into a potent musical tincture. Favorite track: j******** (BLOODLETTER).
/
  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $8 USD  or more

     

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
ERONEL 05:54
8.

about

"Keenan's debut record leaves an enormous grin on my face, which is attributed to the music being truly refreshing and genuine. I hear certain influences, but it's not obvious and that high level of originality is a beautiful thing. The record is full of gorgeous melodies and landscapes within pieces like Opening Credits, j******* (BLOODLETTER) and SOMETHING FOR LAILA, energetic and intense improvisations throughout, and exciting compositions that create a desire to hear more from Keenan after this debut. Gatekeepers: Pay Attention!"
- Noah Preminger

"Effortlessly connecting and connectioning. His music is where I hope music is going: the world will find his work"
- Alexandra du Bois, Ph.D. Department Chair of Composition and Theory at the Longy School of Music of Bard College

"A big and bold statement from an up and coming guitarist/composer that I have been following for some time now. Keenan Ruffin should be proud of this highly individual and very personal project. Congratulations!" - Gregg Belisle-Chi

"Wow, what is going on here? I'm not 100% sure, but I'm looking forward to hearing more" - Kevin Sun

“Keenan Ruffin’s music makes me feel like I’m wearing a dapper suit, but I’m hanging out in the Foot Clan’s awesome graffiti skatepark lair from the 1990 live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie. A young Sam Rockwell asks me if I’d prefer regular or menthol, to which I reply ‘normally, regular of course, but tonight my friend, enjoying this music…I will take a menthol.’ Also Charles Ives and Benny Golson are there, and they’re loving it.“ - Chris Klaxton

"Keenan and I share the same rhythm section, Zak King and Scott Kiefner. The best musicians in the world! Keenan has educated and prepared himself to become the guitarist he is today, someone very well-liked by the musicians that surround him. I continue to hear only wonderful things about him! Recently, I heard his music. I like his sound on the guitar! It invites you to listen more of it. It makes me listen far into the future and imagine how he will continue to evolve and shred! How he will continue to impact the guitar world! Take a listen and enjoy his playing as much as I do."
- Javier Rosario
First Michel Camilo Scholarship winner

******


From the first few seconds of OPENING CREDITS — strong downbeats driven by grit and dirt guitar, rising-to the-the-stratosphere melody of horns, and crashes and bombs dropping from drums and bass — it is clear we are on a hero’s epic journey. As overtures often do, the tone pivots hard, in this case, from the triumphant to the mysterious space of drones, echoes and floating melodies. Origin stories start from spaces of struggle or conflict of various kinds, perhaps nebulous at first, then taking shape. The album SUGAR ~ SHIT ~ SILK ~ SWEAT is in that richly individualistic tradition of the epic journey. Comparative Mythologist Joseph Campbell calls this the “personal myth.” It is a lens through which we perceive the world as we build it. Composer, bandleader and guitarist Keenan Ruffin has built a kaleidoscopic set of original works and arrangements for intrepid adventurers, including his four close bandmates, and open-eared listeners who prefer their improvisational stories unbound by limits of stylistic definition or sonic expectations.

“I never had a deliberate or fleshed-out storyline for the album, rather I let the musical universe unfold as I felt it needed to be expressed” explains Ruffin, “though I am aware of common tropes expressed in RPGs (role-playing video games) like that of the chosen hero that is joined by a well-rounded group of friends with varying skills that completes their unit. This coming together can clearly be heard in OPENING CREDITS, where the party coalesces together one-by-one in a dream-like environment.” Upon each careful listen, one can hear links (a texture, a melodic motive, a groove or progression) embedded in the architecture of the opening track that seems to connect the varied sound worlds and themes across the album into Ruffin’s larger personal myth journey. “Each piece is a unique world, setting in which our party finds themselves, and in an Ellingtonian fashion, our highlighted soloists often serve to best express the emotional space of each piece. Think of each individual hero having a unique ability that provides a special power needed to overcome a particular obstacle.” Ruffin adds, “I wanted to evoke a childlike adventure, one where on the way we learn of heartbreak/lust, longing, deep pain (BLUES), rage, but also of nostalgia, humor, ecstasy, and overwhelming joy. In a way, it's a coming-of-age story expressed through music.”

