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Founded in 1996 by saxophonist Charlie Naked and trombonist Kid Ornery, The Defenestration Unit started out as a roughhewn Free Jazz quartet, and over the next ten years mutated several times, with various members coming and going, becoming at one point an R&B cover band and at another a minimalist drummerless psychedelic group, until, in its tenth year, the group settled into its current configuration, with Naked and Ornery joined by Jim Otterson on electric guitar (who had joined the fold back in 2002), Jeff Miller on electric bass, Kirk "Monkeyboy" Suddreath on drums, and Johnny Freedom on Alto Sax. TDU has discussed what to call the music we play, but the only thing we can all agree on is that it's improvised, so let's call it "improvisational music".
What "improvisational" means to us is that when we play, we are making it up as we go along, as a group, in a form of unspoken democracy. Someone makes a choice, options are laid out, and as a group, we decide in which direction to move, and what parts we will all play in moving. Though the music is moving, it's not about a destination, it's just a journey, and it's over when it's time to stop. We can play relatively brief "songs", or we can improvise for nearly an hour non-stop. What we play for an audience will never be played exactly the same way again; each time we play it's a new experience for us and for our audience. We have in our bag of tricks a collection of musical themes that we occasionally return to and improvise on, expanding the original song into something different in some way, including Free Jazz standards like Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place", Pharoah Sanders's "Black Unity", Don Cherry's "Brown Rice", and the Miles Davis tune "Black Satin", but even when we utilize a familiar grounding, it is used as a springboard for moving into new places. TDU takes inspiration from many musical sources in addition to Free Jazz however, as we've also incorporated elements of funk, Krautrock, psychedelic music, and electronic music. Underneath everything else we are a band of improvisers, which means everything we play is in some way new.
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