Cody Hollow: Vocals/percussion
Chris Entz: Guitar
Phil Stempin: Bass
Sam McKenzie: Drums/percussion
Jarom Hein: Trumpet
Sam White: Tenor sax
Chad Reep: Trombone
Next gigs
Check out Reverend Slanky at the Badlander on Friday, Feb. 22, at 9 p.m. and the Union Club on Feb. 29 at 9:30 p.m.
Full disclosure: The writer played piano and keyboards with Reverend Slanky on several occasions in the spring and summer of 2007.
Score one for the band geeks.
A big one. All those guys holed up in the music practice rooms, the ones who didn’t take the second-year gym elective, the ones in the marching band and the pep band?
Almost to a man, they’re Reverend Slanky. And the reverend, holding not a holy book but the lead sheet to a James Brown tune, has quite a congregation in the bars of Missoula, as anyone who has attended one of its shows will testify.
Those who know the band certainly have felt their hyper-percussive beats reverberate through their feet in the last couple of years on the floor of the Top Hat, the Other Side, the Badlander and every outdoor venue where they have injected a litany of funk and soul, R&B and Afro-Cuban beats - Al Green to Stevie Wonder to Beck - into the Missoula music scene.
For nearly two years, ever since five of its original musicians gathered for a wedding gig in Big Sky in 2006, has Reverend Slanky been a prominent member of the scene as an eight-piece horn band that regularly has people of all ages - and by all ages, we mean 18 to 90 - whipped into a frenzy of everything from Motown classics to the Grateful Dead.
“There’s always a need for a band like Slanky, because everybody likes to dance and people love having parties,” said trombone player Chad Reep, one of three horn players in the group.
Largely comprising University of Montana students and graduates (inluding Reep, a band teacher at Big Sky High School), Slanky is the essence of a band formed by music majors and educated musicians.
“We’re all trained musicians, all jazz musicians,” said founding member Cody Hollow, lead singer and percussionist, who regularly brings a small warehouse-full of instruments to the shows. “It’s music that’s fun to listen to, but also fun to dance to. I think we branch out to different audiences. All the older people in town dig it because it’s music they grew up with and the young people love it because it’s retro.”
Show up wherever Slanky is playing, and you’ll see 20-somethings bodily enthralled next to dancers twice their age. Slanky’s performances have more an air of a Southern tent revival than a bar gig.
It was a sound missing from the bar scene, for sure. In a town with a hundred upstart bands playing original music - for good and bad - Reverend Slanky is a throwback to the old cover tunes, and those covers still have legs today with everyone from Gen Y to baby boomers.
To ask its members, Reverend Slanky is exactly what this town needed when it formed.
“The whole point of this band is to keep people moving,” said lead guitarist Chris Entz, former lead guitarist for The Hermans, who joined the band last summer after the departure of Blake Ingram. “We make people move and we pack venues.”
That Slanky does pack the house is not just a testament to how tight their sound is but also to young people’s love of the classics. Much of Slanky’s music, with songs by Marvin Gaye, Parliament, Chicago and the Tower of Power, was written long before its younger audience was born.
“When we break out Stevie (Wonder), they know that ... ,” said Hollow. “They don’t know where they know it, but they know it.”
Keyboard player Bryan Bakevich, and East Coast native who at 30 is the band’s oldest member, said Slanky filled a niche in Missoula at the perfect time. While there are jazz fans, and there are indie rock fans, there is also a large number of people who simply want something to groove to.
“There’s no other band that really does that stuff here,” said Bakevich, who, like three other members of Slanky, play in the University of Montana jazz program. “Any time I go see music on the East Coast, it’s either serious, sit-down music, or get-down-and-dance-all-night music.”
Bakevich and saxophone player Sam White are responsible for most of the transcriptions and arrangements the band relies on, penciling out lead sheets and horn parts just by listening to the tunes.
While Slanky is known for its tight arrangements, it will occasionally bust out a funk jam that is almost all improvisational. So in between a Maceo Parker or Earth, Wind and Fire cover, the audience might get bombarded with jam-band material or something slower, depending on the gig.
“This band is pretty adaptable,” said Hollow. “We can play a big party at a bar, but also mellow out a bit, like at a wedding.”
Whatever the gig, the members of Reverend Slanky usually show up dressed in randomly selected clothes straight out of the dryer, wearing big hats, loud ties, obnoxious sport coats, green shoes, purple hearts or blue diamonds.
Asked to explain the band’s popularity, bass player Stempin said:
“It’s probably our studly, sexy bodies. But we also like to dress stupid. And we have these grooves that make it so people can’t help but dance, anyway.”
Stempin alludes to a trait of Slanky that not all bands enjoy, especially one with eight members: They all get along and share a serious commitment to the music while still managing to goof around like kids.
“Even if we played for only 10 people, we really don’t care,” said trombone player Reep. “We’re just having a blast on the stage.”
“It takes a lot of weird dedication to get by,” added Stempin. “It’s taken a ton of work behind the scenes. We’re still just a bar band, we’re finally getting our name out there.”
As Reverend Slanky keeps adding new tunes and getting new gigs (they debut at the Union Club next Friday, Feb. 29), their fan base continues to grow.
“It fits right away,” said Stempin. “That’s a special thing. And that’s why, I think, people keep showing up.”
Reach reporter Jamie Kelly at 523-5254 or at jkelly@missoulian.com.
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