Rocket Number Nine Zoom Zoom Up

Three youngish gentlemen from the upstate of South Carolina. The brashness of Chicago at their beck and call. The voice of Sun Ra calling down upon them to band together in an attempt to practice the music that they adore. Monty Craig, Andy Nagel and John Byce (Fruit Bats, Branches) are Rocket Number Nine Zoom Zoom Up: a trio of modern jazz-inflected musicians, looking to contribute something significant and tuneful to the massive volumes of recorded works by the masters of the field.

First and foremost fans of modern music, the trio spend more time listening to music than playing it. Beginning life as a guitar trio playing jazz standards mostly as background noise in steakhouses and pizzerias in Georgia and the Carolinas, Rocket Number Nine Zoom Zoom Up was both fueled by and fed up by the limitations of their immediate surroundings. In response, the group became increasingly insular in their workings, bringing their true musical interests to the forefront of their sets, and using the example of the jazz masters they admired to work their own spin onto the music they were playing.

Rocket Number Nine Zoom Zoom Up, while certainly not the first group to approach jazz in their unique way, hope to strip it of its weighty harmonic baggage and rhythmic cliches in the way that the Ramones did for rock. They seek to reinsert melody into the fore as Shostakovitch reluctantly did under a tyrannical Stalinist regime, and revisit the means of producing sounds and recordings a la Brian Eno. On their self-titled debut, Rocket Number Nine Zoom Zoom Up, the group spent a great deal of time developing material that main songwriter Monty Craig brought into rehearsals. With the help of Chicago producer John McEntire (Tortoise, Stereolab, The Sea and Cake, Chicago Underground) fleshing out the production, the record stands as a progressive, funk-tinged, experimental-leaning journey set atop mountains of melody and billowing rhythms. It's music for the discerning jazzbo and the pizzeria alike. It's a nod towards tradition and innovation, and ultimately, successful because they've made it all their very own.

Upcoming Shows

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Downloads / URLs

Press Photo (72dpi)
Press Photo (300dpi)
"Mello" (mp3)
myspace.com/rocketnine

Releases on Contraphonic

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  Available now in the ContraStore in LP and MP3 format.

  Rocket Number Nine Zoom Zoom Up. CON 065. Released: 04.08.08
  Tracklisting: Mello / Cme / Suebessle / Withh / Before We Were Born / 567 / BBQ / Allen's Theme / Monder's Mood / Maglev