Ketchy Shuby

Not that long ago, County Grind got obsessed with Miami R&B-jazz ensemble Ketchy Shuby's current aesthetic direction. This first took hold with "Broke Like My Soul," a throwback jam for dancing on backroom hardwood floors with hand-rolled cigar smoke curling in the air.

Now, the band takes an unlikely approach by covering Toronto synth-rock act Austra, which performs at Grand Central this evening. The track chosen is the churning and charming dance number "The Beat & the Pulse" for their December mixtape, titled Downtown Soul Record Singles Club. And judging by what appears to be next week's entry -- Nirvana's "Come as You Are" -- nothing's off-limits for these genre-bending groove riders, who open for Fishbone at Culture Room on Sunday.

One thing to be said for Ketchy Shuby's version of "The Beat & the Pulse" is its brevity. It clocks in at two-and-a-half minutes, while Austra takes six minutes to unpack its moody case. Really, there isn't much structural similarity between the original and the breakneck cover version -- aside from some lyrical crossover and a general intense feel. Both songs' tensions stretch to the repeated line "Feel it break" -- which is also the title of Austra's recent album -- and it's impossible to be numb to it. - Broward New Times

tis Redding nostalgia has been going on for decades, and two men who were responsible for quite a push were Jake and Elwood Blues back in 1980s' The Blues Brothers. Their cover of "Can't Turn You Lose" became a mainstay within the Dan Ackroyd-John Belushi lore and kept Redding rising long after his passing.

Now, Miami soul-funk outfit Ketchy Shuby has released a jam that makes a new jam out of old parts of "Turn You Loose." Originally recorded for the group's 2011 album Tiny Vices but ultimately left off, "Broke Like My Soul" is a smoky throwback jam that explores Jason Joshua Hernandez-Rodriguez's marvelously scratchy vocal range and the band's Fraggle Rock-inspired (their words) accompaniment. - Broward New Times

The retro-soulful Miami men of Ketchy Shuby have a holiday jones, which is fully expressed via A Ketchy Shuby Christmas. The album just made itself available on Tuesday, and there's a little release party scheduled for the Stage this evening (details below). This release caps a busy fall of activity for the guys who were recently covering Austra and Nirvana, and injecting their own funky originals into the blogosphere.

Assuming there's some Scrooges who don't see the point of more Christmas jams -- hear some of the meaty music before turning into an icicle.

There is no greater gift than a good night's sleep, so here we have the first single from the collection, "Santa Betta Not Wake My Girl Up (Ssshhh)."


The only question we have: Jason Joshua Hernandez-Rodriguez, why do you get to sing so loud and passionate when you're trying to get St. Nick to shush? Actually, another question: Is it getting sweaty inside that red suit when you get into a full shimmy? - Broward New Times

Ketchy Shuby lives large on stage and in sound, with up to 10 members pumping out big beats.

The ensemble's colorful infusion of psychedelic, soul, Afrobeat, blues, jazz, reggae, Motown, doo-wop, '70s funk and Latin music is "timeless yet fresh, with a lot of heart," said frontman and guitarist Jason Hernandez Rodriguez. "We took our sound from the Miami scene. It's music for our city."



The band, a hybrid of Miami-Dade and Broward musicians, has grown in both sound and size since its start five years ago as a reggae/ska trio. Their name comes from the "Ketchy Shuby" track on Peter Tosh's groundbreaking solo debut reggae album, "Legalize It."

"It's such a beautiful song," said Hernandez, one of the group's founding members. "It was the best part of the record."

Evolving and adding has resulted in the current lineup featuring Miami residents Hernandez and bassists/guitarists Matt Pyat and Mac Moore. They're joined by percussionists Karim Milan of Hialeah and Danny Naval of Pembroke Pines. Charles Gardner on keyboards and organ and Robert Smiley on saxophone and flute are both from Fort Lauderdale, while drummer Daniel "Felix" Garcia is a Davie resident.

