By Ruth Finch<\/p>\n
The LabRats are a genre-spanning jazz quartet that\u2019s breaking into a new frontier: musical theater. While the band can usually be found at the Torch Club on Sunday at their improv sessions, on March 21 they\u2019ll be providing live accompaniment to a cast of Sacramento rappers and dancers at Sac Dance Lab.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The band\u2019s drummer, Jacob Swedlow, has written and produced a hip hop opera adaptation of the 1967 French-Italian neo-noir classic \u201cLe Samoura\u00ef.\u201d Swedlow named the musical \u201cWho is Jef Costello?\u201d<\/a> for the film\u2019s titular antihero, a hitman caught between a detective and his former employer, both of which want him out of the picture.\u00a0<\/p>\n The cast of the musical includes an ensemble of local musicians, including Jakhari Smith, Dogpatch, EGDABEAST with rapper Rudy Kalma starring as Jef Costello. The soundtrack to the musical, recorded by LabRats, will also be released as an album.<\/p>\n In September, the Sacramento Office of Art and Culture selected 200 local artists who would be receiving a monthly stipend of $850<\/a> for a year as part of $2.04 million fund from the American Rescue Plan Act issued to the City. Swedlow was one of the artists selected for this Creative Growth Fellowship Program; he\u2019s used the funds to help make this opera a reality.<\/p>\n How has the Creative Growth Fellowship helped you create \u201cWho is Jef Costello?\u201d<\/p>\n I am able to take the time I need to produce something like this. It\u2019s stressful because I\u2019m a gigging musician. I teach, and that\u2019s how I make my money to have my apartment [and] exist. Starting this month and next month, I\u2019m saying \u2018no\u2019 to a lot of stuff. I\u2019m creating that time for myself\u00a0 to come [rehearse] every day.\u00a0<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been working almost every single day on lighting. Usually, those are times where I teach and this grant allows me a cushion to be able to do projects like this.<\/p>\n Why did you want to write a hip hop opera?\u00a0<\/p>\n The movie that this musical is based on, called [\u201cLe Samoura\u00ef\u201d] \u2026 It was kind of like the first anti-hero movie story, it inspired other movies like \u201cTaxi Driver\u201d and the classic anti-hero downfall story. I was so inspired by the soundtrack of the movie and just how it sounded, even the footsteps on the sidewalk. And I just think that it\u2019s so theatrical and so over the top, and I think it just makes for a cool musical experience. It just made logical sense in my head to take that and make an album about the concepts and then take the album and then apply it to a musical format.\u00a0<\/p>\n What are the big differences between the movie and your adaptation?<\/p>\n We\u2019re forcing upon a lot more of a narrative. The movie is almost three hours long and only four things happen in it. It\u2019s very artful. It\u2019s very slow, and very vague. You can go on online and kind of just see how many interpretations people can grab out of it. And for me, the big interpretation was that freedom is an illusion. You\u2019re kind of a product of your environment.\u00a0<\/p>\n We should also have sympathy for those whose lives we don\u2019t understand. Specifically, in the context of our anti-hero, he\u2019s very clearly in a kill or be killed situation and has been for several years, almost his whole life.\u00a0<\/p>\n What was it like collaborating with this many musicians to record the album?<\/p>\n It was a huge collaboration between all of our favorite people to work with in the music scene. That\u2019s kind of how this project got started in the first place. It gave us an excuse to play with some of our favorite people, and it just grew into this thing.<\/p>\n It\u2019s been a different side of us. We\u2019ve gotten a chance to kind of expand the musical palette. We\u2019re excited for everyone to hear what that is going to entail once it finally comes out.\u00a0<\/p>\n What\u2019s your musical inspiration for this project? Are you a fan of musicals?\u00a0<\/p>\n I\u2019m a huge fan of musicals. I\u2019m primarily a trained jazz musician. There\u2019s a long tradition of studying popular music and adapting that music to your stylings. And at the time when Broadway was becoming so huge and popular, everyone was playing Broadway tunes.\u00a0<\/p>\n All the jazz musicians would go to Broadway [shows] to write out the chord changes and then play them at the clubs. Studying musicals was a big part of my own personal [journey.] I took that upon myself to study that tradition to just become more well informed in the music. \u2026 What does that look like in 2026? That looks like playing a popular style in a creative way, just like how people were doing it in the \u201940s.<\/p>\n Are there any unique challenges that you guys have faced trying to coordinate playing live to choreography? I imagine that might be kind of difficult coming from a gigging, improvising musician\u2019s standpoint.<\/p>\n That\u2019s definitely going to be a fun challenge because we count off songs wildly different tempo-wise from night to night wherever we\u2019re feeling the song. But we can\u2019t do that now, right? Not only are there dancers, but we\u2019ve also routed lighting, like timed lighting that happens. So, we\u2019re going to be listening to a click track that only the musicians can hear. That will keep us completely in time with the dancers and the lighting. And usually we record our music to a click track anyway, so that\u2019s not like a huge difference. But, yeah, we\u2019re going to be playing our music in ways that we\u2019ve never played it before.<\/p>\n \u201cWho Is Jef Costello?\u201d is a live theatrical album release of LabRats\u2019 \u201cTiger in the Jungle,\u201d supported by choreography and staging by Sac Dance Lab. The show is all ages. Showtimes are 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday, March 21 at Sac Dance Lab, 1807 Tribute Road in Sacramento. Tickets here<\/a>.<\/p>\n This story was funded by the City of Sacramento\u2019s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento<\/a>. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, CapRadio, Capitol Weekly, Hmong Daily News, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our \u201cSac Art Pulse\u201d newsletter here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Ruth Finch The LabRats are a genre-spanning jazz quartet that\u2019s breaking into a new frontier: musical theater.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":200336,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[93094,93095,121,123,122],"class_list":{"0":"post-200335","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sacramento","8":"tag-labrats","9":"tag-sac-dance-lab","10":"tag-sacramento","11":"tag-sacramento-headlines","12":"tag-sacramento-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200335\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/200336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}