At the heart of this coming-of-age story is the role friendship plays in both the compositional process and the expectations of the music. “The main thing that drew me back to the New England area during the pandemic in 2020 was to be able to make music with my closest friends and collaborators. I couldn't lose them, so in a way, each individual part is a love letter to the talents and skills of each player.” Ruffin elaborates ebulliently;

Zak King is a phenomenal drummer who's equally comfortable swinging, or thrashing, with an approach to drums that expresses deep love for rhythm, embracing the beat of trap and hip-hop to give his language a fresh, current aesthetic. Jett Tachibana is a virtuosic saxophonist out of the tradition of bebop with a keen sensitivity to unabashed melody, serialism, as well as the saxophone as a sonic device. Max Richardson is a consummate professional on the trumpet, period. Lead playing, modern jazz, free, bop, classical, you name it, he can do it on the trumpet. Scott Kiefner is perhaps my longest-standing musical relationship as an improviser, going back to when I started playing jazz in high school. Always supportive and reliable, Scott's bass has always provided an unwavering platform for us to spring forth.

What should not be overlooked on this album is the fact that this is a project meant to feature young colleagues dedicated to making their mark as an ensemble. No hired guns, no big names or industry insiders here. It's all risk, heart and grit with a “we out here doing something” attitude that is refreshing and inspired. There is clear honest passion top to bottom from every note Ruffin wrote to every solo each musician plays that informs both how and why the music is played, adding gravitas to the theme of building a personal myth. “Most jazz players like to blow, but it's about the bigger picture, and these guys bought into this idea whole-heartedly, so when we're playing our hearts out, it really means something.”

As the album unfolds, layers of contrast, especially juxtaposition and duality, emerge again and again as a means to drive the stories, and engage the listener through varied emotional spaces and surprises. Joseph Campbell would approve of this method of personal myth creation; duality and conflict are central to his thesis on mythology in The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Exhibit A: BLOODLETTER. An epic piece that takes us back to that mysterious origin texture of drones and electronic soundscapes, then shifts to jazz ballad which transforms, pick scrapes and all, to a free improvisation abstracted space, to punk metal thrash, more drones and electronics, back to ballad. All along the way through these stylistic contrasts there are more subtle contrasts of pop-like triadic harmony set beside huge voicings with clusters and/or open strings, and steady grooves interrupted with odd beat bursts or mixed meter or syncopated shifts from horizontal (melodic hook type melodies) to intricate and fast vertical lines (arpeggiated runs, register leaps etc.) For Ruffin these conflicts are central to his album conceptions. “The title SUGAR ~ SHIT ~ SILK ~ SWEAT most obviously expresses duality, which I deal with a lot as a composer. Composed and improvised, dense and sparse, smooth and angular, dissonant and consonant, fast and slow, etc, but I also think the phonetic structure of the title is a reference to the very modular nature of the music itself.” Ruffin expands on this idea, “I composed most of this music in modules that I wanted to be in the same universe and devised bridges and sections that would make them work well together. How do I make sugar and shit work together? What about silk and sweat? Those kinds of questions are what made composing this music both so challenging and fulfilling.”

As the album progresses through the aggressive swagger of BLUES MANNERISM with its hints of metal drive, big band flare, and energized improvisations (both solo and collective) to the intricate counterpoint melodies draped in a Morriconne dream world of ness (INTERMEZZO) to the post-pop psychedelics, lush chord work and sweetly earnest jazz ballad melodies of SOMETHING FOR LAILA, two things are abundantly clear. First, the guitar is the primary sound in terms of setting up emotional spaces, and second, synthesis of style (or better put, liberation from the limitations of style definitions) is elemental to the compositional architecture across the album. “Most of this music is clearly borne out of my physiological relationship with the guitar” declares Ruffin, “it's the instrument I know how to speak on best, and I just so happen to really love harmony and stretching out tonal and melodic spaces to their breaking points.” He adds “also, I think relying on the guitar for harmonic information makes for unconventional approaches to ensemble writing, in the same way, Ellington's unique pianism created new textures and voicings for the jazz orchestra. I don't really see any divide between the guitarist and the composer for this music.” Synthesis of style also starts with the guitar in a way. The role electronics play throughout the compositions feed into the post-style attitude of the album. Ruffin elaborates “my pedalboard serves to fill a void that I feel I wasn't hearing enough of. As someone born in 1998, while I was privileged enough to have a jazz enthusiast for a father, I had many musical phases that stuck with me over the years. Jazz happened to be my passion, but I was deeply affected by chiptune music, neo-psychedelia, ambient music, drum and bass, folk, hip-hop, metal, among many others.” He continues “my pedals help me reach out into these various musical worlds with a greater degree of success, and honesty. In that way, I think also it allows greater potential to bring in other kinds of listeners.” Added to the wildly various grooves and beats that mingle, shift and fuse (as in the “jazz nerd” clever STABLESMATES ~ coltcomrades, that rocks between punk power chords and up-tempo bop) and the intentional contrasts of harmony from folk and pop progressions to free jazz collectivity, the use of electronics provides yet another post-style access point for listeners to discover familiar and unfamiliar sounds simultaneously.

