On Friday, May 3rd (technically early-morning 5/4), Joe Russo will stage a rare performance by his experimental outfit the Selcouth Quartet at Toulouse Theatre in New Orleans during Jazz Fest 2024 [get tickets]. Ever since the Joe Russo’s Almost Dead drummer/namesake first announced the project this time last year, it has carried an air of mystery. So, before heading down to NOLA, we decided it was about time to ask, “What the hell is Joe Russo’s Selcouth Quartet?”

The roots of the project go back to summer 2022, when Russo was tapped to open a pair of shows by Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart‘s newly reactivated Planet Drum at The Capitol Theatre. For night one, Joe was going to perform with The Bogie Band, the ten-piece percussion and wind ensemble he formed with longtime collaborator Stuart Bogie. For the other, he was going to debut an all-new, all-improvisational project featuring himself, Bogie, guitarist Jonathan Goldberger (John Zorn), and bassist Jon Shaw, known to JRAD fans as the substitute for Dave Dreiwitz when he is touring with Ween.

Unfortunately, Planet Drum canceled the Capitol Theatre shows and did not reschedule, but Russo stuck with the idea for the new project. The drummer has made plenty of friends in the music industry over his 30-plus-year career, and one of them—Newport Folk and Newport Jazz Festival head Jay Sweet—gave him a standing invitation to record at Flóki Studios on the Northern tip of Iceland. After sitting on the invite for two years, Joe knew he finally had the project he wanted to take into the studio. So, he traveled to the end of the Earth to record an album by a band that wasn’t even a band yet.

“It was conceived in Joe’s mind with the booking at The Capitol, and then it was born there in Iceland,” Bogie told Relix of the band’s inception.

The group’s self-titled debut arrived last fall to praise from jam and jazz worlds alike. Across nine tracks and just over an hour, Selcouth Quartet oscillates between loose, avant jazz improvisations and trancelike meditations. Even the individual tracks themselves, which run anywhere from 2 to 15 minutes long, can jump wildly from one style to the next, as states of instrumental bliss jolt awake with Russo’s ferocious drumming and wild tempo changes in “Unlimited Light” or Goldberger coming alive with “Maggot Brain”-style soloing on “Before We’re Sunken”. As for inspiration, Russo cites the Thrill Jockey records of the 1990s, the experimental scene surrounding the Knitting Factory, and ECM Records, a jazz label featuring many albums recorded in neighboring Nordic countries including Iceland.

One constant that runs through the album is that these compositions, however loosely defined, feel like journeys. Even if it starts slow and is a lengthy song (like the 15-minute album closer “Ólgusjór” that includes 12 minutes of just the sound of crashing waves) it all serves to draw the listener in for the expedition.

“This was a band that had no concept of what it was going to sound like from the moment we walked into that space,” Russo told Ink Link of the recording process. “It was a little daunting at first to think that we had this limited amount of time to create something worthy of the trip, but in the end I think those constraints made it perfect.”

In a similar vein, Selcouth Quartet has limited time constraints for when they can play together live. Russo leads JRAD and myriad other projects including his new improv series in Brooklyn, This Is Gonna Be A Blast. In addition to his work with Antibalas, Bogie is an in-demand session musician who has toured with Arcade Fire and TV On The Radio. Goldberger tours with a variety of collaborators in addition to his composition work for film scores, and Shaw keeps busy with psychedelic indie-folk musician Cass McCombs. But when they are together, the members of Selcouth Quartet thrive because of their varied backgrounds rather than because of them.

“When I was in college, I had a group called Transmission,” Bogie told Relix about an experimental band he played with at the University of Michigan. “I’ve spent the last 30 years missing that—until this group. But there is also the significance of us all being in our 40s. This group feels like the next chapter of those experiences that I had, that I longed for so much. I longed to get into these mathematical but still emotionally ecstatic places with the music and to make music that wasn’t harmonically dependent. You can still feel everyone on their instruments. No one’s hanging on—we’re all driving this thing, charging forward. It has something to do with listening to Led Zeppelin records while we were growing up.”

Given the group’s heavy emphasis on what Russo called “long-form improvisation,” there’s almost certainly a part of him, Bogie, Goldberger, and Shaw that doesn’t know what Selcouth Quartet is. The group was formed as an outlet for unbridled improvisation, and they recorded what they did in the studio just so they could go onstage and tear it all up.

“I’ve played in rock bands with friends all my life and spent years studying jazz—all efforts to continue to develop a vocabulary that enables me to have an open-ended musical conversation,” Shaw told Relix. “You spend all that time doing the preparation and learning all the rules so, eventually, you can throw them out and just play. What makes improv so enjoyable to me is when you get to play with people that you really want to have that conversation with. You find yourself doing things and responding in ways you couldn’t have possibly imagined were it not for their input.”

So, in the end, the only way to truly find out what the hell is Selcouth Quartet is to see it for yourself Friday, May 3rd (technically early-morning 5/4) at Toulouse Theatre in New Orleans. Tickets are on sale here, and check out the band’s album below.

Selcouth Quartet — Selcouth Quartet [Full Album]

Selcouth Quartet is part of Live For Live Music and GMP Live’s 2024 Fest by Nite series in New Orleans during Jazz Fest. Confirmed Fest by Nite 2024 events include: