Last fall, Thomas Dolby hit the road and reminded audiences of his early contribution to the fusion of electronic and pop music. He also unleashed a live retrospective album and DVD, each called The Sole Inhabitant. Never one to stay in one place for long, Dolby will return to North American soil this year, but with a twist: He'll be joined by the Jazz Mafia Horns from San Francisco, who will help him present new material while adding new shades to Dolby's catalog of classics which include the hits "She Blinded Me With Science," "Hyperactive," "Europe and the Pirate Twins," "The Flat Earth" and more.
Dolby will also debut a new between-albums EP titled Thomas Dolby & the Jazz Mafia Horns: Live @ SXSW on his own Lost Toy People label. The five-song EP contains four Dolby originals ("The Key To Her Ferrari," "May The Cube Be With You," "My Brain Is Like A Sieve" and "Your Karma Hit My Dogma") as well as a new take on George Clinton's "Hot Sauce." The album is available at iTunes, CDBaby and ThomasDolby.com, and will be sold at tour stops across North America but will not be sold at brick-and-mortar retail outlets.
Of his hookup with the Jazz Mafia Horns, Dolby says, "I discovered in San Francisco there's a vibrant underground movement of young jazz musicians who are wide open to everything from 'turntablism' to New Orleans marching band funk. One ensemble that plays regularly in North Beach clubs and bars is the Jazz Mafia, whose numbers on a given night can vary from three to thirteen brass players. Over the years I've employed sampled and synthesized brass on many of my more up-tempo tunes, but I've rarely had the opportunity to jam with live horn players. It seemed to me that the inherent rigidity of my electronica might be nicely offset by the looseness and liveness of real brass, so I got with the Jazz Mafia and worked out new arrangements of some of my tunes. This works especially well when I'm building grooves by 'looping and layering' live tracks and building songs from scratch."
The Jazz Mafia Horns consist of Rich Armstrong, trumpet and backing vocals; Adam Theis, trombone; and Joe Cohen, saxophone.
In its review of Dolby's appearance at South by Southwest (SXSW) this past March, the e-zine LiveDaily.com wrote: "Unsurprisingly, the technological wiz is a gearhound. The stage at the Elysium looked like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, with only a small space left for the Jazz Mafia Trio, a horn section that spiced up Dolby's electronic soundscapes. The bald, mad scientist-like Dolby was relaxed, personable and smiled from the start of his set to the finish. In between, he created off-the-cuff loops to back his vocals (both of which sounded great), danced, and managed a library of video imagery projected on a large movie screen; interspersed with canned video segments were live shots of the crowd, filmed via a cam mounted to Dolby's left headphone. The performance exemplified the word 'fun' - which makes perfect sense, since the presumably well-off Dolby isn't doing this for any other reason."
"Dolby’s one-man stage show is a bizarre hybrid of computer generated music, video montage, and film projections bordering on performance art theater."
"Dolby’s Video Jockey, Johnny DeKam mixes live video feeds of the performance with original footage onto large projection screens behind Dolby as he performs."
"For one number, Dolby constructs an entire song on-the-spot, with web cams tracking each step."
"It’s interesting to watch. I have a camera on my head so you can see my point of view on the knobs." - Dolby
