Rubblebucket Orchestra
John Brown’s Body Trumpet Player Brings Intensity to a New Project
By Warren Allen
Photo by JP Candelier

Alex Toth wants people dancing when he plays, so he sets the example. He rocks with his music, making the bell of his trumpet bounce, and shuts his eyes as he growls out a strand of swelling notes. Toth’s Rubblebucket Orchestra is a nine to ten piece group, featuring four to five horns, keyboard, guitar, bass and at least two percussionists. Alex will say it’s a Fela Kuti/James Brown Afro-Funk group with some of the complex and dissonant harmonies from saxophonist Sam Rivers’ big bands. It’s all topped off with the reggae influence from Alex’s other job as trumpet player for Boston super group John Brown’s Body.

“I love jazz and avant-garde,” he says. “But I really want a band where I can get these really rich musical ideas with harmonic, rhythmic, and compositional integrity but still rock the house with it, you know?”

This has been always been Toth’s style, but it isn’t the only thing allowing him to thrive in a Boston music scene. He will sit down and crank out a song in one sitting, but he also assumes the networking and managerial duties for both groups.

Growing up in a musical household in New Jersey, Alex picked up the trumpet in the fourth grade. “You had to join the band, or a chorus, if you wanted to go to Six Flags at the end of the year,” he says. “Plus I was drawn to music anyway, and I thought an instrument would be a lot cooler than singing. I picked the trumpet because it only had three buttons.” In middle school, he discovered improv and fell in love, transcribing solos from Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane and eventually Miles Davis. During his later years of high school, he decided that he wanted to devote himself to music.

After graduating college in 2006, Toth first arrived in Boston, and was going to jazz clubs every night, sitting in with as many people as he could. Though he knew that he didn’t have the best or fastest technique, he was able to jam with countless Boston musicians. Along the way, Alex had observed that, in music, as with anything else, success depends on who you know. “People say the best things that happen for your career, the biggest successes, aren’t going to be through a job interview or some application you send in,” he says. “It’s going to be through people.”

Networking has brought him to the point that he’s making a living today. In college, Toth made friends with a keyboard player in a local reggae group. They were eventually able to play eight shows and make an impression. Later, that keyboard player would remember Toth when he joined a well-known Boston band called John Brown’s Body. Eventually, spots in the band opened up, and Alex got the calls. “John Brown’s Body is the foundation for everything,” Alex says. “It’s why I moved to Boston. It’s paying the bills, and it’s teaching me a ton about music. It’s opening all these musical doors in terms of business relationships. ‘Oh, you’re in John Brown’s Body? You’re in, man.’”

Creating a large group of his own meant that he would now have to take the managerial duties. Making all the telephone calls for gigs and rehearsals, the hours of scheduling seem endless. Pulling nine or ten musicians together has brought a whole new level of complication into Toth’s life. “There are all these incredible players out there, and they all have different troubles. They’re amazing, but one has an emotional problem, or one’s a drunk, or one’s too scared to come out, or one’s an asshole,” he says. Lately though, Toth has finally been able to cement a more constant lineup for his group, anchored by himself, Kalmia Traver (lead vocals/sax), and guitarist David Slaninger.

Rubblebucket has now made several passes through Vermont, New York, and Northern New England. They recently entered the studio to record some new compositions for an upcoming album. “[We’re lucky] we could be working in a wedding band or something and making rent. But it’s a lot more exciting and rewarding to try and put out our own original music.”

www.myspace.com/rubblebucket