Jazz Articles about Mostly Other People Do the Killing

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Mostly Other People Do The Killing: This Is Our Moosic

by Ivana Ng
November 13, 2008

Mostly Other People Do The Killing (MOPDtK), a quartet led by bassist Moppa Elliott, draws from a plethora of styles and genres in its third album, This Is Our Moosic. Traces of Ornette Coleman (the title and cover satirize the saxophonist's famous disc), John Coltrane and even Danny Elfman and Billy Joel emerge from the group improv in the nine tracks. The songs are out there but also full of familiar phrases. This Is Our Moosic is a true declaration ...

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Mostly Other People Do The Killing: This Is Our Moosic

by Mark Corroto
October 16, 2008

And the call came out from the emperor Wynton Marsalis to his loyal henchman Stanley Crouch, “Bring me the head of Moppa Elliott, and deliver his dome on a ride cymbal!” In fact, the Lord of Lincoln Center demanded the heads of all the members of the band Mostly Other People Do The Killing or MOPDTK. The PC police of the jazz canon could not allow these uprisings to gain popular acceptance. You must agree. We cannot have the 1960s ...

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Mostly Other People Do The Killing: This Is Our Moosic

by Troy Collins
October 15, 2008

A cheeky play on both Ornette Coleman's classic record This Is Our Music (Atlantic, 1960) and the name of a small town in Elliott's home state of Pennsylvania, This Is Our Moosic is the third studio album from bassist Moppa Elliott's terrorist bebop band Mostly Other People Do The Killing. Bolstered by a youthful visceral intensity, this album features the mercurial quartet's historically aware yet stylistically irreverent take on the jazz tradition.

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Mostly Other People Do the Killing: Shamokin!!!

by Eyal Hareuveni
October 7, 2007

New York-based quartet Mostly Other People Do the Killing sounds like an updated incarnation of Steve Bernstein's Sex Mob, more in spirit than in sound. Both quartets defy the sterile definition of jazz by neo-cons and like to play their own version of jazz--dirty, muddy and fast, and meant for the body rather than the brain. Both embrace post-modern pastiche techniques by knitting early jazz, pop and even smooth jazz quotes and references side-by-side with tributes to better sources including ...

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Mostly Other People Do The Killing: Shamokin!!!

by Troy Collins
October 2, 2007

Bassist Moppa Elliott's cheeky quartet, Mostly Other People Do The Killing (MOPDTK) aims to drag jazz kicking and screaming out of the concert hall and back into the street. In the liner notes to their first self-titled album (Hot Cup, 2005) Elliott wrote ..."I like my jazz with some dirt on it, sometimes a lot of dirt. Jazz has started to take itself too seriously and is in danger of falling into the same stagnant condition that so-called 'classical music' ...

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Mostly Others Do the Killing: Mostly Others Do the Killing

by Ty Cumbie
May 29, 2005

Moppa Elliott is a young bassist who leads a young, talented band. As such, the music--both written and improvised parts--is misleadingly mature. Whether it's strong training and influences or just plain old giftedness I can't say, but it's heartening to see such talent continue to flow into jazz, despite the great old form's ongoing brush with death at the hands of the music business, aided and abetted by an increasingly indifferent or antipathetic public.

Elliott seems to want to distance ...