Moppa Elliott met Peter Evan at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where they both studied, and, after moving to New York, founded, alongside with Evans, saxophonist Jon Irabagon and drummer Kevin Shea, the group Mostly Other People Do the Killing, a project conceived as a mean of expression of the bassist’s compositional ambitions. The band’s musical style and idiom is somewhere in between the classical canon of jazz (swing and bebop) and free improvisation, with punctual incursions through the territories of experimental rock and chamber music. Elliott’s compositions are the group’s main focus, although the band’s artistic work is occasionally complemented by idiosyncratic evocations of jazz’s heritage and versions of some of jazz’s masterpieces of the past, namely the music of Art Blakey and Ornette Coleman. The most extreme example of the group’s post-modern approach to history is the recreation, note by note, of Miles Davis’s mythical album, Kind of Blue, a conceptual artistic proposition which has aroused exalted reactions by more conservative sectors of jazz critic and which brought forth a discussion about the limits and the creative potentiality of quotation and imitation as artistic strategy. Similar in terms of its artistic purposes to Gus van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock’s classical movie, Psycho, the project Blue proposes a meditation on the theme of the history’s narrative montage, while at the same time identifying, as Orson Welles did in his film F for Fake, the artist as a forger and an imitator. Such artistic attitude, expressed in ways of critical questioning of the meaning of music in the contemporary world, and of the relevancy of influence and interpretation, constitutes one of the main guidelines of a musical project which overtly assumes its filiation to a post-modernist aesthetic, given its narrative and discursive resonances.

In Guimarães Jazz, the band Mostly Other People Do the Killing, a collective formed by sophisticated instrumentalists of remarkable technique, featuring the aforementioned musicians Moppa Elliott, Jan Irabagon, Kevin Shea and Steve Bernstein, as well as pianist Ron Stabinsky, guitarist Brandon Seabrook and trombonist Dave Taylor, will present their most recent album, Loafer’s Hollow, released in February 2017. In this work, Moppa Elliott, the main composer of the group, explores a music that is simultaneously angular and fluid, based on multi-referential systems inspired by the literary techniques used by the writers to whom some of the pieces are dedicated (namely, Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace) in order to pursue free digressions through several different musical languages and styles, therefore creating a music which is never sounds formulaic or formalist, but rather innovative and defying.