Brooklyn nine-piece power-funk outfit Turkuaz has been blowing up on the scene in the past few years—and if you’ve ever seen their live show, you know that “blowing up” is not much of an exaggeration. The group bring the energy to every stage, with a classic-funk presence consisting of impressive musicianship paired with subtle choreographed dance moves and not-so-subtle color-coordinated flair. After forming at school in Boston and honing their craft following a move to New York, the band embarked on a heavy touring schedule that has helped them further sharpen their spectacular stage offering.
You guys have gained a lot of traction over the last, I would say, couple years. Can you talk about how that’s affected your crowd, or the places and shows you’ve played?
Dave Brandwein: For us, since the beginning, slow and steady, which I personally really enjoy. It’s like one person at a time tells someone they know, and they come back, and they bring more people and that’s kind of what it’s about. It’s nothing overnight, and it’s just hard work.
Chris Brouwers: Build real fans.
DB: Exactly, lifetime fans.
Greg Sanderson: That’s how you have a career in music.
ChB: And they come to every show they are available to come to, and it’s great.
DB: A lot of people traveling to multiple shows and following us around and stuff, which is cool to see. Of course we like moving up to bigger and better venues…
Craig Brodhead: But it’s very gradual—I think it’s very different from the outside when you’re looking in. But when you’re doing it, it just seems like the same thing. Sometimes you look around and like “Oh! This is better!” [Laughs] I think that it’s been good for us that the trajectory has been [gradual]. Every time, we’ve been adequately prepared for when we had challenges, and if we would have had certain opportunities earlier, we wouldn’t have done as well. I think that being gradual has helped us to rise to the occasion on those situations, so I just want to keep doing that and hopefully just continuing.
GS: Eventually we’ll get to the top most of the top most.
So you guys are Brooklyn based. Are you individually from Brooklyn?
DB: From all over. We met in Boston, most of us, at school, but then very shortly after we formed, we did move to New York—about six months later or something like that. Not the exact lineup. At the end of school, we moved to New York for a couple years and kind of incubated, just played local shows and solidified our lineup and then in 2012 finally started touring steadily all the time. We’re both [motions to Garett] from Long Island, actually, then Cleveland [Brodhead], Truckee, CA [Brouwers], San Francisco, CA [Shell], Connecticut [Sanderson].
CrB: Got one Canadian in the mix [Shira Elias].
DB: That’s so weird that she’s Canadian. Like, really? You’re from another country ? She’s from Vancouver, she’s a—whatever—a Vancouverian.
CrB: We’re all from the north, though. We’re all over, East, West, but we’re all northern.
DB: We’re a yankee band! Bunch of yankees.
You have a very theatrical show, which I think adds to how great your live show is. Was that something that came in early?
DB: That was the very first show. Yeah, we all wore white suit jackets and did dance moves at our very first show!
ChB: Well the horn section had black button-ups and gold bowties.
SG: You guys had capes…
ChB: I have my bowtie, I think I have two or three bowties.
SG: Let’s take it back! Old-school Turkuaz!
DB: Yeah I think between Stop Making Sense, the Talking Heads film, being a big influence, and that really rare Ohio State video of Sly & the Family Stone—some combination of those two things—from the beginning it was like, “This is definitely gonna be it.”
GS: That’s the way we want to present ourselves!
DB: A visual spectacle as much as audio.
SG: We like to hit all the senses.
Can you guys talk about with your collaboration with The New Mastersounds, going on tour with them, and how that came about?
DB: Well we share a booking agent, and it was a really great matchup—our two bands are both funk, but in a really, really different way. I mean, they’re not entirely instrumental, but largely, in a smaller, four-piece, kind of New Orleans style. It’s just really complementary, I think, and we switched off which band would play first or second, and it worked really well both ways. And there was a lot of collaboration between the two bands, which is really fun. We loved it; it was 40 shows and we didn’t get tired of it. Which says a lot.
Taylor Shell: They’re really good dudes.
