Ghost Funk bandleader covers a range of topics ahead of band’s Tuesday show in Minneapolis, amidst U.S. tour
Minneapolis — Ghost Funk Orchestra returns to the Twin Cities with a show at The Green Room in Uptown Tuesday.
Don’t miss it, if you like psychedelic soul-funk (tickets + more information here).
Ghost Funk bandleader and multi-instrumentalist Seth Applebaum chatted with Jam in the Stream from the road this week. The band is in the midst of a U.S. tour this month that’s taking them through the South, West, Midwest, Canada and back home to Brooklyn.
“It’s been going really well so far,” he said. “The heat has been a factor that we have had to work with really quickly. It’s August, and we were playing Tennesee and the South. The heat was unrelenting. But the turnout has been good. We just played Austin and had a really big turnout. That (showing) would have been crazy if it wasn’t a Monday night.”
Austin, Texas is a destination for the psych rock scene, and the band played the beloved psychedelic rock festival, Levitation last October.
“That’s how a lot of folks we talked to in the crowd found out about us,” Applebaum said.
Applebaum discussed much of the band’s activities over the past year since it last played St. Paul’s Turf Club in April, 2023 (Applebaum also granted an interview before last year’s show; read that writeup here).
For one, this tour has the band touring much deeper in the personnel department than last year, when stages such as Turf Club’s forced the band to pare things down.
“I think we are double the size that we were when we played the Turf Club,” he said. “That was the smallest (configuration). This time, we are coming back with the largest version of the band that we have ever had on the road.”
That includes four brass players and a pair of singers.
“I think it is going to be 11 of us,” he said.
Ghost Funk’s latest studio effort is available for streaming on all of the platforms. It’s so damn funky.
The band’s latest album, A Trip to the Moon was released earlier this year. It features recordings from NASA’s Apollo Missions.
“It is all public domain,” Applebaum said of the recordings, which immediately transport listeners to space. “I surfaced through those recordings. … I found really interesting sound bites. It is the kind of stuff that if you hired an actor to do it, it wouldn’t sound right. They are experiencing something pretty overwhelming for the first time. This makes it less scientific and more human. … At the shows, people have been asking about the samples.”
Applebaum said he spent hours listening to long stretches of silence, trying to find the right snippets to include.
“It was arduous,” he said.
The last year has seen the band tour extensively, and they’ve earned some prime opening opportunities, including for Grace Potter and Os Mutantes.
“With the new record this year, we slowly ramped up into the year,” he said, noting that most of the gigs earlier were local. This is our first tour of the year.”
The band was scheduled to play Telluride Jazz Festival in Colorado Aug. 9 and Cervantes’ Other Side on Denver Aug. 10. They play Des Moines on Monday. For their full touring schedule this year, go here.
Applebaum noted that the band has gotten some great press lately, including from some U.K. publications and a nice review from Far Out Magazine. Read that here.
The band had the opportunity to play Follow the Arrow Festival in New York, put on in part by keyboardist Marco Benevento, one of the gems of the jam scene.
“We supported Marco back in 2023, three days with him,” Applebaum said. “We got off really well with him and his band. We didn’t sit in with him. But then we did a run of dates with him this April. We already had the rapport. He was calling us up. We have become good friends. There has been a lot of back and forth. He is the kind of dude that when there are more musicians around, he wants to get everybody involved. He has been really good to us. He is a fun presence to be around.”
Benevento and Phish bassist Mike Gordon headlined that festival, and brought a bunch of the festival’s musicians up on stage during one set to perform, including Ghost Funk’s Billy Aukstik on trumpet, James Kelly on trombone, Jared Yee on saxophone, and Stephen Chen on baritone saxophone. Up-and-coming bassist Karina Rykman was another to sit in during the set.
Applebaum talked about his embrace of other genres of music, including the closely related jam and jazz scenes.
“We can hang with the psych crowd just as much as we can hang with the jam crowd,” he said “We get hit up to play jazz festivals. We are by no means a jazz band. But the crowds have been warm to us. It is fun to compile a number of styles.”
On that note, he said of the Telluride Jazz Festival, “The booking for them has skewed pretty far away from traditional jazz. When you see the flyers, you will see the comments say there are no jazz bands in this jazz festival. … But the energy of the bands, everybody started with jazz. All of the bands with few exceptions have jazz in their roots but took it to a place that doesn’t have classic jazz in their identity anymore.”
That leads down to some of the realities of the music industry.
“To get people to go to Telluride, Colo., I don’t know that you could pull all those folks with the living old guard of jazz. I don’t know if that’s enough draw. You have to have fresh blood, and then fresh blood is bending and shaping it into different sounds.”
That’s likely a reason why late jazz goat Miles Davis intentionally helped lead the charge to fuse jazz with rock.
Applebaum said festivals aren’t the ideal setting for traditional forms of jazz anyway.
“To me, those records, that is what I listen to at home almost exclusively, but in terms in going out to see those shows, it is music that is best experienced in a small club. A huge festival, I don’t know if that is it. You want to be close to see what the drummer is doing.”
You’ll get a chance to see, up close and personal, what Ghost Funk Orchestra does (and it is amazing, lemme tell ya’) Tuesday at the Green Room.
