PROJECT TRIO: NOT YOUR GRANDFATHER'S CHAMBER MUSIC

TRUE OR FALSE: Chamber musicians sit stiffly in chairs (or stand stoically by their instruments) courageously playing while less cultured members of the audience valiantly try to stay awake.

Answer: Not the guys in PROJECT Trio. Greg Pattillo (flute), Eric Stephenson (cello), and Peter Seymour (double bass) play like wild horses that slipped their traces and are careening wildly off the track. Rogue chamber musicians loose in the city of carousels. They jive, they bop, they are frenetically alive as they perform music the likes you’ve never heard coming from any classically trained ensemble. Yet, classically trained they are, outstandingly so. Defying stereotypes, this slightly demented musical version of the three Musketeers combine the energy and zeal of rock stars with impeccable classical training and a creativity that is uniquely their own. And boy do they have fun doing it.

Blending multiple genres, their work consists of original compositions and arrangements of music from diverse sources from Guns n’ Roses to Duke Ellington to Tchaikovsky.

What twists in the road morphed three classically trained musicians into the wild and crazy trio they are now? I sat down (on the other end of the phone line) with Greg Pattillo to find out: “I grew up in Seattle, Washington. In the 4th grade, I complained to my mom I wasn’t learning [flute] fast enough, and she looked into lessons. And I got something called Suzuki lessons. That teaches music by ear, and when you can play by ear, all of a sudden you can sit in on all these fantastic non-classical music settings. For me, I always thought that was just part of music and part of my music education, nothing too special. And I don’t know if it was because I grew up around the sorts of people I grew up with, or because it was out west or whatnot, but I didn’t really get the message that there was a difference between high-brow classical music and rocking out on your instrument. By the time I went to the Cleveland Institute of Music, I had very long hair and I liked psychedelic rock and classic rock and I was very into these very non-classical things. And I arrived at a very amazing institution in Cleveland to find that, in fact, I was an oddball amongst those people- and effectively had to learn to hide my non-classical music tendencies.”

It was at the Cleveland Institute that Greg met Peter and Eric.

“Peter and Eric are both a year younger than me. So I’d already been at the school surrounded by these classical people, then the next year Peter came, and I was like, ‘Man, that guy’s cool, I want to hang out with that guy.’ And then Eric transferred into school a couple of years later. And when Eric and I first met, by the end of the week we had written a set for an open mic. And, I was like, ‘Whoa, that guy likes to play cello like I like to play the flute. He likes to rock-out on his cello.’”

And then school ended.

“When you get out of school you are faced with the real world, and that’s a very difficult thing for a musician, you know. I had graduated from grad school, moved around, and was not able to find a way to make a living playing music. I was teaching a lot and I moved and I left the Cleveland area: I moved to China, I moved to San Francisco… [In San Francisco] I ended up getting what I always called square jobs, in other words work not in the biz. And I met a lot of people that were artists and musicians. And one type of folks I really met were people that could do, like, performance poetry- what you call slam poetry. They had an open mic night every Thursday night at 16th Street and Mission at the Bart Station. It was a free-for-all open mic night. I was kind of introduced to this group through this girl that is now my wife (she was a poet) and I brought my flute. I was like, ‘Hey do you guys want to hear my flute playing,’ and everyone kind of like looked sideways and groaned. And I was like, ‘Well, I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna’ come and I’ll try and do something funky.’ I realized that I’d kind of already had these sounds I was doing, because I like to emulate bluegrass players on the flute…and I realized I was just one step away from beatboxing. So, I practiced… and I learned to beatbox on the flute a little bit and people thought that was a riot. And so I kept practicing it.”

The practice obviously paid off. YouTube videos of his playing later went viral, and The New York Times called him “the best in the world at what he does.”

“I followed my girlfriend to New York. I was working at Trader Joe’s, and then during my lunch break I would go to Union Square and play on the subway and I had a little 45-minute subway set that I did. And I did something for a film student at NYU and she gave me an hour of free film time and I went to the studio- I just played my subway set and all of those edits ended up being, like, YouTube things that got millions of views. That was in, like, February of 2007, something like that. Back then YouTube had one page, and for whatever reason, my video got on the front page and it stayed there for a week.”

Meanwhile…

“Peter had moved around. Eric stayed in Cleveland. They were doing summers together in Boulder, Colorado. There’s the Colorado Music Festival, and this is a very common thing for people in the classical world, to go do summers somewhere. They did, like, I think five or seven years in Boulder, every summer meeting up. Those guys were in Boulder saying, you know, ‘we could do better than this. We could do better than what we’re doing- the just gigging.’ Actually, Peter made the group a non-profit, he did all of this legwork on all of this paperwork and things, and they brainstormed a lot and lived together in Boulder. And I kept in touch just because we were friends. And as the group was coming together, I was trying to be involved, because those two, they’re cool. I had even taken a special trip- we’d all flown from different places in America to Cleveland for the first Project event. I couldn’t be in Boulder because I was living in California at the time. Eventually, I was in New York and convinced them to move to New York. And it all kind of came together about 9 years ago- the spring of 2007.”

“Coming together” happened over time, the result of a lot of hard work. Managing and promoting themselves, they created the Harmonyville label, on which they have recorded 5 CDs (with a 6th in the works) and a DVD (PROJECT Trio: Live in Concert). Their devotion to teaching creativity in relation to music education led them to create a non-profit organization to forward that cause. And in 2010, they were invited to play at Carnegie Hall.

“I’ve gone to Carnegie Hall plenty of times as a patron, and so playing for Carnegie Hall, that’s like a big fat check mark on your list. It was amazing. I’m fairly certain too, that Peter met his wife on the subway going to Carnegie Hall. He was on the subway with his bass and she said, ‘Hey, where you going?’ And he got to be, like, ‘I’m gonna’ go play Carnegie Hall.’ That’s a pretty awesome line actually to deliver, you know what I’m saying?”

In addition to having been seen on Nickelodeon and MTV, and having their music featured in commercials for Nike and Smart Car, they have toured extensively, both in the U.S. and internationally (including a State Department sponsored tour in 2013 to the former Soviet Union).

“We, I think, get additional value when we leave the country because we are kind of a strange group: there’s not really a group that’s flute, cello, and bass, and we’re pretty wild when we play. So we’re like a spectacle, and we have entertainment value on that level. So I think overseas, you know, we get away with a lot under the veil of being, ‘Those Americans, look how crazy they are.’ ”

Greg closed with a few words about their upcoming performance at the Forum Backstage Theatre on Friday, May 6th.

“It’s kind of informal, or informal in the sense that you’re close to the actual act on stage. We, as an ensemble, are trying to tear down the fourth wall, in the classical music sense. In jazz and rock this often happens, the performer can get pretty amped up by the audience. It doesn’t always happen in classical music. We’re highly energetic, and so we let the audience feel that and bring it back to us. I think that it’s hard to compare our group to anyone else, but if you like instrumental music, man you’re gonna’ love our stuff. We play a little bit from every genre. We cast a wide net, so you’re bound to like something we play.”

The show starts at 7:30pm and access is through the State Street entrance. Tickets are $25 and may be purchased online at binghamtonphilharmonic.org.