LBP review by the Houston Press

 by John Lomax (Houston Press)

If you're not already stoned -- which, by looking at the clientele, seems about a 50-50 proposition -- when you walk into a Little Brother Project show, you'll feel that way after about five minutes. You don't even have to light up. Though they're billed as acid jazz, the absence of a DJ, horns and keyboards gives up the game. "I wouldn't really call it acid jazz, either," says 26-year-old guitarist Marc Reczek. "That was just our marketing strategy to get into a club downtown. It's funny, though; some people say that it's acid jazz, but I don't think it has anything to do with it. I see it as more of a jam band with no band."

Reczek, who also plays in the dormant and larger group Bro-Sure, realized that approaching a downtown schwankienda like Dean's and offering up their services as a jam band was not likely to succeed. Thus the acid jazz fib. "What we wanted to do was something where we could be in a hip atmosphere and improv," he says. "We wanted it to relate to Bro-Sure, but we also wanted it to be separate. We started it about six months ago, and we've never had one rehearsal except for those in that room back there. The bass player and me try to come up with different ideas every week. It's really caught on bigger than I expected."

He ain't lyin'. Though the first set drew only about ten people, Racket walked back by later and saw that Dean's was bustling. What separates LBP from most jam bands is that they don't play any covers -- not even as template for a half-hour of noodling-- or even any songs, as such. What they do is just get up on stage and wing it for an hour. "Most jam bands -- they'll play three chords and then the guitar player will take a solo and the keyboardist will take a solo and that's a jam band," says Reczek. "What we try to do is meander. We have a piece of paper and there's a set of ideas and we'll go from one to the other."

Reczek's influences include Phish and to a lesser extent the Grateful Dead, but also Wes Montgomery and Django Reinhardt. LBP's ideas are fairly succinct, and they vary the tempos with aplomb. Grooves move from blues to rock to jazz to funk with punctuation and snap. They don't drag you through a fog of virtuosity for its own sake. It may not be acid jazz, but somehow LBP's brand of jam music works in its posh environs.

As for their music's narcotic effect, Reczek will only say, "I used to smoke a lot of weed, but I don't really smoke anymore." Racket thinketh "Whatever." And so did a fan who came out a couple of weeks ago. "You should have seen this guy who came out last week," Reczek laughs. "He was getting down. He was like, 'Y'all are a bunch of potheads!' I was just like, 'Rock on, man.' "Little Brother Project plays every Wednesday at Dean's, 316 Main, 713-227-3326.

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