Shuffle Demons: They Are for Real... Really

On the Shuffle Demons' Are You Really Real (Alma Records 2025), the uncategorizable Toronto band knits together traditional jazz, modern funk playfulness, blues, rap and the sensuality of Prince. For an ensemble that has been a going concern for 40 years, they maintain an optimistic, let's-go-for-something- new outlook, reflected in their flamboyant retro clothing that resembles that worn by harmonizing quartets with 1950s haircuts, looking so sharp they could pierce the heart of a bureaucrat. Born out of busking on Toronto's vibrant street scene in 1984, Shuffle Demons have built a legacy as innovators of genre-defying music. Are You Really Real? celebrates this history while pushing their music forward. The stripped-down combination of bass, horns, and drums creates a bold sound, setting the stage for high-level improvisation and dynamic grooves.

We are talking four decades of fearless creativity, led by original members Richard Underhill and Stich Wynston. Kelly Jefferson, Mike Downes and Matt Logan complete the current roster. The unusual combination of three saxophones, bass and drums somehow manages to deliver a sound as full-bodied as a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from Ontario's Kacaba Vineyard. Listening to the album is like enjoying a glass with dinner, while grazing a cheese board before getting up to dance if there is chocolate for dessert!

If you are worried about being a latecomer to the work of Shuffle Demons, take solace in the certainty that you are not alone. Their output started with Streetniks (Stubby Records, 1986) followed by five other albums with curious names such as: Bop Rap (Stony Plain Records, 1988), What Do You Want? (Stony Plain Records, 1990), Clusterfunk (Linus Entertainment, 2012), Crazy Time (Stubby Records, 2019) and All In (Stubby Records, 2021). Their debut album yielded a leftfield hit with "Spadina Bus," a reference to the Toronto Transit Commission's Spadina Avenue bus, which Underhill would hop on after busking while allowing his own songcraft to incubate to maturity. You may have noticed a rather large gap between the third and fourth albums, owing to the band breaking up and reforming seven years later with a greatest hits record.

Their music is a showcase for a unique and eclectic sensibility, horns bristling with passages like an all-night choir of frogs mating in harmony, rhythms so hot they are hissing like a blowtorch. When they work in a rap cut or two like "Have A Good One," you hear echoes of Tower of Power's horn section shouting out "Oakland Stroke," intermingled on Wynston's drum kit with a sound like breakdancing in a bowl of Rice Krispies. The music is fractured, giddy, funky and just plain fun, each song highlighting a different aspect of the band. The track "Money Is Everything" throbs, tightens, droops as the triple saxophone attack blows with almost a tangible menace like a mature bull protecting a herd of cows. Alternately on one such as "Ride the Wave," their palette can be as light as a surfer's eyebrows.

The chemistry that activates Shuffle Demons is palpable on numbers like "X Marks the Spot" and the title track, outrageous and irresistible forays into jazz-funk. Their humor and fearless spirit could call upon audiences to break out into the Chicago craze, "Percolator Dance." Typically, they manage to find the sweet spot between their multitude of influences, making the listening experience more enjoyable than frustrating as is sometimes the case with full-on blowing bands. Theirs is no pretentious jumble of references to diverse sounds as Rich and Stich knit them so they all sway together. The two bandmates spoke to All About Jazz in the following Q & A about what 40 years together has wrought.

We take our jazz sunny side up with a cup of cacophony

All About Jazz: Good morning, Richard and Stich, we are all on screen. Praise the Gods. Sorry, no demons allowed.

Richard Underhill: We are a two-headed monster.

AAJ: Let us move right to the origins of Shuffle Demons. Tell us the tale.

RU: Well, the Shuffle Demons started because a bunch of us came to Toronto to go to university—Stich already lived here—and I was busking a lot at the time to pay my way through school. I lived with one of the other band members, Mike Murley, who came from Nova Scotia. He invited Stitch and his best friend, Dave Parker, and we really gelled as this band. We kept busking and busking, did a tour of Europe, more busking, and then finally hit the stages of clubs and festivals in 1986, put out albums, and it went from there. But it was a really organic group of friends who loved playing similar kind of stuff, and we were very aware of the musical soup that was happening in the mid-1980s. So, we came up with this interesting combination of players and instruments to make the Shuffle Demons.

