The Motet have been throwing down particularly hard on Halloween since 2000, when they first had the idea to spend a night putting their spin on the work of legendary musicians. That year the bearers of Colorado’s groove torch set their sights on The Beatles, sparking a tradition that has since featured tributes to the Grateful Dead, Prince, Sly & The Family Stone, Talking Heads, The Headhunters, Jamiroquai and more. However last year’s Halloween show marked a departure from the original plan, as The Motet paid tribute to the year 1980 instead of honoring one act in particular. That new tradition will continue tonight when the band kicks off its five-show Mixtape 1975 tour, which is set to bring their Halloween show to four different cities over the course of the week. We caught up with singer Jans Ingber to talk about the upcoming Halloween run, the success of the band’s new record, developing a national audience, their upcoming run through the Northeast and more.
You guys have a five night Halloween run in Colorado coming up. The theme for the night is ‘Mixtape 1975.’ What do you mean by that?
I don’t know how much you follow our history, but we’ve been doing these really big Halloween extravaganzas for I think eleven years now and for the first nine years we did just the music of one particular band. We did Tower of Power, Prince, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, Earth, Wind & Fire, Parliament Funkadelic, Talking Heads, Grateful Dead. We did you know all of these bands and last year we decided, instead of doing bands, that we would start to do years. So we did our first one last year, Mixtape 1980. We got to choose any music we wanted from 1980, and this year it’s 1975.
What is it about that year—1975—that inspired you guys to pay tribute to it?
Part of it is that through writing our own original material this last year and putting out an original funk record. We’re all really attracted to the mid-to-late 70s electro-funk era. So in that electro-funk era, in 1975, there is so much to choose from. It is, as you could say, our jam.
Do you want to give us any hints as to what you guys have planned for that, or is it all going to be a surprise?
Oh there’s so much there. I can tell you some bands—Earth, Wind & Fire. 1975 was still when rock n’ roll was happening, so there’s Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin. Then there’s the start of the disco era, so you know there’s some amazing disco hits that were still really funky from that era.
You’ve got five stops coming up for Mixtape 1975. Are you gonna’ keep it more or less the same each night or do you plan to mix it up a lot between shows?
We have five dates. We do The Vilar in Vail and The Aggie in Fort Collins, then two nights at the Boulder Theatre and then The Ogden. So we have four places in five nights. Because we’re doing two nights at the Boulder Theatre, we have two nights worth of music. So we’re going to mix up those two nights of music through those five days. You can imagine what we’re learning, I think the list was 38 new tunes. There’s a lot of work that goes into something like this and you want to put as much as you can into it, but not obviously over-play it too much so that it sounds lame.
Are you guys trying to keep it to stuff that was more or less funky to begin with or are you going to try to put a funk spin on things that don’t really fall into that category?
Let’s just say that both of those are happening.
How does a rehearsal of something like this go down. Does everybody kind of give their own two cents as to what songs they want to play? Is it a democratic effort?
We start 6 months out for these Halloween deals, and we just start scouring top 100 lists. Top 100 dance hits, Top 100 soul R&B, Billboard Top 100. Then we start looking into bands, what were they doing at that time? What was War doing in 1975? After we do that, everyone does compiling. Then Dave Watts, who is our band-leader and our drummer, compiles kind of a master list that has way too many tunes on it. Then slowly we all put our two cents in, bring other things onto the table, until we have narrowed it out to just the best. The things that we think would work best with our instrumentation and also would be a great dance party Halloween thing.
Do you have any other surprises in store. Maybe some special guests?
For these we definitely have special guests. Our Halloween shows are known for being big band shows, which means three singers, three horns, percussion, and then the full band.
Earlier this year you guys released your first album in quite some time. How has the response been?
It’s been great. We’re enjoying kind of a resurgence of another level of success that we hadn’t reached before and it’s just very rewarding. Not only that people are listening to the record, but it’s also just bringing us a ton or new live music fans. So, it’s been great. We’ve been traveling much more than we have in the past bunch of years. We have new management, a new booking agent, things are just really on the up and up for The Motet.
It seemed, for a long time, like you guys were almost the house band of Colorado. Then in the last couple years or so, you have been around on a more national level. What do you think has been behind that wider exposure?
Jans—Well there was a lot that happened. I mean from personnel changes to also a life change. Some of us had kids. We decided to hang back a bit and just do the stuff that we knew would be great for business and that people would show up. We’re a party and our Colorado scene is just so supportive, so it was kind of easy to just stay home and have all these great gigs. Either in the mountains or at festivals in Colorado or these big Halloween and New Years shows. So we made a commitment that we were going to put out original music that we collaboratively wrote, and we were going to get back to the rest of the country and that we were going to do really this thing. So that’s what it was. It was the commitment. It was that the band was ready to give it a real shot and get our music out there.
You mentioned it not really being that hard to get gigs in Colorado all the time, what is it about Colorado that you think makes it such a musical state. For a little while now, its been such a center of the live music scene.
Well there’s a lot of reasons. For one, it’s absolutely gorgeous so people like to come there. There’s a kind of tourism. Kids like to come there. There are great schools, and now weed is legal. It’s a great place to come and do shows. I mean Phish does three shows a year there. There’s Red Rocks and other venues. The music business is also really set up there. There are really great and large management companies, booking companies. If you’re a band it’s one of the premiere spots in the country to start out and have business infrastructure. I mean think String Cheese Incident, Big Gigantic—they’re all running their thing out of little Boulder, Colorado. There’s pretty amazing stuff.
This upcoming New Years show will be in Portland, OR. Is this the first time you guys have left Colorado for a New Years show?
It is our first in a long, long time. We made this a point that we wanted to bring some of these special shows that we’ve been treating Colorado with to other places. So we’re going to start to expand and we want to bring some of our special shows with special guests and special music to New York to Atlanta to Chicago. To these places that have shown us a lot of love in this last year and a half that we’ve been getting out there.
I know a lot of members of the band recently joined Big Gigantic on stage at Rowdy Town over at Red Rocks. Since Dominic [Lalli] used to be a member of The Motet, was that kind of a full circle thing for you guys?
Absolutely. We’ve always been really involved with them. We still do shows with them in Colorado once a year. There’s this Herbie Hancock Tribute we do with them. He’s still our bro and we see him all the time. He comes to support and we have him sit in. We’re just so happy for his successes, and he really brought it around to us and said, ‘Hey I want you guys to do something so that I have a live sound up there and also get the kids to know that The Motet is where it came from.’ So it was a very cool thing. You can’t complain about two sold out nights at Red Rocks.
So what else is in store for you guys? I imagine you plan to keep the national push going.
Yep. More than ever. This next year, like I said, we just got a new booking agent and he’s really going to make sure our festival scene is on point and that we show up at all four corners of the United States—and the middle—to represent. We’ve also got shows coming up in the East Coast next month. We’ll be playing the Brooklyn Bowl. We’re just excited to finally create more great original music that hopefully can last the test of time.
On that note, do you guys have another album of original material in the works?
We are in the writing process for it right now, and we are very excited to get it out to the world.
