Throttle Elevator Music

Throttle Elevator Music emerged as a West Coast collective that introduced its ferocious strain of punk-funk-infused jazz through the self-titled debut album issued in 2012. That record balanced expansive instrumental stretches with compact, high-energy punk pieces, spotlighting the singular saxophone approach of bandleader Kamasi Washington alongside the fervent and unyielding momentum supplied by Wide Hive founder, producer, and composer Gregory Howe. Across the ensuing seven years the group sustained its trajectory of continual growth and inventive exploration through a series of studio albums that documented its evolving identity and creative preoccupations.

Howe assembled the project in 2011 with the explicit aim of fusing the uncompromising idioms of jazz and punk. The initial lineup placed young tenor saxophonist Kamasi Washington beside drummer Mike "Lumpy" Hughes and bassist/pianist Matt Montgomery, with Howe guiding the sessions from the producer’s chair as the ensemble forged its distinctive punk-jazz hybrid. The musicians reassembled in 2014 to record the follow-up Area J, again featuring Mike Hughes behind the drums and delivering another uncompromising surge of intense jazz. Their third album, Jagged Rocks, arrived in 2015, followed by IV in 2016. During this period Washington’s profile rose sharply after the appearance of The Epic in 2015 and Heaven & Earth in 2018, which established him among jazz’s foremost figures. The ensemble’s fifth release, Retrorespective, surfaced in 2017 and presented newly compiled material drawn from sessions originally taped in 2011 and 2016.

Howe reconvened Throttle Elevator Music for the 2020 album Emergency Exit, which again drew on unreleased recordings made between 2011 and 2014 and included guest contributions from Ross Howe, Kasey Knudsen, and trumpeter Erik Jekabson. In March 2021 the collective issued Final Floor, its concluding set of original material culled, as the title implies, from studio remnants in the form of alternate takes, outtakes, and undeveloped fragments. Rather than issue these pieces as a miscellaneous assortment, the group arranged them into a deliberate sequence that stands as a fully realized seventh album.