Stich Wynston: Nothing about it was preconceived; the whole thing just evolved organically from the streets. There we were—three saxophones and I'm the drummer.

AAJ: So, Richard, you were out on the streets all by yourself busking with a saxophone? Is that why the first release was called Streetniks?

RU: Exactly. It was a shout out to the beatnik era and also a shout out to the fact that we started out as a street band.

AAJ: The personnel has undergone changes over the 40 years, especially after the breakup / reunion.

RU: Absolutely. Stitch and I are the lone originals in the band. People move away; it's inevitable. In the '90s, Dave Parker married a woman and moved to Quebec City, and then Mike Murley embarked on a jazz career of his own and didn't have the space to do the Demons. Stitch has basically been on the prowl for some of the hottest young players or established players in Canada and elsewhere, and we work them in. It's a little bit of a fluid lineup when we play out, but the recording band is the current lineup, certainly.

AAJ: Did any of you have formal music instruction?

SW: Well, we met at York University and were all in the jazz music program together. So yeah, we were serious music students, and some of us also took private lessons.

AAJ: Is there any one teacher in particular that took you under his wing or was important to you?

SW: For me, it was Jim Blackley, who was a very famous drum teacher here in Toronto. He taught a lot of the best drummers in Canada. What about you, Richard? Did you study privately at all?

RU: It would probably be Al Henderson, who was my workshop leader at York. He was influenced by Mingus and Monk and that really creative music with a blues edge. He had a band called Time Warp, which was similar in a way to the Shuffle Demons, as in there were no chordal instruments, so either trumpet and sax, bass and drums, or two saxophones and bass and drums. I was very interested in that music, that Ornette Coleman-type music that was more verging on free jazz, but still melodic. Al was very inspiring and encouraging.

AAJ: Who comes up with the band's arrangements?

RU: It's usually up to the composer of the song, and we all compose, though I do a fair amount of the compositions on any given album. I guess that would be me doing the arrangements. Some of them are group things, like some of the older songs we spontaneously composed on stage. We'd come up with horn backgrounds, and we still do that when we're performing live. I will walk over to one of the sax players and we'll come up with a background behind another saxophonist, so that can be a bit spontaneous. Stitch has a few songs on this record that he arranged.

AAJ: Was there ever any consideration given to adding other chordal instruments like keys and strings?

SW: No. We love the sound of a chord-less band. It's a very unique sound and our own unique musical personalities make it very original. I don't think adding a guitar or piano would do the band justice. I think a lot of the things that make it special are the instrumentation.

RU: It is one of those things where if you place a limitation on an artist, then they come up with a creative way to work within that limitation. And in a way that's our limitation, that we don't have the chordal instruments. And we come up with a full sound in spite of that. Stitch says that really defines our sound.

SW: Personally, I don't think of it as limitations. I just think it's certain parameters and gives us a lot of freedom. Actually, it opens things up in a lot of ways because if you have a chordal instrument, it kind of locks you in, but without one, we can take it in all kinds of different directions. So, I find it very freeing.

RU: It's true in the soloing. You can go down a different avenue and everyone can jump on because there's only a bass note and a soloist, and sometimes maybe some backgrounds from horns. It can all be interpreted in different ways.

AAJ: Once in a while, I can hear African influences in the music. Is that something you would use?

RU: For sure. I was lucky enough to do something in Toronto in the '90s called Afro Night, which was a once-a-month jam at a club called The Bamboo, led by a bassist from Mozambique. There's a big African community in Toronto, and so we get people from all over the world sitting in. I got a real dose of some wonderful African music. That's something Stitch has also been into and influenced by.

SW: We're very fortunate to live in Toronto, which is the most multicultural city in the world. There are people from over 260 countries who reside here. So, we get exposed to so many different cultures artistically and in so many ways. It's definitely had an influence on us and our music.

AAJ: Here is the scary question. Are you guys demons?

