The night Brad Tucker approached saxophonist Brian Nelson at the Ritz Cafe in Oak Bluffs, guitar slung over his shoulder, Mr. Nelson rolled his eyes. “Oh no, not another guitar player,” he thought to himself. Mr. Tucker only had to strum a few strings and sing a few bars for Mr. Nelson to understand that he meant business.
“He called me and said, look I’m trying to put something together; he already knew everyone else,” Mr. Nelson said, describing how the band got together. Mr. Tucker was friends with bassist Alex Budney, and he too wanted to be part of something. “It has its own way of working itself out,” Mr. Tucker added.
Everyone else included drummer Matt Rosenthal, keyboardist Ryan Enskine and trombonist Mark Campos. Together, they form the funk, rock and soul band the Mooncussers.
“We’re lucky because I wanted to put something together Big Band style,” Mr. Tucker, the band’s manager and lead singer said at their show last Wednesday night. “I feel so lucky that we have a five, sometimes six-piece band and we all match so well.”
The Mooncussers opened with a mélange of a James Brown cover mixed with their own improvisations, much of what the band plays. They stick to a base of funk, blues and bluegrass, and when Mr. Budney began Michael Jackson’s Billy Jean, his bandmates threw him darting stares. They laughed it off and quickly moved on.
Before the show started, a few of the band members sat down for an interview at a bar table at Seasons in Oak Bluffs, where the Mooncussers play every Wednesday night. Sipping on beers, their funk playlist playing in the background, band members who only started playing together early last summer were finishing each other’s sentences as if they were old friends.
“I throw something out there and everyone puts their own piece in it,” Mr. Tucker said. “Everybody meshes really well.”
“It’s so cool there’s a skeleton, a framework. Brad has a concept and we figure out some bare-bones stuff, but then the whole evening is improvised, it’s amazing,” Mr. Nelson continued. “One song starts here, and it morphs and then it’s this over here. It’s wonderful because we don’t rehearse to lock things in,” he added.
“We rehearse communication,” Mr. Tucker said. Throughout the evening, band members could be seen giving each other nods to indicate what the next chord or song would be, almost like a secret language. Band members are respectful of one another, allowing solos to happen naturally and taking turns having their star moments.
“If I could put this band in a nutshell it would be respect and autonomy,” Mr. Nelson said. “That’s our struggle, that’s my struggle. We get so excited about the horn parts that sometimes we have to pull it back when Brad’s singing.”
“I have to pull back sometimes too. That’s how it all works out with improvisation; it happens rarely but when someone does go a little nuts you see the rest of the band staring at you and you’re like, whoa,” Mr. Tucker said. “The crowd never notices, they think that’s the way that it was planned out. We have a skeleton like he said and the flesh comes from there.”
The Mooncussers play at Nectar’s on local night too. On this night, the bar was a little emptier compared to other nights at Seasons, but outside both adults and children were peering in through the windows on Circuit avenue, interested in who was making all that funk and noise. One young girl danced in the street.
“There’s a big difference between the venues. Because of the bricks, the more people that show up the better it sounds,” Mr. Tucker said of Seasons. “Here we notice that people aren’t dancing, they’re listening to it. We have waves of people off the street that are just listening. It’s the same song, the response is different. People are listening here and it’s contagious,” Mr. Nelson added.
“I love when people dance but I almost get more of a kick out of it when people are listening,” Mr. Tucker said. He said his favorite nights are those when the crowd is mostly musicians. “To me that’s a testament to how good the music is,” Mr. Nelson said. “It’s not just a party and it’s fun to dance, it’s like, wow, let me check out what the band’s doing.”
The band takes its name from a coffeehouse on Circuit avenue where singers such as Judy Collins and Carly Simon and her sister Lucy performed in the 1960s. “All the old timers could tell you about it,” Mr. Tucker said. “Kate Taylor nearly teared up when I told her about the name.”
He continued: “We lost Wintertide and Che’s [Lounge] so it’s a good way to pay homage to those places.” Mooncussers lured sailors into shallow water by using decoy lanterns on shore; then they would pillage the ships and would “cuss the moon” if its light revealed their trickery.
The band’s logo is adapted from the Hot Tin Roof, with a moon in it.
The band comes from widely varying backgrounds. Mr. Nelson, in a full suit and tie, looks as if he came straight from the office. But he is an engineer, specializing in geothermal heating. Mr. Tucker, also known for his lead role in the Island band Ballywho, was a stonemason for 10 years and gave it up to concentrate full-time on music. Mr. Budney drives down from his home in Burlington every time the band has a show, and Mr. Campos used to play his trombone on cruise ships. He toured with James Taylor years ago.
“We were playing at the P.A. club and all these little kids had their blow-up guitars and they were playing air guitar,” Mr. Nelson said of one of the band’s more memorable moments together. “Oh, yeah, this is definitely my favorite moment,” Mr. Tucker said about the story.
Mr. Tucker brought the kids up on the stage for an air guitar contest; he hid behind the amplifier making it appear as though the kids were really playing. “The parents were going nuts because it looked as if their kids were playing,” Mr. Nelson said. “You could just see the respect all the way around. The kids’ parents were so impressed,” he added.
“The kids were going nuts, the youngest that won the contest was 10 years old and he was jumping down onto his knees,” Mr. Tucker said, animated and strumming his own air guitar to enhance the story. “It was unbelievable. I got a bunch of flack after the show because they said, ‘Now I have to go buy my kid a guitar.’ They were so hooked.”
The Mooncussers play every Wednesday night at 10 p.m. at Seasons in Oak Bluffs and at local night Thursdays at Nectar’s at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport.
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