Too Many Zooz literally climbed from obscurity and stepped into the sunlight of a professional music career from the bowels of the New York City subway system. The trio created a musical style dubbed “brasshouse” by busking in subway stations, then took the connecting routes of viral videos and performing with music icons (Beyoncé, anyone?) to stages all over the world, including an approaching gig at White Oak Music Hall.
Their wildly inventive music is a mashup of jazz, funk, hip hop and house music. It’s lent itself well to wildly inventive videos which have amassed fans from millions of views. It’s been featured in TV commercials, movies and, implausibly perhaps, on the Country Music Awards. The trio is like Beastie Boys on brass, so much street cred that its members perform under hip hop monikers. Leo P is the band’s baritone saxophonist and resident dancer. King of Sludge – or KOS – is its drummer. Matt Doe plays trumpet.
All that success means the band no longer has to busk in the subway, we assumed. It was the first of too many things we guessed wrong about Too Many Zooz.
“It’s just so funny because I feel like everyone assumes the same as you did, which is that we don’t play in the subway anymore and that’s totally not true,” said Doe by phone from the back of a Tesla on a rideshare somewhere far from Houston. “I’ll put it to you this way, if we’re off tour for more than a month, we will absolutely go play in the subway. If we’re in between tours and it’s less than a month, typically we all wanna spend time with our families and use that time to be home, but if we have a decent amount of time home, we’ll come home from tour, spend time with our friends and family and then we’ll go out to New York and just play in the subway for a week or two.”
Doe called rehearsing in the subway the band’s “most valuable asset,” which is saying something considering their impressive music skills. He said it’s not really like the Billboard charting singer going back to open mic night.
“The subway’s such a special place creatively. There are very, very few places that share the qualities of the subway,” Doe noted. “We use the subway as a platform to rehearse now, as we always have. But now when we go to the subway, we’re not going down there thinking, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna go viral.’ It’s more just ritual. We go down, we talk about business, we play, we keep ourselves in shape musically, we come up with new ideas – and the beauty of it is it’s a paid rehearsal with an inherently built-in focus group.
“Companies will pay millions of dollars for access to focus groups and access to metadata and pay focus groups to test their products and tell them what they like, and we get paid to have the same service given to us,” Doe added. “For us, it’s like a triple win. We’re going out, we’re keeping ourselves in shape musically and creatively and keeping the juice flowing. We’re being paid to do so. And, we have a group of people who are watching. Because there’s no barrier – there’s no disconnect between the audience and the performer in the subway – it’s extremely obvious if what you’re playing is working for them.”
It’s hard to imagine Too Many Zooz music that doesn’t work for listeners. It’s infectious, fun and delivered by a proficient trio. When you hear it, you gotta move, like the train from the 59th Street tunnel to Queens Plaza. A song like “Warriors,” from the band’s aptly-titled album Subway Gawdz, is stick-your-chest-out, walk tall music. Hearing how it comes together so seamlessly must mean the trio has lots in common besides music, we guessed. Wrong again.
“To be honest, there’s really only a few things that we all three of us really like,” Doe shared. “I think one of the reasons that people gravitate towards our band musically and creatively is because we all grew up very, very differently. I grew up on classical piano and then playing piano and singing in church. Musically, I grew up listening to rock and roll and hip hop and jazz and stuff like that, that’s kind of my musical background.
“Leo grew up doing plays with his dad and playing klezmer music and bar mitzvahs and being in a symphony orchestra. The King of Sludge came from Indiana and wasn’t even a drummer for the first 20 years of his life, then moved to Nashville and became a chef, then moved from Nashville to Portland and discovered music, then moved from Portland to New York and that’s kind of where our paths meet.
“The point I’m trying to make is all of us have really, really different upbringings, musically and in life, and I think that’s one of the beauties of our music and who we are individually and how we create together. It’s just this hodgepodge of all of these different influences and how they come together to form this one kind of unique sound.”