RU: More like Crafty Devil, something like the impish version of that. So, we were playing on the street and still didn't have a name. We happened to be playing one of my songs, which was called "The Shuffle Monster." There was a 3/4 song I'd written for my York University big band class, then at some point in the tune I crashed it with this groovy song called "The Shuffle Monster." We just finished playing that and someone asked us, whoa, what are you guys called? And Shuffle Demons came out. There's a jazz tradition of having a demon or a devil in your name. We play a few shuffles, but if you came thinking you're going to get a whole night of blues shuffles, that's not who we are. It's a figurative name.

AAJ: Good to know it is not literal. How would you define a shuffle?

SW: Well, it's a triplet-oriented groove, which is very prominent in blues and jazz music. So, the basic jazz ride cymbal pattern is ding, ding, ding 1, 3, 4. And in the shuffle groove, you play the quarter notes and then skip a beat. So, that's a shuffle.

RU: There's different kinds of shuffles. There's a classic Art Blakey shuffle, and there's the Bernard Purdie shuffle. He has a really interesting variation on it. But it's a really classic rhythm that you often associate with jazz and blues music.

SW: Many of the reviews of our music say that we're uncategorized, and I really like that because it means that we've come up with a kind of music that defies categorization. It's really open-ended, and I don't like the way that the music industry likes to categorize artists. This artist is jazz, and this artist is blues, and this artist is rock. It's like musical segregation. We have all kinds of different influences that we incorporate, so we don't want to be pigeonholed into a genre or a label. I don't know how you feel about that, Richard.

RU: It's true. Our second album was called Bop Rap. In a way, we were sort of rapping early on and we had some bebop influences, but that certainly didn't cover the whole gamut of what we did. With the instrumentation being as it is, we can veer off into all kinds of different things that are influenced stylistically by different genres. But it doesn't lock it into anything that's really traditional, so it's cool. It allows us to free float and come up with our own thing.

SW: When we play, for example, something funky, it doesn't sound like James Brown or Parliament Funkadelic . There's no electric bass; there's no keyboards, no guitar. It just sounds like ourselves. We have a couple of reggae-influenced tunes that I've written, but again, it doesn't sound like Bob Marley. We put our own spin on it and make it our own.

AAJ: Listening for the first time, I got this feeling like there is a punk sensibility to it. Of course, I'm not talking Sex Pistols or Tom Verlaine or anything like that, but it felt very vibrant and not beholden to anything else.

SW: In our early days, we were thought of as musical rebel rousers. We were going against the norm and throwing out all the rules. And that's what I love about the band. We're not conforming to any kind of formula. We're just creating our own path.

RU: There was kind of a punk jazz scene in Toronto in the '80s, new jazz or whatever. And everyone was kind of pushing the boundaries influenced by Ornette Coleman and that sort of stuff, that kind of take no prisoners thing, but that also comes from playing on the street where it's a little bit more of a savage garden and you have to hold your territory. We ended up in Amsterdam once and had a little friendly run in with a guy called Zero Slingsby. He had a band called Zero Slingsby and the Works, and they were classic tough English buskers. They kicked us out of a spot, but then later on we became great friends with them. But that was the ethic on the street. It's a little bit of a pirate code.

SW: We called it Amsterdam Rules.

RU: Right. We've always been willing to plunge two feet first into whatever we're doing and with a lot of energy, that no holds barred, devil- may-care way that we approach things. And in terms of the musical tradition, too, that's the way I look at things. Sometimes people can be a little too reverent to the tradition, and the people who are making the jazz tradition weren't really reverent. They were pushing the envelope; they were going forward. I always think when you're playing a standard you want to approach it with your own kind of creativity.

AAJ: Before going any further, tell us what you were trying to achieve with Are You Really Real?

RU: Well, it's kind of our usual thing that we like to do, which is a lot of interesting instrumentals from a varied palette of the jazz tradition with a few vocal songs. They tend to be a little sardonic, poking fun at what's going on, "Money Is My Only Religion" being one of them. And with "Are You Really Real?" I've been studying since over two years ago the AI revolution. It takes a firm poke at that. When we're playing live, I can say this isn't fake, the audience isn't fake, the band isn't fake. But when I'm online, I have no idea if that's true or not. So, some of the songs are looking at social issues, and a lot of them are our own brand of jazz.