The album closes with BIZARRE ADVENTURE THEME, the epic fanfare finale in which both Ruffin’s personal myth building and the saga of the five heroes (the quintet of musician friends) intersect, in cinematically appropriate climatic fashion, in varied grooves, shifting improvisational spaces, giant harmonic structures, and a space for rest and conclusion. The predominantly half note melody that hints at superhero type themes is punctuated by downbeat stabbing stop-time-like interludes that urge the piece forward. The ensemble performs as a tight unit throughout this album, each musician getting generous time to make their own personal myth statements in solos and collective improvisation settings. But, it must be mentioned both Jett and Max especially shine as soloists on BIZARRE ADVENTURE THEME, showing off a balance of energy driven chops and fluent swing/bop melodizing. Near the end, Ruffin’s bit-crushed pentatonic anthemic riff raises the album to one of its peak emotional spaces. Here we are at a moment of triumph, hope, and even joy. The theme returns bright and shiny only to end on one more dense unresolved harmonic dissonance to conclude the album. Duality to the very end, and as in any good myth, personal or otherwise, the conclusion promises that although this journey may have ended there are many more adventures to be had into the known and unknown.

Keenan Ruffin has created on SUGAR ~ SHIT ~ SILK ~ SWEAT, an intimate portrait; part autobiographical, part celebration of close collaborator friends, part nod to heroes of the past and a myriad of genre influences, and part post-style futurism. Myth makers are eternal students of their storytelling craft and of the human experience. They use their tools (in Ruffin’s case a vivid and personalized compositional sense of melody and structure married to an individualistic and playful exploration of harmony and sound on the guitar) to create their heroes and journeys. This album both introduces us to Ruffin’s sound world and hints at promises of more adventures to come.

- Eric Hofbauer, February 2022.

Acknowledgements:

This album is the culmination of the last 7 years of my development as a guitarist and jazz musician. I had an unconventional path to this point, but I was driven by the love of my mother Venus, father Kelton, sister Laila, Scott, Zak, Jett, Max, Alex, and various mentors that have believed in me when I was a new musician trying to put it all together. This record is a libation to that love and support for all those years. And to my heroes, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Miles Davis, Bill Frisell, Eric Hofbauer, MF DOOM, Madlib, Tyler the Creator, Maurice Ravel, Kevin Parker, Toro y Moi, and countless others who've provided inspiration and logic for me to continue going forward on this path. I love you madly.

Keenan Ruffin, February 2022.

credits

released May 6, 2022

keenan "FLACCO" ruffin- guitar, pedals, composition, arranging
SCOTT KIEFNER- BASS, SYNTHESIZER
ZACHARY KING- DRUMS, PERCUSSION
MAX RICHARDSON- TRUMPET, FLUGELHORN
JETT TACHIBANA- SAXOPHONES

ERIC KLAXTON- MIXING, MASTERING, ENGINEERING

keenan performed this music on a fender telecaster and supro s6420 reissue amplifier

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

FLACCO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE New York, New York

jouissance purveyor











*co-co-co-cornball music*
... more

contact / help

Contact FLACCO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this album or account

FLACCO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE recommends:

If you like FLACCO'S BIZARRE ADVENTURE, you may also like: