Big is beautiful

Fat Mama define their own jam

By Michael Endelman

Fat Mama play Bowdoin College at Jack Magee’s Pub, Thursday, November 30, at 9 p.m.

LOOMING LARGE: Fat Mama have quickly assimilated into New England’s jam-band circuit.

Currently living in Jamestown, Rhode Island, the septet known as Fat Mama moved east from Colorado in the fall of ‘99 with one self-produced CD, a couple of summer-long tours, and some encouraging reviews under their belt. They’ve quickly assimilated into New England’s jam-band circuit, playing with blues-rock combos and Phish clones. Over the phone from Colorado, keyboardist Erik Deutsch tries to be diplomatic about their presence in the jam-band scene. “It’s flattering to be included in anything, and it usually brings an audience with open ears, but we don’t necessarily do energetic solos, we don’t have ‘climax’ moments, and we’re not always funky, so people don’t always get what they expect.”

With a bootylicious name culled from a Mwandishi-era Herbie Hancock tune, the Fat Mama fellas are used to the funk pigeonholing. “There is that pressure to provide feel-good music,” says Deutsch. “A promoter will come up to us and say, ‘We need more funky stuff!’ ” Fortunately the band follow their own twisted logic, which is often danceable but is just as likely to mutate into dubbed-out ambiance, a turntablist breakdown, or paint-peeling squalls of sound. “It’s an aural travelogue of sorts,” Deutsch explains. “We try to push the sonic envelope to create cool tones, gigantic soundscapes, new textures, and waves of layers.” It’s this fascination with sound — analog and digital, acoustic and electric, pure and processed — that leads the already stage-crowding seven-piece to cart around an arsenal of analog keyboards and frequency-phreaking guitar pedals, plus two turntables and a vibraphone. And that connects Fat Mama to sound-boy contemporaries like elliptical Brooklyn beatmeister Bill Laswell, Chicago’s post-rock crew, and the heady progressives on NYC’s downtown scene.

Fat Mama are also pretty funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny — though there are usually a few hoots and hollers when they pull out their spookadelic version of Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” — but tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek funny. As when they drop a jungle breakbeat in the middle of the aforementioned classic-rock nugget, or when they turn the tightly composed pathos of “Eleanor Rigby” into a sprawling, trance-inducing epic. There’s a track from their album Mamatus (available through www.fatmama.com) called “The New Rock Thing” that’s neither new- nor rock-sounding — rather, it’s a composed trip through Otis Redding-style R&B rave-ups, mystical swing vamps borrowed from John Coltrane’s “Olé,” and plaintive piano soliloquies that end in a sludgy, horn-led riff wreck.

Village Voice scribe Richard Gehr remarked that Fat Mama are one of the few bands comfortable at both the Wetlands and the Knitting Factory (the former being New York’s jam-band HQ and the latter being the downtown jazz mecca). Which means a little more hip shaking than avant-types are used to and a little more sophistication than the granola-rock bunch usually hear. A good thing altogether.