New Zealand band Fat Freddy’s Drop aren’t a house hold name but slowly they concert people into loyal followers, creating disciples to their smooth fusion of funk, jazz, dub, jazz and techno.
Chopper Reedz the band’s saxophonist spoke to OUTinPerth from his home in Auckland. For Reedz it was a rare break from the band who have been incredibly busy over the last year with multiple tours around the world and trips to the studio to work on the bands forthcoming third album.
The break will be short lived though because soon the band will be back on the road again touring around Australia with Erykah Badu and Mayer Hawthorne, hitting Perth on February 25 for a show at The Belvoir Ampitheatre. Reedz is looking forward to getting back on tour though, especially since the band is teaming up with Badu.
‘At the start of the year we did the Good Vibrations tours, Erykah Badu was on before us and Damian Marley and Nas were after us, it was a bit of an eye opening tour. I was at the side of the stage for every single one of those Badu shoes, her band is amazing.’
All the members of Fat Freddy’s Drop have stage names, alongside Reedz, there is Jetlag Johnson, Tony Chang and Dobie Blaze to name a few members of the large ensemble. The saxophonist laughs when we asked him how the names came about,
‘That’s Joe Dukie’, says Reedz, ‘his real names Dallas Tamaira, he’s our vocalist, he started coming up with all these aliases, it’s like the names1940’s jazz musicians had, like Lockjaw Davis or The Prez – people like that, he just started coming up with names for the band, you can’t pick your own name, it has to be thrust upon you.’
For a band that critics describe as being a fusion of so many styles, Reedz too throws a healthy dose of genres into the mix when asked to describe the band’s sound,
‘It’s a psychedelic bluesy dance party’ then he adds, ‘and it’s good to have a big dash of dub in there too’.
Erykah Badu, Mayer Hawthorne and Fat Freddy’s Drop play Belvoir Ampitheatre on February 25.
Graeme Watson
