Slanted and syncopated

 PROFILE. Friends and music enthusiasts Jake Cohn and David Elkins founded Brown Brothers Recordings as an answer to a simple but all-important question for any music fan: What hybrid of your favorite music would you like to hear the most? Over the course of a nightlong discussion Cohn describes as “drunken,” the two decided that the answer would be to get some of the best jazz players to work their magic on the catalog of the legendarily loose ’90s indie rockers Pavement. Thus was born Gold Sounds (pianist Cyrus Chestnut, saxophonist James Carter, bassist Richard Veal, and drummer Ali Jackson), the band headlining this weekend’s Beantown Jazzfest. The idea of these seasoned players riffing on Pavement’s fuzzed-out anglo punk noise might at first seem like a recipe for awkwardness, but to the band, the sounds aren’t that different. Any Pavement fan can attest to the free-flowing, spontaneous quality in their music, and it’s that same freedom to explore that Chestnut identifies as a main reason he loves jazz.

“We didn’t want to just copy or redo the songs,” he says, stressing that Gold Sounds is no mere tribute act. “We all have our own takes that we bring to it.”

The result is a sound rooted as much in the sensibilities of the quartet as it is in those of Stephen Malkmus, Pavement’s frontman and lead songwriter. Still, there is no mistaking that these are indeed Pavement songs.

“They managed to maintain a lot of the melodies from the original recordings but still made the songs their own,” says Cohn, “which is a very fine line to walk when covering great, memorable songs.”

In fact, Malkmus himself sent a card to Brown Brothers expressing his approval of the project.

“The card probably means as much to us as anything we accomplished with the record,” Cohn says.

Asked how much potential Gold Sounds has to expose fans of these musicians’ other work to Pavement and vice versa, Cohn says, “A lot.”

“It’s difficult to calculate these things, but great music can appeal to fans of different genres, and once you open your mind to different things it’s natural to want to explore the sources or branches of that music.”
      
Beantown Jazz Festival
Friday and Saturday
Various Berklee College of Music locations
MBTA: Green Line to Hynes
www.beantownjazz.org