When galaxies collide, time tilts in all directions, past, present and future. Sound crumples into surprising forms and strange new frequencies.
No, not in outer space, silly. Everybody knows there’s no sound in space.
That’s exactly what to expect, however, at Sunday’s (March 9) all-day Mort’s Fest music festival at Moriarty’s Pub in downtown Lansing. Joining forces to aid struggling communities in Asheville, North Carolina, that were devastated by floods last fall, the cream of local musicians from two galaxies will converge for a celebration of music’s healing power.
The galaxy of jazz, funk and blues, represented by greats like organist Jim Alfredson, vocalist Freddie Cunningham and many more, will share the stage with folk, Americana and bluegrass stars like singer-songwriter Jen Sygit, Steppin’ In It stalwart Andy Wilson, steel guitar maestro Drew Howard and other local favorites.
It’s a lot to take in, but at its heart, this year’s Mort’s Fest is a tale of two Jeffs: special guest Jeff and local Jeff.
Special guest Jeff is Jeff Sipe, a drummer from the Asheville area with a storied career that straddles numerous musical galaxies.
Fusing a free, experimental spirit with relentless polyrhythmic mastery, Sipe has played with everyone from bluegrass legends Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe to jazz-fusion pioneer John McLaughlin, the Allman Brothers Band, south Indian raga masters and members of every ‘90s jam band you can name, from Phish to Widespread Panic.
Sipe was also a mainstay of one of the most influential semi-underground bands in history, Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit — not exactly a household name but a musical and cultural singularity, a whispered-about legend among top musicians from many galaxies.
The local Jeff is Jeff Shoup, Mort’s Fest organizer, seasoned drummer and impresario of Jazz Tuesdays at Moriarty’s, now in its 11th straight year as a top destination for musicians from across the country. Shoup’s supergroup, The Polaroids, is also on Sunday’s slate.
Bringing Sipe to Lansing will not only stir the rich cocktail of local talent for a worthy cause but also bring Shoup’s musical life full circle. Hearing the Aquarium Rescue Unit on MSU student radio and later meeting Sipe at early gigs in Ann Arbor shaped (some might say “warped”) Shoup’s musical consciousness for good.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that meeting Jeff was a life-changing experience,” Shoup declared.
Geysers and grooves
We take up the tale of two Jeffs in the mid-1990s. Long before Shoup became a Lansing jazz stalwart, impresario and educator, he was a fan of Soundgarden, Jane’s Addiction and the usual grunge bands. But his brain was a sponge, ready for fine imported vinegar.
One morning, while driving his dad’s Chevrolet Suburban to a 7 a.m. rehearsal at St. Johns High School, he first heard Col. Bruce Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit on MSU student radio.
Hampton played a “chazoid,” a hybrid guitar and mandolin that sounded like the two instruments were strangled together by a witch doctor.
“I was like, ‘Holy shit, what is this?’” Shoup recalled.
Not a trained musician, Hampton sauntered and staggered through semi-cryptic songs like “Basically Frightened,” a tune that could’ve been written yesterday.
“History is gone,” he sang. “History wasn’t much anyway.”
The words lazily rose from his mouth like the bubbles in a Yellowstone mud pot, punctuated by frantic geysers and gutbucket grooves from the band.
Thunderstruck, Shoup wrote the name of the band down as best he could while bouncing through a
snowstorm on a Michigan road. It came out something like “General Lewis and the Rescue Squad,” but he found the record anyway, at the long-defunct Michigan WhereHouse Records.
Listening at home, Shoup was scalded up to his scalp by the band’s sinewy grooves, whipsaw twists and free-spirit vibe — a Southern-fried variant of Frank Zappa’s circus of sound, or the jazz excursions of that self-styled visitor from outer space, Sun Ra.
He listened to the superhuman ride cymbal work on a track called “Davy Crockett” and wondered if a drum machine was in the mix.
“I couldn’t even approach what was going on there,” Shoup said. “I was flabbergasted.”
He searched the liner notes in vain for the usual credit line, “So and so, drums.” Instead, it read, “Apt. Q258, hydrophase-enhanced collision devices and floating ceramic surfaces.”
On Oct. 8, 1993, Shoup climbed into a friend’s pickup truck and drove to Ann Arbor to see the Aquarium Rescue Unit at the Blind Pig.
He cherishes that day the same way Buddhists celebrate the day Siddhartha Gautama sat under the Bo tree, achieved enlightenment and became the Buddha.
“I was only 19. I couldn’t even drink,” he recalled. “But I got right in front of the stage and stayed there for both sets.”
The band was a dead-serious cosmic joke, a mix of performance art and wicked-sharp musicianship.
“I’d never witnessed anything like that at all,” Shoup said. “It made me take this left turn — OK, maybe there is something more than grunge rock out there.”
After the gig, Shoup helped Sipe put away his drum kit and chatted with him. He may or may not have hung with Sipe in the green room.
