Making avant-garde jazz in a mostly killing climate

The record business is a sinkhole no matter which way you turn.

But in this troubled economy, Moppa Elliott chose an especially tough path: playing in an avant-garde bop band named Mostly Other People Do the Killing, and starting his own tiny jazz label, Hot Cup.

Elliott, 30, a bassist/composer born in Factoryville, says, "Look, we're just a couple of over-schooled jazz guys who want to play. The problem is that most jazz is not only boring and bad, but irrelevant."

The mission of MOPDtK: Make valid 21st-century jazz that his label will release. That's a big load with a long haul.

Like many musician kids, Elliott did play in rock, country, wedding, and metal bands while growing up. "Oh, I have pop chops," he says with a laugh.

For evidence, he describes his collection of 10,000 albums, from Patsy Cline to the Roots. He's even in a cover band, led by MOPDtK saxophonist Jon Irabagon. It's called Starship's Journey: A Tribute to the Music of the '80s.

"We sight-read tunes on stage and read all guitar and sax solos in unison," Elliott says. "It's fun."

Playing in diverse bands in his old hometown made him the madly diverse jazz player and composer he is now.

The quartet, playing tomorrow at Chris' Jazz Cafe, formed in 2003 and has many influences in common, but each member has his own oddball diversity. Drummer Kevin Shea's knowledge of pop is encyclopedic. Irabagon loves Billy Joel, and so "Allentown" is skewered on the band's 2008 album, This Is Our Moosic. "MOPDtK sounds like it does because all of us played so much different music and can draw upon all of it," Elliott says. "We can respect other musicians without worshipping them."

Elliott grows serious talking about his love of the game, his adoration of post-bop music, and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, whose free-jazz classics of the '50s and '60s have inspired both MOPDtK's music and its cover art. Both Shamokin!!! (2007) and This Is Our Moosic look like Coleman albums of yore.

Elliott, Irabagon, trumpeter Peter Evans, and Shea play with a visceral and often irreverent potency. They care about the modern jazz tradition so much they skewer it with gleeful passion. Yet Elliott's not too serious. Like many of his song titles ("Andover," "Evans City," "Baden"), the albums borrow their names from cities in Pennsy.

"My titles come from the idea that names of jazz songs are pretty lame most of the time," he says. "Admit it: As a state, Pennsylvania has a high percentage of quirky, absurd town names . . . including the town where I grew up, Factoryville, in which there is not, nor was there ever, a factory."

Recently relocated to New York, Elliott reminds me that his old hometown just surpassed the 1,000 mark in population; voted for Barack Obama; had a bank until it was robbed and closed; and that baseball player Christy Mathewson grew up there.

Plus, Factoryville is but miles from the Poconos, a snowy region with an avid jazz scene filled with giants like Phil Woods and David Liebman.

"Pennsylvania to me is kind of funny, but also nostalgic," Elliott says. "I spend a lot of time there since my parents still live in Factoryville. And naming my tunes after those cities is also because I find it all strangely inspirational."

As for the band's name, it's from a statement by Russian instrument inventor Leon Theremin: "Stalin wasn't bad. . . . It was mostly other people did all the killing."

Before recording his band's eponymous debut in 2005, Elliott made Pinpoint, a solo album, in 2001. He shopped both projects to jazz labels but found no takers. So he started Hot Cup Records simply as a way to release his music. That led to other projects: oddball jazz Christmas albums such as Yulenog by Hot Cup's graphic designer Nathan Kuruna; Bangin' Your Way Into the Future, by Shea's vocal duo Puttin' on the Ritz; and all three of MOPDtK's efforts. A new MOPDtK album is due out in spring. Baritone saxophonist Charles Evans' The King of All Instruments, to be released in March, is the first Hot Cup release that Elliott is not playing on. "I'd like that to be a trend," he says.

Creating a small label, tough in these times, allows Elliott a brand of niche marketing that even rock indies don't have. "The smallness makes the economics work," he says. "I pressed 1,000 of each [album] and am down to about 200. We're not putting up big numbers at this point, but here's hopin'."

Don Lucoff, an international jazz promoter who owns Pennsylvania's DL Media, calls the current jazz marketplace a level playing field. "Now," he says, "it's all about buzz, not spin, reaching your core audience and creating concentric circles around the core. MOPDtK are not trading in on their good looks and believe in serious music."

Daniel Piotrowski, label manager of Philly's High Two, releases albums by local improvisational jazz cats Shot × Shot because the major labels can't. "Majors don't bother," he says, "because they can't hope to see a hit come from doing anything avant-garde." For major labels, "breaking even" means "not worth doing."

According to Piotrowski, major labels have "done such a poor job with avant-garde music in the past 30 years that fans don't want to support them. We care. That's why we do it."

Elliott sees what he and his three friends in Mostly Other People Do the Killing in even simpler terms. "We're all overtrained jazz musicians who embrace influences from outside and have fun in the process. We just make fun."