New York jazz trio's newest songs named for Pennsylvania disaster towns

To call Moppa Elliott’s approach to music composition “loose” might be an understatement.

The Pennsylvania native is a music teacher at Information Technology High School in Long Island City, N.Y., and the bassist for jazz collective Mostly Other People Do the Killing, which will perform in Pittsburgh on Feb. 23 at City of Asylum in the city’s North Side neighborhood.

One thing Keystone State residents will instantly notice about Elliott’s discography is that all of his original songs are named after the boroughs, townships, cities and municipalities of Pennsylvania.

“A long time ago, I came to the decision that song titles, especially for instrumental pieces, are kind of dumb, or kind of a weird minefield,” said Elliott, who grew up in Factoryville near Scranton. “There’s the ‘program’ aspect, where you give the music a title to evoke something in the audience’s mind. But when I listen to Debussy, I don’t know French, and I have no idea what the song title means, but it’s not any less affecting.”

The musicians of Mostly Other People Do the Killing — Elliott, pianist Rob Stabinsky and drummer Kevin Shea, who is a Fox Chapel graduate — gravitate heavily toward improvised music, performing tunes that are rooted in the jazz tradition, but also highly improvised and unstructured.

“For the past 16 years, this band has evolved into a way of playing where any of us, at any time, might start playing anything that pops into our heads,” Elliott said. “And the other members will make a conscious decision about whether to follow him or not.”

The result is a sonic atmosphere that can begin by bopping or grooving, only for the floor to start shaking as Shea’s drums begin splintering off in a new direction that may not be the same meter, tempo or style.

With all of that shaky ground, it makes sense that the group’s new record is titled “Disasters, Vol. 1,” with each song named for a Pennsylvania town with a troubled past — think Three Mile Island, Johnstown, Centralia, etc.

A song like “Johnstown” begins in a fairly traditional way, with a lilting piano and smooth bass. But around the one-minute mark, the drums start getting a little twitchy, and for much of the rest of the song, it’s almost as though Shea’s percussion is trying to break the tune’s walls, much like water broke the South Fork Dam in 1889.

Shea’s work on the drums creates the type of musical tension Elliott said the group strives to create in live performances as well.

“That tension comes from the decision about whether the other members of the band will bail that person out when they head in a different direction,” he said. “It creates this constant push-and-pull where everyone has the freedom to play whatever they want, and it helps to generate some of these impossible-to-compose moments.”

Below, listen to an original song, “Zelienople.”

Some nights, a Mostly Other People Do the Killing set will start with one of Elliott’s songs, “and then we’ll wander off into a pop tune, play another original, do a classical song and then head off into some other sonic space,” Elliott said.

Even in the process of recording the “Disasters,” record, “Centralia” and “Johnstown” were actually part of one long, single take, which was eventually separated into the two songs which appear back-to-back on the record.

Elliott said he’s looking forward to returning to his drummer’s hometown.

“Every time we’ve been there, we’ve had a good time,” he said. “The folks at City of Asylum are great. And from here we’re going on to Cleveland, where I went to college and spent my formative years gigging.”

With the recent Fern Hollow bridge collapse, it’s possible that Pittsburgh could make an appearance on a future installment of “Disasters.”

Elliott was coy about it.

“Well, we called it ‘Vol. 1’ for a reason,” he said.

Both in-person and online tickets for Mostly Other People Do the Killing are free at CityofAsylum.org.