Who Dat?

It's not often you see a ten-piece band so when one comes along it's a special occasion; enter Jumbledat. Hailing from the Blue Mountains, the jazz and hip hop ensemble have amassed quite the following with their big band cum blues and funk sound. â€œMost of us met in high school and the others we've picked up along the way,” laughs keyboardist Luke Saunders.

The group consists of two vocalists (Perrin Moss, Matthew Kirkis), two guitarists (Taylor ‘Chip’ Crawford, Josef Heks), two percussionists (Bobby Damelian, Jesse A'Hern), three in the brass section (Kevin Kerr, trumpet; Marc Brown, trombone; Eugene Baker, sax), plus Saunders on keys.  With a line-up this large you may wonder how they find time to practice. â€œGetting together at the same time is pretty hard but writing songs is a little easier because a few of us usually work on an idea and take it to the others and we all jam it out until we find something we like, that way we all have input into how our tracks turn out,” he says.

The group have recently relocated to Melbourne and replaced their drummer, which Luke says made the process more difficult for a while. â€œWhen our new drummer joined we spent quite a while teaching him our tunes and getting him on the same page but now we're organised we're planning bigger things.”

The group seamlessly fuse the two unlikely genres (jazz, hip hop) together and the end product is rather similar to the True Live sound. â€œAt the start we we're all into different styles, I was into jazz as was Kevin and Perrin and Matthew were more into hip hop and they came to us wanting to fuse the two styles so we all had our influence on each other and when we picked up Bobby who is a massive Latin head our sound just continued to develop.”

Whatever the beginnings, the sound these guys produce is as amazing and full as only a ten member band can achieve. The boys, who’ve just recorded two singles, hope to release an album within the next six months and are currently gearing up for the Bellingen Global Carnival. â€œOur shows are really high energy, we'll definitely be playing our new singles along with a few of the older tracks but we try not to plan too much, we're unpredictable and like to improvise during our sets.”

Catch Jumbledat at the Bellingen Global Carnival from October 2-4. If you can't make the trip south, they're also playing the QUT Spiegeltent on September 20.