Geneva Harrison, on xylophone, is a San Francisco resident who tours and records with the band. Another local drummer, Sandor Davidson, records with the group and can be heard on Ketchy Shuby's "Tiny Vices" disc, due out in mid-May.

Several of Ketchy Shuby's members might also be familiar to fans of Fusik, an instrumental outfit out of Fort Lauderdale. Naval, Garcia, Moore and Gardner perform with the funk-fusion band.

Maturing from a desire to play and have a good time, Hernandez said the guys are getting more serious about their art by investing time and money into a wave of recordings. "Tiny Vices" is the third album to hit this year. Two previous efforts, "No Time to Hate" and "Energy," have dropped in the past several months. - Sun Sentinal

Then you have Ketchy Shuby, which are just plain amazing. Their direction as a soul band is so refreshing to me and straight up takes me back to a simpler time that I never really experienced (because I wasn’t alive in the 60's and 70's). Ketchy Shuby is definitely dope on record and in person. - The 305/Complex

Most people wouldn’t hear the groove in Nirvana’s “Come As You Are”, but Miami soul act Ketchy Shuby, lead by the throat-straining vocals of Jason Joshua Hernandez-Rodriguez, has turned the Nevermind track into a Stax-esque (and Nevermind Miami-worthy) jam on its new release, Downtown Soul. Comprised mostly of covers, the 10-song collection features funkdafied renditions of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Who Shot Ya?”, The Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb”, Ween’s “Ocean Man”, and “Broke Like My Soul”, a Ketchy Shuby original so indebted to Otis Redding’s “Can’t Turn You Loose” that the band lists the King of Soul as a co-songwriter. You can stream the entire release below and download it for free on Ketchy Shuby’s bandcamp. - Beached Miami

Miami soul scientists Ketchy Shuby's latest video is a psychedelic/schizophrenic take on Nirvana's "Come as You Are." Where Nirvana's version was soaked in bleach and wet with warble, Ketchy Shuby takes the jam out into the South Florida sun to bake, and its arrangement sounds like it could be a bonus track from Eccentric Soul: The Deep City Label. The star of the clip is vocalist/Strat-man Jason Joshua Hernandez-Rodriguez; as Nirvana's signature guitar line is stripped down to a Stax Records bass line, we follow our hero, JJ He-Ro, as he peels himself out of bed and groggily takes on the day.

This is the second time in less than a week that Hernandez-Rodriguez has been through the ringer on the little screen. In Mayday/Garcia's "Make Some Noise (Freestyle)," he gets royally tanked and into a slew of barroom brawls. In this vid, he gets attacked and chased by a possessed Jerry Garcia doll. Hernandez-Rodriguez's unruly locks and maniacal expressions look amazing onscreen; we hope to see this wild man in a lot more videos.

Kurt and company make a few bootleg cameos too! It isn't until the song is almost over and the unhinged laughter starts to fade that we hear the well-known riff, as played in a puddle on saxophone.



Ketchy Shuby's "Come as You Are" takes what Charles Bradley & the Menahan Street Band did to "Stay Away" on Spin's Newermind compilation and chases it down with a couple of space cakes.

Come as You Are by KETCHYSHUBY

They've included a little bonus material at the end of the video. It looks like bassist Matt Pyatt is hanging outside of CocoWalk, across from Johnny Rockets, and trying to cheer up a girl who may be named Dr. Shoemaker with some jokes. She claims to have a lot of patience, or patients.
- Miami New Times

These days, soul music is a genre often stuck in the side aisle of the record store or passed off onto smoky cafés and '70s reunion shows. The originators of American soul music — Ray Charles, Otis Redding, and early James Brown — commandeered ears when they blasted onto the scene with this new style in the '50s and '60s. The movement has splintered into a number of subgenres worth exploring, including Detroit Motown soul, Stax Records Memphis soul, psychedelic soul, Philly soul, Chicago soul, and, now, downtown soul. That last category was invented by the local stone groovers of Ketchy Shuby in order to describe their band's sound.