“That’s what my friends tell me, but I don’t remember that clearly,” Shoup admitted. “Most of the guys I was with were on LSD that night, so I’m not sure I trust their recollections.”
Shoup recalls shaking Hampton’s hand and feeling like he was “shaking the hand of a giant.”
The encounter with young Shoup stuck with Sipe, even in those hazy days. “He had a nice smile,” Sipe recalled.
In July 1994, the Blind Pig asked Shoup’s East Lansing-based hippie-rock bar band, Hepcat (not to be confused with the ska band of the same name), to open for the Aquarium Rescue Unit. Hepcat played the house party circuit, regular gigs at Small Planet and other local venues around mid-Michigan.
“I got to play on Jeff’s drums and got to know him a little bit,” Shoup said. Sipe showed Shoup some drum rudiments that took months for him to master.
“It was a left-turn moment in my life and musicianship that led to what I’m doing today,” Shoup said.
‘Absolute, total freedom’
About 20 years before that night at the Blind Pig, Sipe had his own “left-turn” moment when he was asked to play a wedding in the north Georgia mountains with the great keyboardist Dan Wall.
“I needed the work,” Sipe said.
A stocky trickster who called himself Col. Bruce Hampton was the last to arrive, blood-red mandolin in hand. (He didn’t have the chazoid yet.) When the quartet began playing, Wall signaled to Hampton, with a wink and a nod, to take a solo.
“I thought it was supposed to be real smooth jazz, smooth and silky,” Sipe recalled. “Bruce unleashes holy hell. He turns it all the way up and starts playing random notes, the craziest shit I’ve ever heard anybody have the audacity to play, especially at a wedding.”
Wall tried to adjust by reharmonizing to match what Hampton was playing, laughing all the while.
“Bruce has got his head down, eyes closed, just going for it — whatever that is. I didn’t understand it,” Sipe said. “I didn’t even like it.”
But something compelled Sipe to answer the phone when Hampton called him the day after the wedding gig, inviting him to jam with the band at a venue called the Harvest Moon.
There, Sipe found himself in a 15-piece band with Hampton, members of the Aquarium Rescue Unit, flutist and Centers for Disease Control researcher Joe Zambi, an oboe player from the local symphony and “guys playing a rake and a bird cage.”
“I didn’t know what I was getting into,” Sipe said. “There were no tunes called. They just started playing, and I jumped in. We improvised the first song and the second song. I was having a blast.”
By the third song, Sipe turned to his left and told Randy Honea, who was playing guitar, “I think I’ve found my calling.”
“I think you have, too,” Honea replied.
Joining Hampton and the Aquarium Rescue Unit was the real beginning of Sipe’s musical adventures.
“The band is almost impossible to describe to someone unfamiliar with their music,” Shoup said. “It’s at the crossroads of rock, jazz, blues, country, funk and performance art. They hit on everything from Howlin’ Wolf to John Coltrane to the Carter Family to Sun Ra.”
Sipe eagerly took the music anywhere Hampton wanted to go.
“It was a real performance-art band, and the money was hardly there at all,” Sipe said. “The only way I could pull it off was almost to take a vow of poverty.” He lived in a leaky garage on $200 a month.
No matter. Hampton was a magnet for any musician who cherished freedom of expression.
“I’ve never known anybody like Bruce. Not even close,” Sipe said. “He was a clairvoyant, a psychic, an uncle, an older brother who would always be there for me without judgement, always encouragement. Whenever I needed to get to the next level, he would show me myself, and I would see and be clear on what I needed to be.”
If the music settled into a routine, no matter how pretty it sounded, Hampton would simply stop the flow and point to someone in the band as if to demand, “Say something.”
“This was a vehicle that allowed for full expression, and I hadn’t had that before,” Sipe said. “There was always a governor, a place you shouldn’t go. But there was absolute, total freedom in that band.”
Running out of hyphens
It’s impossible to cover all of Sipe’s exploits since the heady days of the Aquarium Rescue Unit.
“I’ve been lucky along the way,” Sipe said. “I’ve met some very original, one-of-a-kind musicians, and the gamut runs really wide.”
After leaving the Aquarium Rescue Unit, Sipe followed his interest in bluegrass, gigging for three years straight with a Colorado country-zydeco-bluegrass-rock band, Leftover Salmon. (Most of Sipe’s bands test the hyphen-bearing capacity of even the most advanced laptop computers.) On “The Nasville Sessions,” Sipe is heard in the company of banjo master Béla Fleck, country legends Waylon Jennings and Lucinda Williams and bluegrass icons Randy and Earl Scruggs.
Shoup saw Leftover Salmon at the Blind Pig in 1994 and found it “magical.”
“They called it ‘polyethnic-Cajun-slamgrass music,’” Shoup said.
One of Sipe’s wildest projects was a big — very big — band called the Zambiland Orchestra, which assembled each December for six years at Atlanta’s Variety Playhouse to benefit a local hospice program and food bank.
