The Smoking Jackets

This past Monday, the all-Tufts piano rock band The Smoking Jackets digitally released its debut EP, “Wolves in Cheap Clothing.” The five-track sampler displays the band’s versatility, with songs that range in feel from the adult contemporary jazz of Jamie Cullum to ironic piano-punk a la Ben Folds. The Daily decided to take an in-depth look this eclectic group of musicians to learn more about the band’s formation, songwriting process and sound, its debut EP and the group’s plans for the future.
What’s in your Jacket?

The Smoking Jackets — consisting of junior Ben Anshutz on keyboard and lead vocals, senior Will Maroni on bass, senior Alex Berdoff on drums, sophomore Connor Ferguson on trumpet and backing vocals, sophomore Matt Davis on alto and tenor saxophones and junior Hanson Gong on baritone saxophone — was formed toward the end of the 2008 fall semester when Anshutz decided he wanted to start a piano-rock band.
“I’d written a few rock tunes for piano and kept hearing horn lines,” Anshutz said. “I dug the idea of piano being the only chordal instruments, [but I also] wanted to try out a full, three-part horn section. It would require us to solve musical problems in interesting ways, so I went out a-hunting.”
Berdoff had previously played with Anshutz in the now-defunct Tufts band Party Hat, and Anshutz gathered the remaining musicians to staff his band through posters, classmates and previous band members.
“Basically, I just threw up flyers around the music building and asked friends in my music classes if they wanted to jam,” Anshutz said. “We started messing around that fall, but really came together in the spring.”

Writing a Smoking Song

The group takes a very improvisational approach to its songwriting process, doing very little of what one would traditionally think of as formal composition and arrangement.
“Ben writes a tune, and he’s just got a piano part and some singing,” Ferguson said. “Ben plays it through once, Alex adds a beat, and we all play different things to see how they sound. We [the horn players] start catching on to what others are doing; like if Matt has a cool line, I’ll do the same thing, but working on a harmony for it. And nothing’s ever written down. Not a single note. Not even chord changes.”
“It comes down to just playing songs over and over again and trying something else cool each time until we find something we all like,” Berdoff added. “It tends to work, though, in my opinion.”
While the group’s lineup has remained constant since its very first jam session, its sound has undergone a little bit of evolution. “We’ve gotten so much better at composition,” Davis said. “I listened to [saxophonist] Jerry DePizzo of O.A.R. a lot, as far as rock saxophone goes, before joining Smoking Jackets, so my initial conception of playing in a rock setting was very solo-oriented. In the first semester playing with the Smoking Jackets, it was kind of a problem.”
“We had this motto for awhile: ‘Everybody needs to play less,’” Berdoff added.
The band’s initial influences ranged from Ben Folds to James Brown, from the Beatles to Stevie Wonder, although Anshutz feels that the sound hasn’t really moved too far from where it started.
“I think we’re still in the ‘early days,’” Anshutz said. “Maybe we’ve gotten a little bit more punk-ish than the first songs we were working on, but I’d say we’re really just establishing a sound now. This is the start.”

A Five-Pack of ‘Wolves’
“Wolves in Cheap Clothing,” the newly-released EP, clocks in at just five songs through which the band must demonstrate both consistency and versatility. An EP, or extended play, format is favored by bands just starting out for its lower production costs, but allows no room for filler material, unlike the EP’s big brother, the LP, or long play. “Wolves” begins gently, with the jazzy, vaguely Broadway-inspired “Cameo.”
“Sometimes you meet people,” Anshutz said. “And then they get all high and mighty on you and forget where they came from. It’s a love song on the surface, but it’s also about being that guy who’s been left behind in the crowd and gets swallowed up by the hustle and bustle.”
The sassy “Ms. Practice” follows, riding a driving piano line reminiscent of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” (1972). The song narrates a story of forbidden love, as Anshutz explained. “I worked at a supermarket when I was 16, [crappy] job. I had to wear a bright orange vest while I bagged groceries and fetched shopping carts. Newport Beach, [Calif.], my hometown, doesn’t just have Silicon Valley but also some other silicon topography, if you catch my drift. It’s basically about that: topography.”
“Wolves” then takes a turn for the decidedly retro, with the ’80s synth sounds, “four-on-the-floor” dance beat and thumping slap-bass line of “Baby, Can You Disco?” In live performances of the song, Anshutz dons an actual keytar, complete with a fuzzy pink guitar strap, and dances about as though struck with a serious case of “Saturday Night Fever” (1977).
The track that follows — “Heartache with a Side of Mayonnaise” — can best be described as an angsty, copyright-infringing, piano-rock mashup. The Smoking Jackets lift a bridge melody from the theme to the TV show “Doug” (1991-1999); the band also copies wholesale the verse instrumentals of Jukebox the Ghost’s “Good Day” (2008). The resulting tune plays like an ironic spoof of Ben Folds — if he were on an old-school Nickelodeon kick.
“So the cat’s out of the bag,” Anshutz said. “It’s about the show ‘Doug.’ Except now Doug is in college, and he hears Roger Klotz taking Patti Mayonnaise’s virginity in the room next door. It’s tragic. He gets all pissed off and curses a lot.”
The final song on the EP is “Karma Kid,” a tune whose soulful piano lines and “la-da-da” choruses call to mind the effortless, lounge-pop sounds of jazz pianist Jamie Cullum. The lyrics paint a decidedly carefree perspective on life in general: “It’s an old-school kind of philosophy/ I just do what I want the world to do back to me/ It’s as simple as the light of day/ Come on be a Karma Kid with me, and let the music take you away.”
In accordance with a pay-it-forward world view, the Smoking Jackets are offering these five songs for free download through numerous outlets, including myspace.com/smokingjacketsrock, thesmokingjackets.bandcamp.com, reverbnation.com/thesmokingjackets and purevolume.com/thesmokingjackets.

Jackets With Dreams

The Smoking Jackets have used the online community extensively to promote awareness of “Wolves in Cheap Clothing” — even the title itself came from a Facebook.com-based fan contest to name the EP, in a move that Berdoff referred to as “crowd-sourcing.” The band plans to encourage further participation from its Internet audience by hosting a remix competition for “Baby, Can You Disco?” Toward the end of April, the Smoking Jackets will be selling physical copies and digital downloads of an extended edition of the EP; this version will include as bonus tracks the winning fan remix of “Baby, Can You Disco?” as well as another original song, “I’m Out,” and an up-tempo cover of Otis Redding’s soul hit, “(Sittin’ On The) Dock Of The Bay” (1968).
While Anshutz and Gong study abroad this semester in India and France, respectively, the band remains on hiatus, but the band is booking several dates in the late spring and early summer, including appearances in New York and Washington, D.C. Though Berdoff and Maroni will both graduate this May, members of The Smoking Jackets are not yet ruling out the possibility of continuing to play together.
“Next year is next year,” Anshutz said. “We’ll see where everybody is in the world, and if we’re near enough to make music together, you better bet you’re ass that’s what we’ll be doing.” - The Tufts Daily