Elizabeth Ferguson
Ketchy Shuby's debut record, NOTIMETOHATE, will be released in November on Tomorrows People Recordings.
Location Info
Tobacco Road

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Tobacco Road
626 S. Miami Ave.
Miami, FL 33130 Category: Music Venues Region: Central Dade Menu Photos
Details
Saturday, October 24: At Buddhafest: Halloween Monster Bash. Tobacco Road, 626 S. Miami Ave., Miami. Doors open at 5 p.m. Admission is $10. Ages 21+ with ID. 305-374-1198. Tuesday, October 27: Bougainvillea's Old Florida Tavern, 7221 SW 58th Ave., South Miami. Show begins at 8 p.m. Admission is free. 305-669-8577. facebook.com/ketchyshuby; myspace.com/ketchyshubymia
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Ketchy Shuby is made up of six members, all in their mid-20s, whose roots range from Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico to Broward and Dade counties. Formed in 2008, the outfit has quickly created a buzz on the live circuit by combining new sound with old soul to earn its "downtown" moniker. "It's jazz, it's '60s rock, Afrobeat, reggae, ska..." explains the group's 28-year-old lead vocalist and guitar player, Jason Joshua Hernandez-Rodriguez, AKA Jay.

Percussionist Danny Quinto adds, "Our music is Curtis Mayfield, Santana, Miles Davis, Fania All-Stars, mixed with MGMT, Kings of Leon, and the Budos Band, to name a few."

Many bands advertise their sets as a melting pot of influences — and then play to their singular strengths. But Ketchy's versatility is no joke. Bassist Mack Moore skanks to reggae rhythms while Camilo Parisi channels Latin fusion on the electric guitar. Drummer Sandor Davidson keeps proper pace for their musical time warp, and sax player Bob Smiley adds the bounce. "We started out playing more roots reggae and ska," Quinto says. "The group was first called Mad Anxiety and consisted of myself, Jay, and Camilo. We would jam all the time, but the band really started to grow when we added Mack and Sandor last year, and most recently our sax player, Bob."

Jam sessions turn into recording fodder, and live shows morph into improvised extended cuts. At a Ketchy performance, each set is a different experience with the same common denominator. The group's name is taken from the chorus of the Peter Tosh track "Ketchy Shuby." ("Come make we play some ketchy shuby/And when me shuby, you feel ketchy.") Though it's unclear what Tosh's ketchy shuby is exactly — many listeners say the song is clearly an allusion to sex; others have claimed it's a play on catchy shubby, a variation of the game cricket — the song exemplifies the type of mellow but happy reggae-influenced grooves found on the band's debut four-song record, titled NOTIMETOHATE and coming this November.

"Some of the song ideas we had come up with originally as Mad Anxiety — like our first single, "Expand Your Soul," Jay says. "But all the tracks will combine the old with the new and have our Ketchy style stamped on it." On the single, Jay croons, "Look inside yourself and you will see/That the positive outdoes the negativity/Expand your soul/Open up them doors because they're meant to be open," over a driving reggae riddim that falls between Black Uhuru and the Wailers.

Each of the four songs will be accompanied by a matching video directed by talented local director Jess Weos, and the debut record will be available for free download at ketchyshuby.bandcamp.com, where you can also grab "Expand Your Soul" right now.

Ketchy is one of a handful of newer local bands championing the DIY ethic, but one of the first to put it on paper as a collective through the group's Tomorrows People imprint. "It promotes good music in general and allows us to mold our own sound under our own umbrella," Jay explains. "A lot of labels aren't concerned with the actual music, just the numbers. And that's not what we're about." So far, Tomorrows People has recruited a grip of funky locals and offshoots, inc - Miami New Times