Eminence Ensemble works hard for the music

Band does DIY tour-booking and festival creation

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We had made the mistaken assumption that our inability to get Eminence Ensemble drummer Tanner Bardin by phone last Tuesday, bouncing off a full-and-not-accepting voicemail box, was a ski-hooky thing. Bardin is a Summit County-bred skier — the fast board kind — and the weather gods had deposited a sumptuous shroud of freshies on the high country the night before. If he had been in ditch-the-world-I’m-going-skiing mode, he’d not have been the only one.

The reality was a shade less zesty — Bardin had been working the phones and the net trying to finalize the Boulderbased prog-funk quintet’s upcoming West Coast swing, starting just a few days after their Fox Theatre stand on Jan. 31.

“I wish I was up there doing that. I was in the rehearsal room,” Bardin said. “I’m juggling booking, management, writing arrangements and staying up to bang on the drums.”

Apart from the drumming, all of this is what managers are for, reminded the generously unhelpful local writer.

“Yes,” Bardin sighed. “I’m doing this myself. We do need a manager; we just gotta find the right one.

“This will actually be our third swing through the West Coast, it’ll just be the longest. In the past it’s just been southern California, but this time we’re also heading up to Arcata, then Seattle and Portland. Some new rooms, including a new room in L.A.”

And Texas. Two nights in Houston. Houston?

“Yeah, that’s our biggest market, for whatever reason. Houston, Austin and just Texas in general, we do well,” he said.

Maybe we don’t get out enough, but it seems like a stretch for us. Austin… OK. College town, culturally a little less tight-fitting than the state overall, but we had to wonder what a prog-funk quintet from The People’s Republic was doing scoring in Houston.

“Me too. We have some friends down there that really plug us, and the first gig we did there we got about 300 at the club,” Bardin said. “They like that heavy rock ’n’ roll, guitar thing.” 

The quintet may well be poised for their close-up. Starting their sixth year, the band has a tight and keenly concocted album under their belts called Mouse Hunt. Released last spring, the platter serves up sunny, offbeat groove grinners, hellbound instrumental breaks (check out guitarist Justin Neely’s fusion-y shredding on the title track) and a healthy wash of Hai-Karate-scented makeout anthems. Well, scented by something. And “Swimsuit,” which has been picked off here and there as a crowd favorite, with the memorable line, “In the winter or the spring/there’s just one thing you need to bring/I want to see you in a swimsuit.”

We had to listen to this one a couple of times.

The groove is a low-calorie confection, a slightly stoned-out soft-funk arrangement you might have heard on some L.A.-based WAVE radio station 20 years ago, an outtake from Gaucho, perhaps; the whole thing being about a guy spying a beautiful stranger on the street one day and wishing he could see her in a bathing suit. It first struck us as a kind of anachronistic, almost a Beach Boy-ish play on innocence and youthful longing. And then, somewhere around halfway through the second spin, maybe it was the third, it conjured this vaguely sinister undertone, the poised and pleading howl of some deranged misfit, like some twisted shut-in villain on Criminal Minds with a Luther Vandross-influenced singing voice.

Bardin was clearly pleased at our befuddlement.

“That song was originally written as a joke,” Bardin said, laughing. “I was just singing it over some hip hop/funkish chords, and it was really just a joke. We were in college and someone heard it, and they said, ‘Hey, that’s catchy. You guys should really play that.’ And then we just played it out, and everyone seemed kind of stoked on it.

“If we play it at the right moment, it works. Wrong moment, it’s bad.”

Almost all the band hails from Summit County, where they still have friends and family, and the death by avalanche a year ago of Tony Seibert was one of those life-altering experiences for Bardin, who arranged PardeePalooza last summer at State Bridge to raise funds for Seibert’s family. (Pardee was Seibert’s middle name.)

“I was really good friends with Tony and his family, ’cause I grew up in the ski racing world, and then went to college with him,” Bardin said. “It was the most shocking news I had heard in my life, to be honest, just to have someone so close all of a sudden be gone due to a ski accident. … It hit a lot of people in Colorado really deep as well.

“And Guy Oldaker over at Madison House was also good friends with Tony … and he was like, ‘If there’s anything I can do to help,’ and I suggested doing this festival. So he helped me lock down the venue and get the festival going. And we’re going to do it again next year.”

Eminence Ensemble with The Coop and special guest set featuring the Jaden Carlson Band. Doors at 8:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 31, The Fox Theatre, 1135 13th St., Boulder, 720-645-2467. Tickets are $10 plus $2 for under 21 tickets. All ages.

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