Album Notes

Think of this cd as an excavation. The dig is in musician/composer Steve Elson’s neighborhood: starting on the sidewalk, say, off the Bowery in New York City’s Lower East Side. The first job is to break through the hard contemporary surface, and, if you look around, people are doing that all over. There’s the constant rumble of affordable housing being torn down, bodegas giving way to condos, high rises shadowing tenements. But this music is interested in honoring, not erasing, the past. In the first layer of top soil are some artifacts from when Steve first moved here from the Oakland area. Maybe one of his kufi caps, a horn chart from his time with Johnny Otis or David Bowie, that scrap of the New York Times that called Steve’s early compositions “the missing link between the Phillip Glass Ensemble and James Brown’s JBs.” Dig deeper, and you can trace his ancestry: Steve’s parents raised him in California, but his grandfather grew up a few blocks away in the back of a storefront ladies tailor shop. And his great-grandfather immigrated to the Lower East Side from Russia --where, to complete the circle, Steve’s son was born. Those connections might help explain some of the resonance to be heard on “Mott and Broome:” the sense of place and of history, the easy and remarkable shifting through different eras. But what this excavation also reveals are the other cultures that have made this city: a sensual mix of Latin rhythms and Duke Ellington horns, the cry of Arabic flutes coupling with the soft swing of the bossa nova. This is the substrata, the loam, that these compositions travel through and grow from. Whether the old world “Sevilla” or the new world “Mott and Broome,” many of these songs sound vaguely familiar, as if someone was gently lifting up and examining pieces of the past. But they’re also discoveries: brand new, surprising. And throughout is a kind of pervasive questioning. What have we done? What are we doing? Picture this cd as an exploration of time, an excavation: the treasure that Steve Elson and friends have found in the dark – and brought to light. DW STEVE ELSON: MOTT AND BROOME Q and A with Daniel Wolff You have a new cd, Mott and Broome, your first in ten years. How does it differ from your earlier music? It feels more straight ahead. It has more blowing on it, more playing. I’ve made a smaller ensemble and kept the palette a lot smaller. I think I’m trusting myself more as a player on this record. Why the decade gap till Mott and Broome? I was trying to figure things out! I like so many different kinds of music that I sometimes zip back and forth between things. Then [you and I] started to come up with songs, and it started to feel of a kind. Plus, I’ve lightened up in the last ten years: I’ve had my son and kind of slowed down a little bit. Out of high school in California, you started playing with the great Johnny Otis r&b band; does Mott and Broome seem connected to that? I hear that stuff in my playing. Which I’m really proud of and pleased about. The thing is I came from so many different places. I liked the downtown thing, but it always felt kind of ironic to me. David Bowie, Sam And Dave, Joe Jackson: I’ve made a living since I was very young playing with all these great musicians. What they all had in common, I think, was that they were about dancing – and I always wanted to play music that made people want to move. As a player, all those different experiences have given me a certain moodiness. Or a depth. All my great heroes, when they were my age – well, they were mostly dead! -- but they’d done so much and been around so much, and it was evident in a simple song. So this cd is simpler in a way because I trusted … what do you call it? The dust. Or the depth. The history of it. Less dense but deeper. A lot of us start off rebelling at our parents and their values, but I know your father and mother have heard Mott and Broome and like it. What’s your