Butch Morris

Featuring: Nublu Orchestra

2025 stock. The question is simple, but the answer remains an enigma: "What is Nublu?" The legendary Avenue C club and label exists as a force seemingly without definition, where Forro in the Dark delivers hard-charging Brazilian folk one night, and I Led Three Lives entrances crowds with near-psychedelic tech-jazz two nights later. If there is any promise of unlocking this mystery, the Nublu Orchestra conducted by Butch Morris holds the key. The Nublu Orchestra assembles the multifaceted range of musicians who call Nublu home. Band members from Brazilian Girls, Wax Poetic, Kudu, Forro in the Dark, I Led Three Lives, and Love Trio, alongside regular Nublu guests Graham Haynes and Eddie Henderson, all perform under the baton of Butch Morris, inventor of Conduction®.

Conduction represents Morris' revolutionary vocabulary of ideographic signs and gestures designed to modify or construct real-time musical arrangements. An outstretched hand with upward-facing palm commands sustain; fast, forward baton strikes direct staccato sounds. Through this conductive language, Morris can instigate or manipulate musicians' harmonies, melodies, rhythms, articulations, phrasings, and forms within spontaneous compositions. Morris, who began as a free jazz cornet player and composer, invented Conduction twenty-one years ago to unite musicians regardless of technical, theoretical, stylistic, or cultural differences. Since its inception, he has conducted over 5,000 musicians across twenty-two countries. With the Nublu Orchestra, it's as if a composite of all those nations and players have converged.

"Conduction is contingent on social and cultural structures but is not limited to or dependent on style or category," Morris explains. "Musicians, no matter their background, play what they play best under the baton of Conduction. They give it to me and I reshape it. Nublu Orchestra comprises musicians from jazz, funk, pop, fusion, Brazilian, R&B, classical backgrounds... but the music we make is none of these." This philosophy illuminates Nublu's essence. "If Nublu means anything, it means 'inclusive nature' rather than exclusive," Morris continues. "It means we will find the center of balance and cosmology no matter who is in the band. Nublu reflects the music and the music reflects Nublu. It's a total encounter in the moment."

That momentary encounter reveals the answer to "What is Nublu?" The Orchestra's music amalgamates sounds from free jazz to techno, mirroring the club's eclectic programming. When swirling wind sounds and horns yield to punk-funky bass lines on Sketches of NYC, Nublu's common thread emerges. As free jazz horn lines contort around solid four-on-the-floor beats complete with disco hi-hats in We Are The Ones, it becomes clear how a venue releasing electro-pop records can host steel guitar players every Sunday without contradiction.

While Butch Morris serves as the convergence point for all styles within the Nublu Orchestra, the club itself beats at the heart of all Nublu bands. Just as Morris directs and reshapes individual musicians' improvisations, the venue subtly influences its artists' outputs, developing common threads within one of music's most diverse communities.