Blood and Bone Orchestra

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The Blood and Bone Orchestra [henceforth, BABO] is an experimental, improvisatory music group that began in the early twenty-first century in Rochester, New York. Their sound has been described as "a turn off the road at the MC5's 'Black to Comm'; keep going past the Stooges' 'LA Blues'". Other frequent comparisons are to Boredoms, Sun Ra, and Cecil Taylor. Their first show under this name was at one of the Synaesthesia events, though they had been performing together under the name "Evidence" for several months previous to this and were also briefly known as "Surface" before discovering that these names already belonged to other groups.

BABO consists of five members, though not all five have performed at every concert or on every recording, and the band frequently asks others to perform as well. Every member plays a wide variety of instruments. They include:

Ed Downey primarily plays tenor and C-melody saxophone, sings, and sometimes plays piano, violin, guitar, or other various instruments. Downey has had a long and complex career, deep in the "underground" of the music world. As a saxophonist, he explored the furthest-out music in the sixties, playing with everyone from Ornette Coleman to (most famously) the MC5. Although his musical experience was grounded in jazz (and he can still listen to minute portions of hundreds of old avant-garde jazz records and identify both the song and the individual players), he started to explore rock and particularly folk-rock in the seventies (he had in fact actually begun his musical career as a teen-ager in a Gene Vincent-style rock and roll combo called "the Silver Satans"). Playing in bands like the Right On Time Rangers, he re-invented himself as Bob Dylan-style guitarist and singer with an ability to craft lyrics with remarkable beauty, depth, and complexity, often spontaneously improvising them. As the years went on, he concentrated on raising his family, getting a job as a literature teacher, but never gave up music, and played in "AnderDown and Taylor", which evolved into the longest-lasting of his projects, the Doughnut Boys, which played throughout the 80s and 90s, changing membership and styles along the way. Although it began as an acoustic folk-rock group with elements of country & western, by the turn of the millennium it had become so different and so widely experimental that it developed a separate name, "the Outer Doughnut Boys," which, with subsequent personnel changes, became "the Filth" and finally "Eating Animals". The Eating Animals are widely recognized as seminal groups in what became the distinctive "Rochester Sound," playing along with groups like Diana Behlke.

Ian Downey is Ed Downey's son, and plays cello, guitar, and various electronic instruments. Ian and his father started playing music together at a very early age: from earlier than he can remember, they and Ian's sister would turn on a tape recorder in their small one-bedroom apartment, pull out pots and pans, and make "monster music" - conceived as music that someone entirely unhuman would create. For most of his life, it was perfectly natural that when family got together (for instance, with their family friends, the Teret family), some kind of free improvization or sing-along would occur. There was, it need hardly be said, no thought of "commercial" gain or even public acclaim - they were simply happy to play together in their living room. When he was five, he tried fooling around with a cello and enjoyed it, so for his sixth birthday, his parents get him a rented cello and cello lessons. He then studied classical cello for many years, before putting it down in favor of an electric guitar to play rock and roll. While at college in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he became interested in the advances in rock music that were occurring there - he for instance sites as one of his main influences the 1985, on Carbon Records, whose singer, Joe Vernet, was also in the Sottile Crime Family with Ian's college girlfriend, Alexis Sottile. Moving back to Rochester, NY, Ian started up a hardcore band called the Uncomfortable People. But he also began to renew his interest in the cello, especially in its wide experimental possibilities (the cello has a far broader potential sound-pallet than the guitar). Improvising with his father in the Outer Doughnut Boys and the Eating Animals, he developed many sonic directions for his instrument.

Chris Reeg plays bass (both string doublebass and electric bass guitar), electric slide guitar, and keyboards. Before playing with the Blood and Bone Orchestra, Reeg was in an improvisatory group called "Suffer" with Darren DeWispelaire, among others. He is also a graphic artist and designs much of the artwork for BABO releases, as well as the official BABO website. Along with all of this, Reeg co-owns his own design business, records solo music, and lives with his wife and two children.

Darren DeWispelaire plays drums and trumpet. Besides playing in Suffer, before BABO, Darren has for several years been the front man of the power pop band Veluxe. He owns a studio in downtown Rochester and has played various instruments for many bands over the years.