Talibam!

New York duo Talibam! might be remembered in a variety of ways: as a classic keys/drums free jazz duo, as obnoxious Dadaist provocateurs with an uncanny sense of musical history, as members of the D.I.Y. Brooklyn underground. Given their name and occasionally lo-fi surrealism, they might also be just as easily written off as goofballs, but keyboardist Matthew Mottel and drummer Kevin Shea could never be accused of slacking.

Mottel, raised in Manhattan and present on the downtown jazz scene as a teenager, crossed paths with Shea, born in Pittsburgh, in Brooklyn, members of the first generation of the post-downtown jazz diaspora. Their earliest CD-Rs were packaged in cut-up Bruce Springsteen LP jackets and sounded, despite the attitude, like the groove-heavy organ trio Medeski, Martin & Wood. They toured and worked frequently, playing multiple times a week in New York in a way that was almost unthinkable in that era, moving between under-the-radar Brooklyn parties and the dwindling Manhattan jazz scene, including Tonic. Some releases came packaged in folded-up pages from Vice magazine, or blasted with spray paint, sometimes to the point of making the CD-Rs unplayable.

Collaborations were frequent, including live work the Karole Armitage dance company, trumpet player and sometimes bandmember Ed Bear, free jazz saxophonist Daniel Carter (on 2009's The New Nixon Tapes), and others. Their live show was a spastic attack of obscene improvised comedy, song fragments, and start-stop free jams. In 2009, the duo signed with the legendary New York avant-garde label ESP-Disk and recorded Boogie in the Breeze Blocks, which realized Mottel and Shea's surreal vision with a rich palette of horns, vocalists, guitars, studio layerings, skits, and field recordings.

Active by themselves as well, Mottel worked with the USA Is a Monster founder Colin Matthews in the CSC Funk Band, and Shea toured with bassist Moppa Elliott's Mostly Other People Do the Killing.