SmoothOp

Bio:

If you were to run into SmoothOp on any given day, you might not know who you were seeing. College towns like theirs of Wilmington, NC are filled with guys like themselves: unassuming, t-shirt and jeans wearing twenty-somethings with facial hair and bed heads. But catch them onstage once, and you’ll be chatting them up in the grocery line. Tom Shaw (guitar), along with Keelan McCoy (drums), and Chris Mitchell (bass) form SmoothOp, Wilmington’s marriage of blues, jazz, funk, and jam; and don’t forget to pepper in some hip hop flavor. This up-and-coming jam band is drawing bigger crowds with every show, and creating a celebratory atmosphere that their listeners are eating up.

“We played our first show in mid-July 2007. I think we did that show and then we didn’t do another one. Maybe a couple parties , fraternity mixers and stuff. Then we started throwing house parties. But no one would be watching the house, so we’d get done playing and our house would be trashed and half our stuff would be missing,” says Tom Shaw. Needless to say, the said pilfering and one very real visit from the police pushed them into a more public arena of local hookah bars and pizza-serving venues. “Basically people would find us gigs and we’d go play. We didn’t really know what we were doing.”

Apparently they’ve learned. Since 2007 their shows have become more frequent, their venues larger, and their crowds more enthusiastic. SmoothOp recently played a crowd of 5,000 at Wilmington’s annual Wingfling, a fixture among beer and wing enthusiasts both locally and beyond. “It was a mind trip for me,” recalls Keelan, who had flown in early from Chile just three days earlier in order to make the festival, “It melted my face off.”

Such audiences are the fuel beneath SmoothOp: they’re crowd pleasers, but they’re not insecure, “crowd participation is what’s most important, and we’ll continuously transform the music to whatever pleases on a given night.” They’re loose but not sloppy, “a lot of it is just making sure that our music still has a lot of body. There’s only three of us, I mean, it gets old quick if you don’t keep it fresh.” Tom will open with a riff on guitar, Chris falls in, “and then I follow Chris. He’s the bassist, so I’ll just make sure I’m with him,” says Keelan, “and it all kind of flows together. Just as long as we keep bodies movin’,” he says.

But SmoothOp isn’t one to fly Hans Solo all the time. Their collaborations with other local bands like SciFi and Addictive Nature keep their sounds ripe and roomy, “It’s so fun because you can add another element at each show and make it different. Every show is different. There’s more room to grow, there’s more room for error, you don’t always have to be playing your part, you can sit back.” Spontaneity and collaboration are at the heart of SmoothOp, their live shows are high energy and primarily improvised: set lists are occasionally written and seldom followed. Their shows are in the crowd rather than on stage, and they’re all about charging up their audience and getting people together, evidenced by the fact that when we asked them to boil SmoothOp down to one word describing its intent, they unanimously responded with “dance.”

Like an author separated from his readers, connecting to a crowd of otherwise estranged individuals is not always easy, but when you have an established sense of community yourself, channeling that fellowship to the audience is natural, especially for SmoothOp. They cut up, feed off one another’s humor, have no trouble accusing the messiest roommate(Chris), or identifying who would be the first to cry in an interview with Barbara Walters (Keelan). “Keelan and I actually met at the airport on our way to freshman orientation,” Tom says. “He commented on the Phish patch on my book bag. Sparks flew, our pinkies touched,” Keelan adds with a straight face, the others laugh. The three live as roommates now, an environment that inevitably invites their musicality as a band. “we have a music room, so when we get bored, we’ll just start playing music and get into a jam that we like. We’ll remember it and keeping working on it for a couple of days, it might turn into a song after a while. It’s coming up with different pieces at different times, and then putting them all together.” Keeping their creation process organic is what keeps their live shows that way, free-flowing and crowd involved, an experience of good music and good community.

What does the future look like for SmoothOp? “It’s all up in the air right now. We might move somewhere west, somewhere with a bigger music scene, just to take things further,” says Tom. “We plan on recording some live stuff,” adds Chris, “we’ll hopefully put out a live album in December or January, whenever it gets done.” They’re always developing new ways to connect with the audience, Chris says, “I’m actually trying to start getting some lyrics in, but it’s not going to be singing full songs. Maybe just a chorus, it’s definitely an idea to add an extra element, something else that someone can remember more than just the music.” And when we asked the guys what it is they want a fan to experience when they come out to a show, Keelan was quick on the draw: “get sweaty.”

Taken from RedThoughtMedia.com

Member Since:

July 16, 2007

Members:

Download "Bluewater Sessions" here:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/1j5d72

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Tom Shaw Guitar


Chris Mitchell Bass


Keelan McCoy Drums


..Booking/Contact:..
Tom Shaw
SmoothOpMusik [at] gmail [dot] com











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