T Bird & the Breaks @ KUTX 1.29.15

T Bird & the Breaks is a big, funky, band.

They’ve got it all: Horns, female singers that swing-it-while-they-sing-it, a fire-in-the-hole rhythm-section of drums, bass, guitar, and keys, and of course…the eponymous gravel-voiced front-man who always leaves it on stage. Formed in 2007 and hailing from the Live Music Capital, T Bird And The Breaks play a style of dance music that has it’s most basic and obvious roots in the funk and soul music of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. It’ll get you dancing. It’ll make you sweat. It’ll make you smile.

But it can’t quite be classified as strictly throw-back, retro, funk/soul. T Bird & the Breaks define “chunk music” as a form of twenty-first century American music consisting of equal parts funk, hip-hop, and rock and rollcharacterized by its rough sonic quality and energetic, visceral performance (commonly served hot with a side of girls and brass). It’s a melting-pot of funk but one that people of all ages, and across musical genres, can dig. The contemporary swagger of The Breaks’ live show especially pays homage to the creativity and positivity of early and golden-age hip-hop. In the last few years they’ve been invited to play shows with artists as eclectic as The Flaming Lips, The Funky Meters, Sting, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and Galactic.

This past week T Bird and the Breaks released their third studio album, Harmonizm, available for digital download, CD. and vinyl. With their record out, the group can focus on bringing their electric, tear-a-hole-in-it, funk-bomb of a live show to a stage near you. You can catch T Bird & the Breaks on Thursday, January 29th at Waterloo Records or you can stream them right here at KUTX!

– Jack Anderson

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