It was jam-band nirvana. All four members of Phish were in the orchestra at one time or another, along with members of Widespread Panic, the Derek Trucks Band, Fiji Mariners and other bands.
“I invited 20 people, and 40 people showed up,” Sipe said. The next year, he invited the first 40 people, and 60 showed up.
“It kept growing through the six years we did it,” he said. “At one point, we had 83 people on the stage.”
Longtime Atlanta session bassist Ricky Keller conducted with a toilet plunger or a giant tiki spoon. To wrangle the assemblage without rehearsal, Keller and Sipe flashed three sets of poster cards at the musicians: one with key changes, another with names of genres (heavy metal, reggae, bebop, funk, Dixieland) and a third with performance antics like “everybody walk backwards,” “shake hands” or “point up.”
Hampton, who died in 2017 after collapsing on stage at his own 70th birthday tribute concert, would have enjoyed the loosely harnessed anarchy.
“On the dime, everybody switched to the new key, the new tempo, the new sound,” Sipe said. “That was how it worked and didn’t work. It was crazy sounding sometimes, like Sun Ra on steroids, but really a lot of fun — for the audience as well.”
‘These cats are hurting’
Last fall, Shoup found himself in a nostalgic mood and posted a memory on Facebook of his long-ago Blind Pig epiphany with the Aquarium Rescue Unit. To his delight, Sipe responded.
Around the same time, Shoup was planning a revival of Mort’s Fest with a partner, Mike Smalley, a journeyman bassist and retired employee of Elderly Instruments. The festival started in 2016 with a 10-hour marathon to raise funds for a sound system at Mort’s. (Most of that sound system, including massive JBL speakers and monitors, is still in operation.)
“It was fun but kind of self-serving,” Shoup said. “We started looking at charities like Homeless Angels and the Capital Area Humane Society.” The festival went into hibernation with the 2020 pandemic shutdown.
In fall 2024, the national news was full of images of floods that were devastating Asheville, home to many great musicians, in the wake of Hurricane Helene.
Shoup remembered that Sipe is based in Asheville.
“There’s a kinship among musicians,” Shoup said. “I thought, ‘These cats in Asheville are hurting. There aren’t many places for them to play. Let’s help them out.’”
Shoup contacted a local charity, BeLoved Asheville, and found that the need is still great.
Without regular venues to perform at, Sipe has played dozens of house concerts and other benefits in the Asheville area.
“It’s still tough,” Sipe said. “Musicians are scrambling. Not all the clubs are back up and running. It’s crawling back, but there’s tons of cleanup to do. All the low-lying areas are devastated. It’ll take thousands of dump trucks and years to get rid of all the debris.”
Sipe has a high regard for BeLoved Asheville.
“It’s a great organization,” Sipe said. “They’ve been real effective leaders throughout this crisis, taking care of everybody from the homeless to nursing homes, day care centers. They have hundreds of volunteers and were able to get in there well before FEMA or any other people could get here.”
Shoup set about lining up sponsors for the event, including Providence Consulting, the Lansing Symphony Orchestra, Sonor Drums/KHS America, Avedis Zildjian Co., Gregg Hill’s Cold Plunge Records (a mainstay sponsor of Jazz Tuesdays), Elderly Instruments, Music Manor, Local Roots Cannabis and Josh Hovey’s Bellwether PR firm.
Sipe will have a busy weekend in Michigan. He’ll play Detroit’s Cadieux Cafe on Thursday (March 6) and Friday (March 7) with Grateful Dead tribute band Supercrunch and visit Lansing music store Music Instrument Swap on Saturday (March 8) for a drum clinic.
At Mort’s Fest, Shoup is throwing Sipe into two separate supergroups. One will feature harmonica monster Andy Wilson of the Springtails and Steppin’ In It, steel guitarist Drew Howard, guitarist Keith Minaya, bassist Mike Smalley and a real wild card, former Root Doctor vocalist Freddie Cunningham.
Although Cunningham is a blues and R&B singer without peer, his ability to pivot to country tunes earned him the nickname “country Fred” among his Root Doctor bandmates.
Sunday’s second Sipe-centric supergroup will have more of a jazz vibe, with organist Jim Alfredson, award-winning guitarist and MSU graduate Chris Minami and others to be named.
“I wanted to put Jeff with the best musicians I could,” Shoup said.
Alfredson met and played with Sipe at a jazz camp in Brevard, North Carolina, directed by MSU trombone Professor Michael Dease.
“Jim Alfredson is a great dude,” Sipe said. “I’m looking forward to meeting everybody, seeing those jazz heavyweights.”
Many of the musicians on Sunday’s slate can switch genres or instruments with ease, and that suits Sipe just fine. To him, it’s the spirit, not the genre or the instrument, that matters.
“Bruce used to say that a musician can play a song on a push broom,” Sipe said. “You hit the floor with a bass tone and get the high end with the push. Already, you’ve got something great. You don’t need an instrument. You can play the most beautiful thing you’ve ever played on a pizza box.”
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