AAJ: What is your take on that, Stich?

SW: Whenever we do a new album, we're very fortunate here in Canada to have an infrastructure for the arts. We have arts councils that provide funding to Canadian artists from all different artistic disciplines to do activities like touring and recording. So, I always apply for recording grants to make a new album. Everyone starts composing songs and then it kind of takes on a life of its own. We never sit down and say, okay, what do we want to do on this album? We don't really conceptualize; it just happens and takes on a life of its own.

AAJ: Has the success of the band come as a surprise?

RU: Yes and no. In the early days, I was really the driver of trying to get us gigs and doing the promotion. It's not like that anymore. I innately knew somehow as a 22 or 23-year-old that being in something special doesn't come along that often, and I really wanted this to work. I would put pieces of paper out at shows and get people's addresses to join the fan club, which I was running. And then I would send out a newsletter way before it became online stuff. I would actually buy the stamps and send out a newsletter. That generated the early popularity. And then we were fortunate enough to be at the window when our version of MTV was happening. They were looking for Canadian videos. We managed to get a few videos onto Much Music that really kicked us off. I don't think I was surprised by our success. I was happy by it.

AAJ: I have looked at some of your videos and you do get a little wild on stage.

RU: That's part of the fun. Once again, goes back to the busking days where we marched through the crowd, which is always a highlight and brings the music right to people. And then Stitch will do some crazy dance stuff, and hopefully we're covered for insurance because I felt like a few times stages were going to collapse under the weight of his dancing.

SW: When I was a teenager, and Richard too, we both heard Sun Ra's group and that had a huge influence, the whole theatrical aspect of it. And then in 1985 when we did that busking tour of Europe, we had a chance to attend the North Sea Jazz Festival, and we caught Albert Mangelsdorff, who was also very theatrical, and some of those Dutch bands, Willem Breuker.

AAJ: I have to ask: Who is your tailor?

SW: Well, that's interesting because on that busking tour of Europe, our first stop was Paris. We were busking in front of the Pompidou Center, and we met this Gambian tailor named Gabi. And he said, man, you guys need to upgrade your wardrobe. So, he made us these traditional Gambian clothes. We started wearing them, and just over the years, we kept expanding on it in our second video called "Out of My House, Roach." Then we met this wonderful local artist named Kurt Swinghammer, and he designed our suits and the sets for our videos.

AAJ: Why does everyone wear a suit except for Stich. Is it that the drummers are strange things?

RU: I wasn't going to say it, but it's cool. Stitch brought up Sun Ra and that whole show part of it, and it's fun for me. It's a little bit like an elastic band. You kind of get 'em in with the costumes and everything, and then you stretch it with some weird music and then you bring 'em back. The costumes provide an identity, and once you put that suit on, you're shuffled in and you do feel that, okay. It's no holds barred; let's go for it. And they also give a little visual hook for an audience who may not be up to the kind of music we're doing. Then we win them over.

AAJ: You have done some traveling, but if you could go anyplace in the world and stay for a month where would that be?

RU: Interesting. Oh, there's so many choices. Let's see. We have toured all around the world, so everything offers something different. In New Zealand, you go for the hiking and the beauty or New Orleans, you go to soak up the music and maybe I would say New Orleans, because I've been there briefly. It was right after Katrina and I was part of an initiative by the CVCR broadcaster to send some funds. We did a performance at the House of Blues, and I got to play with The Soul Rebels who were a wonderful brass band, and actually got to march in the first crew of Mardi Gras that year. It would be great to go there and really soak in more of the tradition of the music. That could be wonderful.

SW: Another place we've performed in, I think four or five times, is Cuba at the jazz festival. They have such a rich musical tradition, so that was really special, being able to soak that in. The first time we went was 1992, and then we went in 2015, 2017 and 2018. The first one was just in Havana, and then it expanded to Havana and Santiago.

AAJ: Did friends ask you to bring back cigars?

