Style rangers

Where’s a band name like Yelsa come from?

“It’s a tabula rasa,” says bassist Jordan Keach.

“There’s definitely a story behind it, but the story’s insignificant,” says drummer Aaron Edgcomb. “We were going through a few names that had very specific connotations, and ultimately we don’t want to be associated with anything specific. The name doesn’t have any specific connotations. It can be funny or it can serious, so we can be funny or serious.”

“It means nothing, so we were able to grab it and define it however we want,” says trumpeter Chris Williams.

Yelsa is a Reno-based quartet. Keach, Edgcomb, Williams and guitarist Drew Wesely are all young, but experienced, jazz musicians, veterans of the local jazz scene and the university’s jazz program. But Yelsa is not strictly a jazz band. The musicians also draw inspiration from electronic music, hip-hop and rock. And, perhaps most importantly, Yelsa is a band, not just a pick-up group of jazz musicians organized for a single gig or to perform one player’s compositions, but a cohesive musical group, where everyone contributes compositional ideas and the sum is greater than the parts.

The musicians were all familiar with each from playing in pick-up jazz bands prior to forming Yelsa early last year.

“I started the group because I really wanted to make a group with my friends that I could spend a lot of time on focused rehearsals without a specific game plan,” says Williams. “We come at it more like a garage band, just a bunch of guys making music, rather than the jazz approach”—a rotating cast of different musicians forming pick-up bands—“which we’re all very used to and very tired of.”

“What we’re going for with this group is a certain voice, and we have that voice consistently because of the way we play and the way we interact,” says Edgcomb.

The exact sound of that certain voice is a bit ineffable. Because there’s a trumpet in a lieu of a vocalist, it would be easy to pigeonhole the group as jazz, which in the broadest definition of the word, it is. But the music has grooves inspired by electronic music, like Flying Lotus, and since Keach and Wesely both play electronic instruments, with a full array of pedals and effects, and Edgcomb is able to hit with a sure hand, there’s also an element of rock in the music, especially when they build up a full head of steam, with guitar and bass feeding back, the drums rocking hard, and Williams’ trumpet cascading over the top.

Because they use a lot of improvisation, the musicians are able to adjust their sound according to the venue and the audience. There’s a big difference in audience expectations and reactions to a show at a bar late at night versus a formal concert hall early in the evening.

“We have consciously adjusted sets to venues,” says Wesely. “We say, this is more of a jazz venue, or this is more of a rock venue, so we should play these sorts of tunes more, at least for openers and closers. Our style ranges a lot. It covers a lot of ground musically, so we can do that.”

But the band members say their favorite shows locally are the ones for rock audiences, on rock bills, for energetic audiences that hoot and holler, dance and drink, rather than the stoic, patient, all-too-polite listeners at many local jazz performances.

“This band thrives off the audience,” says Keach.