Jellyella presents vintage blues with synthetic grooves. Popular R&B tunes primarily from the 40s and 50s are given new life and form by mixing original antique equipment from the first half of the 20th century with state of the art up-to-date electronic synthesizers, sequencers, looping and drum machines. In the entire city of New York there’s nothing else like it.

Jellyella is the brainchild of longtime collaborators Hyllus & David Fryer (Urban Orangutan). Taking the live band repertoire of Hyllus & The Veligers as their point of departure, Hyllus & Fryer first set to work as did the ancient scribes of old, spending years painstakingly transcribing the original arrangements of dozens of classic (mostly early) R&B recordings. They then encased those accurate transcriptions within the digital chi of electronic sequencers. Like the jinn of the Arabian Nights entombed therein, these ghostly notes haunt their machines in the torment of Sisyphus, repeating their mystic chants word for word, beat for beat, over and over in eternal, unchanging exactitude. Often they are simply uncorked from their bottles and let out to play with the unparented sounds of live instruments; the result is a ritual resurrection of sounds long dead. Alive yet not alive, at once chanting and chanted, Hyllus & Fryer invite the audience to join in the magical zombification of these undead melodies.

Sometimes, however, these synthetic souls are revealed swimming within their genie bottles without actually being released. In these cases they resemble more the half plant half human polyps surrounding the entrance to the cave of the sea witch, grounded in place, moving yet unmovable, they feed by grabbing at any detritus passing by. This indeed describes as well the Bryozoan for which Jellyella is named, which, like the band itself, makes its home on the long-since discarded shells of sea snails (those grown up veligers!) and, unlike any other Bryozoan known, floats on the surface of the world’s oceans. Journeying yet unable to journey, they submit to the literal tides of their fate and feed on whatever passes by. A colony creature, they form mineral hives for themselves to live within and it is these hive networks which encrust the shells upon which they float. To the human eye they are but empty vessels. Yet within these vessels thrive these anemone-like creatures, both moving and moved by the waters around them in their endless hunt for nourishment.

In the same way, the demonic rhythms and melodies which Hyllus & Fryer have inscribed within their small boxed machines move not just the air around them with their zapping vibrations, they move that airy ether within each of us as well, which some call emotions, feelings, or the soul. They too are then moved by the artists’ souls in turn. The demonic stock in Jellyella’s necromantic soup, the sounds in these sequencers are twisted, crumpled, writhed and otherwise contorted, until they are transformed into something both entirely new in form and wholly old in intention. The music that results is truly original in both senses of the word: new yet primitive, they are at once original and the original.

Faithful in parts, innovative in others, the music of Jellyella is a continuing growth in the offshoot of music history as it seeks to both capture and transform the roots of American R&B. The lifeblood of rhythm and blues is the necessity from which it is born. Just as the artists who the industry originally labeled as R&B were making music out of what was available to them in their own time, R&B must continue to grow by using those tools most expedient in our own time. But at the same time, if it seeks to remain what we now retrospectively consider R&B, it must still be grounded in what must become a firm tradition, if there is to be any sense of genre. Thus, Jellyella freely moves beyond what is easily recognizable as rhythm & blues and into the realms of traditional jazz, free jazz, samba, and other sounds that in any ordinary context would be deemed separate genres but are here subsumed under the single genre of the style in which they are played, rhythm and blues. They are rhythm and blues simply because R&B is not just a body of music, it’s a way of hearing and communicating and presenting music.

At the time of writing, the music of Jellyella can only be heard live and in-person. Click here to find the next upcoming live performances this month and make a date to check it out. You’ll be glad you did.