RU: Oh yeah. Once, I got some cigars and brought them back, and I actually sold them for a profit. Someone was doing a big cigar party. I often go to our local music store (Long and McQuaid), which has been a great supporter of the arts. I go to the brass and woodwind department and say, hey, I'm going to Cuba. Do you guys have any seconds? And they give me a big bag of mouthpieces and reeds and accessories that I can bring down. Then I find a student or a teacher and hand them over because there's always a shortage of everything down there. So that's a really nice thing to be able to feel like you're contributing just a tiny bit to the great music that's there.

AAJ: You mentioned New Orleans. Did you ever have the chance to play in any of the second line marches?

RU: I managed to play in this first crew of Mardi Gras with the Soul Rebels, so that was amazing. I marched through the streets of New Orleans and what a feeling. So many incredible players. We have a sort of brass band scene here in Toronto with some pretty good sousaphone players. But there, man, I watched. We did our show and then I said, what are you guys doing? They said, oh, it's this first crew, this first parade of Mardi Gras. We're going to do that. And I was like, can I come? And they said, yeah, we need you because it was post-Katrina, so everyone was spread out to Houston and all over the place. They didn't have musicians, so I went down to Rampart Street to find them. The bands that came by were just unbelievable, just such great music. Then I found them, pulled out my horn, sunk into it, and got to play through the streets. What a joy!

AAJ: Hockey season is around the corner. Do you all play or watch?

RU: Early on when a bunch of us lived in a house, I used to apply for park permits to play hockey. We started the Jazz Musician's Hockey League out of that. We have a Friday game, which I haven't played in a while since Covid. We usually play at night. In the early days, we used to play against the Toronto Symphony team, which was called the Gustav Mahlers, as in brawlers. It was a pretty funny mix of the two. And further to that, the Toronto Symphony went to Finland on an exchange. They were going to play some conferences, concerts, and apparently the Finnish Symphony got wind that they had a hockey team. They put together a game but the Toronto guys didn't realize the Fins took it so seriously. It was actually televised, and the Fins had ringers, and they pummeled us.

SW: And speaking of hockey, we should mention that on our second album, Bop Rap, we did an arrangement of the Hockey Night in Canada theme. It ended up making it onto a compilation album of hockey songs, which went gold in Canada.

AAJ: I suppose your guys are Maple Leafs fans. The Canadiens are my team, so we have a rivalry going on.

SW: The Bell Center in Montreal is always electric. The problem with the Scotiabank Arena is that there are so many rich people who are there entertaining their clients, and they're not really there. They're not real hockey fans.

RU: We used to actually take our horns and play at the arena for some games, which was really fun. Usually, we could just afford the cheap seats. So, we're up in the cheap seats and we were playing and Stich is dancing and the crowd is going wild. Then we thought, okay, we can afford some better seats. So, we went down and it was a call for a penalty. We started playing to get the crowd into it.

AAJ: Has the sociopolitical nature of some of your vocal songs always been part of the band's repertoire?

RU: It's more my take on things. One of the original vocal songwriters was Dave Parker, and he wrote the sillier songs like "Out of My House" and "Roach." We had one, it was called "Deli Tray," like, hey, we won't play unless we see our deli tray. He was more of the fun one, and I was a bit more serious, but I'm thinking on this next—we've actually done some recording on a new album—I've got to write some more universal songs. Some of the sociopolitical stuff, it's something I obsess about, but it's not necessarily happy, fun, go to the club music. Maybe we will change it up a bit.

AAJ: What are the Shuffle Demons planning to do on the back forty?

RU: Hopefully keep playing, keep having fun, keep making music. It's hard to know what the future has in store, but I feel like we've been really lucky. I say, often as a joke, I've been retired for 40 years because what do retired people do? They get together with their friends, they travel, maybe they play music. I get the band back together, they have a few drinks and they make a little bit of money. But no, it has been a real gift to be able to do what you love for all these years, and hopefully we'll keep doing it. And we may be able to collect some retirement funds at some point, but it certainly wouldn't mean that I was retired because I don't ever want to stop playing. It's a fun thing to do and I love it.

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