A rotating roster, improvisation and structured jams. Sounds like jazz? It is … sort of.
You may have seen Hello Society at any number of events around Foggy Bottom since the band's inception in the spring of 2005 playing as the house band at a performance by Think Tank, a spoken-word group on campus at the time. At the show, pianist Campbell Charshee, drummer Corey Brekher, a senior, trumpeter Philippe Chow, a junior, and then-members John Canter (saxophone) and Tash Neal (bass) met the band's would-be vocalist, junior Dan Cohn. Though they played dozens of shows billed under the name Speak No Evil, the band had to change its name due to a conflict with a West Coast heavy metal band. As Charshee puts it, "We'd rather play than fight with a bunch of forty-something washouts hanging onto their last glimmer of hope. Besides," he adds, "the new name fits the new sound better anyway."
Indeed, it does. Though Speak No Evil may be an appropriate name for the hip-hop driven jazz-fusion band that they were, the newly renamed Hello Society is much more fitting for the band in its current incarnation. With Charshee, Brekher, and Chow still on the piano, drums, and trumpet (respectively), the band has added GW graduate Steve Perkins on the bass and sophomore Gabriel Morales-Bermudez Pereyra on the alto saxophone. Cohn remains an absentee member of the band until his return this May from his semester abroad in Africa.
Along with these new members has come an aforementioned new sound. Without a vocalist to groove behind, the band has recently turned away from its original hip-hop roots and moved more towards the complexity of post-rock and modern jazz, along the lines of one of Brekher's favorite bands, Tortoise.
In its current form, the founding members of Hello Society likens itself to music that has "jazz chops with a rock spirit." With members who draw their influences from both ends of the musical spectrum, it's no surprise that their music varies so much in its style. Chow is the most traditional of the group (as well as "the brainiac" and the conflict settling "arbiter", according to Brekher,) and cites Freddy Hubbard and Roy Hargrove as some of his horn-blowing heroes. Bassist Steve Perkins, who Charshee describes as a "very creative soloist," graduated from GW last year as a computer science major and is currently the band's webmaster at hellosociety.com.
You may have seen Hello Society at any number of events around Foggy Bottom since the band's inception in the spring of 2005 playing as the house band at a performance by Think Tank, a spoken-word group on campus at the time. At the show, pianist Campbell Charshee, drummer Corey Brekher, a senior, trumpeter Philippe Chow, a junior, and then-members John Canter (saxophone) and Tash Neal (bass) met the band's would-be vocalist, junior Dan Cohn. Though they played dozens of shows billed under the name Speak No Evil, the band had to change its name due to a conflict with a West Coast heavy metal band. As Charshee puts it, "We'd rather play than fight with a bunch of forty-something washouts hanging onto their last glimmer of hope. Besides," he adds, "the new name fits the new sound better anyway."
Indeed, it does. Though Speak No Evil may be an appropriate name for the hip-hop driven jazz-fusion band that they were, the newly renamed Hello Society is much more fitting for the band in its current incarnation. With Charshee, Brekher, and Chow still on the piano, drums, and trumpet (respectively), the band has added GW graduate Steve Perkins on the bass and sophomore Gabriel Morales-Bermudez Pereyra on the alto saxophone. Cohn remains an absentee member of the band until his return this May from his semester abroad in Africa.
Along with these new members has come an aforementioned new sound. Without a vocalist to groove behind, the band has recently turned away from its original hip-hop roots and moved more towards the complexity of post-rock and modern jazz, along the lines of one of Brekher's favorite bands, Tortoise.
In its current form, the founding members of Hello Society likens itself to music that has "jazz chops with a rock spirit." With members who draw their influences from both ends of the musical spectrum, it's no surprise that their music varies so much in its style. Chow is the most traditional of the group (as well as "the brainiac" and the conflict settling "arbiter", according to Brekher,) and cites Freddy Hubbard and Roy Hargrove as some of his horn-blowing heroes. Bassist Steve Perkins, who Charshee describes as a "very creative soloist," graduated from GW last year as a computer science major and is currently the band's webmaster at hellosociety.com.
