SU community members form jazz funk band Casaroja

One night each week, Room 201 of Syracuse University’s Shaffer Art Building transforms into a practice space for Casaroja.

Casaroja is the band appropriately named for the big red house on the corner of Beech Street and Euclid Avenue where it frequently plays shows. Their practice space might as well be considered a comedy club. Each member of the jazz funk collective is just as much of a jokester as he is a musician.

During practice, the band doesn’t seem to be able to go a few minutes without a witty comment. At one point during last week’s session, while trying to sit still for a photograph, one member complained of an itchy mustache, only to have his comment upstaged by another whose bare upper lip itched even more.

Matt Berger, Matt Kingsley, Sam Roux, Jon Kane, Nick DiNardo, Shaun Kinney and Ludo Coudert make up Casaroja. Each is a member of the SU community, either as a student or employee of the university.

As students in the Setnor School of Music, some of the guys in the band already knew each other. But it wasn’t until last fall that they started playing together — the band has the Westcott Street Mexican cafe Alto Cinco to thank for initiating their meeting.

Alto Cinco hosts Tuesday night jam sessions where musicians can come and do just that: jam. It was there that the guys realized they all had a common musical interest in fusion group Snarky Puppy, a band Roux said is only for “music nerds.”

“You know more about someone if they listen to Snarky Puppy,” said Roux, who is the coordinator of the ACCESS program. “A very specific kind of person listens to that band.”

With that instant connection, they decided to get together for some jam sessions apart from the ones at Alto Cinco. They noticed there was more than a similar interest — they truly meshed together.

“Once we all started playing together at these jams we started to realize we have some flow together,” Roux said. “We kind of had some creativity that was working well.”

That creativity has led to some original songs coming from Casaroja, such as the band’s ode to Bill Nye called “Science Rules.”

Roux admitted the phrase “jamming” gets overused, but that’s truly how they create. One of their songs started with a trip to the studio and Kane banging out a quick drumbeat. Roux then added a catchy baseline, and Kingsley played some guitar. Once the horns of Coudert and Berger started blasting, they had their song.

“I think the whole aspect of us being in the room and the recording still going at the same time kind of makes you play to a higher level,” said Kane, an audio arts graduate student. “You have to make a certain amount commitment in order to go for it.”

Sitting in on one of their practice sessions, it’s hard to tell Casaroja has been playing together for only a few months. The camaraderie between them is apparent — they just have fun together.

When Kane mentioned that Coudert, a senior music major, just started playing the trombone as a member of Casaroja, Coudert corrected him and sarcastically said, “No, no. Next month I’m starting to play the trombone.” The whole band erupted in laughter.

It is these kinds of moments the band wants to enjoy while they still can. When May rolls around in just a few short weeks, many of Casaroja’s members will be graduating, and they see no way the band will survive long-term. Roux said it’s not an ideal situation, but they can still benefit from their short time together.

“We’re spending all this time and energy to make this music that won’t last far beyond the next month and a half,” said Roux. “But at the same time, that’s a really cool experience because you’re getting all this other knowledge from all these other musicians. And then when we go off and do our own things musically, we have all that knowledge to spread to the next people we work with.”

Then in vintage Casaroja fashion, Berger teasingly added what kind of legacy the band will leave behind: “It’ll last in the hearts and minds of all the children.”

The band is trying to play as many shows as possible before their forced demise. This Saturday night, they’ll be playing at Otro Cinco downtown. They’ll join Second Line Syracuse, a brass group consisting mostly of Setnor faculty looking to raise funds to record an album. Kane said they’ll play some covers and originals, but a lot of what they do is somewhere in between.

That in-between sound is something Kingsley, a senior music major, said defines the group.

“We’re trying to play Casaroja,” he said.