It’s part of what allows listeners to hear New Orleans or maybe Cuba in their music. It’s why hip hop fans hear Brooklyn in the song and video for the insanely creative “Car Alarm,” with KOS drumming rap beats while Leo P “raps” on the sax.
“I think that really comes from our individual upbringings. (KOS) playing dance music and traditional west African Senegalese music and jazz. And Leo playing klezmer music and symphony orchestra music and jazz and myself playing jazz and growing up in the church. All of us individually come together to make this one thing and it’s like a sum is sort of greater than its individual parts thing in my eyes.”
The three non-music things the band connects over, Doe said, are hip hop, basketball and chicken wings.
“You know, Buffalo wings and all sorts of wings – we love chicken wings,” Doe said, endorsing them like a product pitchman.
Doe said 2023 should prove to be a big year for TMZ. The band used the COVID hiatus to reset but is planning an active year.
“I don’t think it’s like any surprise or shocker to say we’ve kind of been coasting and just touring a whole bunch for the past four or five years, so we’re excited to just get back out creatively, release some new music and we’re really going to be pushing the YouTube content and getting people involved in remembering our name,” Doe said.
The band has been actively touring this year, in the U.S., the U.K. and soon in Mexico. New content in 2023 likely means more touring, we surmised. Not necessarily, Doe said.
“You know, speaking frankly to you, we don’t want to tour all the time anymore. We’re not 18 anymore. We love playing shows for our fans but we don’t love being on the road, right? Because there’s so many things about it that just suck, to be honest,” dished Doe. “It’s a lot of driving, it’s a lot of sleeping on couches. The older you get the harder it gets. And we still do it because obviously it’s a source of income for us but also we love connecting with our fans.
“But, one of our big goals is to shift more into that YouTube lane. We just see people not only making a way decent living off of YouTube but they’re really making a huge cultural impact and shaping the lives of young people and helping them grow and become better humans. I think YouTube really is an amazing platform for that, so for us, we’re really, really trying to transition to that.”
When Too Many Zooz packs Houston fans into White Oak’s upstairs room, we imagine folks from all walks of life will be there, just as folks from all walks of life are in the NYC subway. They’ll exchange the energy required to make for a great show. It might even mimic the band’s home turf, we suggest. We at least guess partially correct on this note.
“If you go to a Too Many Zooz concert, there will be a five year-old, there will be a 99 year-old, there will be straight people, gay people, white people, black people, men, women, old, young. There’s really no limitation to our music for the listener’s sake,” Doe said.
“You know, it’s different for a million different reasons, but when you’re playing on a stage, obviously you charge money for a ticket, people pay for the ticket, they expect some sort of product. So, there is a huge difference right off the bat. When we’re playing in the subway, there’s zero expectation as to what we’re supposed to play and there’s no obligation for us to play. There’s no expectation as to, ‘Oh, I wanna hear this song,’ or “I wanna hear this song.’ What you get is what you get.
“Obviously, the bigger stage you’re on, the less connected you are to the audience,” he added. “You have this inherent disconnect that comes from people not being able to share their emotion with you, just out of the distance, the actual, physical distance from them to the stage.
“For us that makes a big difference. I think for us, one of our biggest weaknesses as a band is playing really large shows. You know, we’ve been really fortunate and grateful to play for 10,000, 20,000 people, and that requires its own level of practice. Our expertise lies, in the moment, with playing smaller venues. We’re more used to that, we’re more used to being on the same level as the audience and having that direct, shared energy with them.
“You know, Leo specifically always talks about how he feeds off the audience and it’s true for all of us, but he’s someone who speaks to this a lot where, you know, if we play a show and people just stand there kind of like fish, just not moving and looking at us, it’s harder for us to play. Whereas if we go to a venue and play and people are losing their minds and screaming and dancing, it’s way easier for us to play because that energy’s shared.”
Too Many Zooz, Wednesday October 12, White Oak Music Hall, 2915 N. Main. With Bayou City Funk. Doors at 8 p.m. for this all ages, general admission event. $20-$23.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