GS: We all kind of walked away feeling like we made some serious friends out of the situation. That’s really the bottom line—I think those are friendships that are gonna go the distance.
Speaking of them, there are a lot of funk bands out there, young funk bands, but I think you guys have a really unique thing going on. How do you try to differentiate yourself when there’s a lot of bands in your genre coming up right now?
DB: I mean, I think the vocal and lyrical element of what we do is pretty different—I like to think so, at least. But, you know, a lot of the funk stuff out there is either instrumental or a different style, vocally and with the way it’s written. Some of the groove stuff you can’t help but take from the greats and just do what feels good at a certain point.
TS: I think, at least in the rhythm section, Mikey [Carubba] and I having been into some heavier music in our past has some influence sometimes, with us occasionally getting, like, really aggressive, which I don’t necessarily hear a ton of funk-type bands sound like.
SG: And then just visually—we all wear different colors, and all of us do dance moves at some point, together as a group or individual sections.
DB: Yeah, visually we set ourselves apart too, as you mentioned.
CrB: And that we’re men and women, as well. It tends to be a pretty male-dominated situation, so having that element is definitely [good].
Were you guys all into funk music before Turkuaz?
DB: I never envisioned myself being in a funk band when I was younger. I think it slowly kind of revealed itself as the thing that makes all of us happy, I guess. We were saying before, I think we all pretty much grew up on rock—almost classic rock—largely British.
TS: I envisioned myself being funk band, but not until I was probably like 17, and I envisioned myself being in bands before that.
ChB: I was listening to Maceo Parker though, and that got me started. I was like, “Oh, this is amazing!” And then whenever we would jam, we were always playing funk pretty much.
DB: I think playing parties—that’s honestly it. Like, our band is playing parties, you’re not gonna perform your big, singer-songwriter, conceptual song here.
TS: No, these mother fuckers need to get down—let’s party and let’s do this!
DB: For me, that’s the first time I played funk guitar of any kind, playing parties. So that changed what I thought I’d be doing, certainly, after a while.
Do you think the sound you guys put out has changed, especially since you started touring and really solidifying everything?
CrB: Well hopefully we’ve gotten better. [Laughs]
TS: Listen to those old recordings, they sound like shit!
GS: Well, not really. Sometimes…
TS: Just tighter. For us, it’s not even that we rehearse—playing is our rehearsal, and just getting better and tighter, knowing each other’s tendencies.
CrB: And then you do things like this and you see the real stuff. So when you get to hang out and talk to those people—you know, going down to Jazz Fest and just being around the real, authentic stuff. I think shows you—because we’re all from the suburbs and went to music school, so we kind of have to earn our authenticity from just being around it and absorbing it and studying it that way.
ChB: Also when we’re touring, playing with other bands, you see somebody else do something every night, like, “Oh man, this is how they’re doing that,” and it’s experience. We play every night, and it’s a little tighter, and we’re always learning. Just constantly evolving.
Can you talk about some of the plans you have coming up for 2017? Recording or anything like that?
DB: Yeah, we’re just working on new stuff. We don’t know exactly when it’ll come out yet, but a bunch of new songs, new recording. I mean, touring as always, bunch of great festival stuff. Just more playing, more recording. And you gotta keep staying productive in terms of making new material when you tour this much, just stay vigilant about it. Because it’s easy to just kind of fall into a pattern.
GS: You start playing the tunes that you are good at, not having to develop, to make the next evolutionary step.
DB: It can happen. People want something similar, but something different.
Do you write on the road?
CrB: Try to.
DB: It goes through phases. The last tour we did was so grueling that we didn’t really.
TS: Yeah, it wasn’t like, “Alright, it’s 4am, we’re back in the hotel room. Let’s get our laptops out.”
CrB: That did happen a couple times! We had Nate Werth from Snarky Puppy with us, and he’s super gung-ho about it, like, “Come on!” It does happen, but we’re gonna try to be better about it the next tour.
DB: We’ll have a little more energy on the next tour. [Laughs]
