A Young Drum Master’s Futuristic Jazz

You Me and The Lord is a new band led by Ethan Kogan, the Chicago-born, New York-based drummer and conceptualist whose band Nu Music pioneered a new vision of improvisation: one where digital and instrumental improvisers interface to create a virtual reality of musical, literary, and almost filmic worlds. In this new project featuring Nu Music guitarist Emmanuel Michael, legendary bassist Asante Santi Debriano, and electronicist and pianist Henry Paul, Ethan envisions something at once more humble and more freewheeling than what he has previously achieved. You Me and The Lord is a standards-based project in the long tradition of Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis’s quintets, John Coltrane’s quartet, and Keith Jarrett’s turn-of-the-century trio—groups that expanded at profound length upon standard forms—but, cut across with Henry Paul’s freakish internet sound-sculpting and a series of patiently tended literary fragments, characters, and scenes, this new quartet is also always a séance: a site of resurrection where ghostly linguistic meanings may convene, might unravel, and must reorder.

This music brings together lineages of jazz music, electronic music, musique concrète, poetry recitation, and experimental soundscaping. Original literary work will be processed by the modern digital tools and improvised across American jazz standards and American pop hits.