“Anything you could hit that would make a noise would serve our purpose,” says Lev Gartman.
On stage in the Angell Elementary School auditorium, seven U-M students stand behind a pair of folding tables as a group of Angell kids looks on. The onstage students are holding long, clear plastic tubes, which they tap on the table, making hollow-sounding notes. After pretending to fool around awkwardly for a bit, they launch into a fast, perfectly synchronized sequence of beats, until the delighted kids realize it’s a silly version of the William Tell Overture.
This is Groove, and tubes and tables aren’t the only odd instruments they play. The multi-talented U-M student collective’s lively, entertaining performances feature skits, dancing, singing, and percussion pieces played on aluminum ladders, propane tanks, garbage cans, and other unlikely objects. And outreach programs like this in the public schools are just the tip of the iceberg–they also do two big concerts a year and perform at special events, including this year’s U-M commencement.
Gartman, who founded Groove in 2003, calls it the “love child” of the English group Stomp and the New York-based Blue Man Group. One of Groove’s first instruments was a xylophone made from a barricade that Gartman and a friend “borrowed” from a NYC street and took back to Michigan. They cut pipes to make the notes they wanted, attached them to the barricade, and played it with hammers. One of their first tunes was a version of “Hey Ya,” the big hit by the R & B group Outkast.
Of all their strange instruments, perhaps the strangest is “Doc Oc,” named for a Spiderman villain. Made of different lengths of curved PVC pipe, it has a harness that allows the player to carry it on his or her back. Played with handmade paddles made of wood and sponge, it makes a deep yet airy sound. It looks and sounds bizarre, yet cool.
Groove plays for audiences as small as the Angell School assembly, and as large as this spring’s commencement. As about 44,000 people found their seats at Michigan Stadium, Groove members climbed aluminum stepladders, playing the metal crosspieces with drumsticks as they stepped up or jumped down. They also played their trademark garbage cans, water barrels, and racks of plastic buckets cut to different sizes. Called “bucket tenors,” these are played much like the racks of tom-toms used by marching bands.
At times, as many as half of Groove’s thirty or so members have come from the Michigan Marching Band drumline. But “not everyone in the group has a percussion background,” says musical director Meredith Hoffman. In fact, Groove has rejected technically great drummers because they lacked stage presence. “We’re looking for entertainers,” Hoffman says.
For most of the year the group practices for two hours twice a week, but in the two weeks leading up to their big fall and winter shows, they practice for six hours every day. “It really taught me to manage my time,” says member Josh Simon.
Once they graduate, most Groove members move on from music. Since 2008, however, a select few have continued to play in a professional strange-percussion group called Juice. Member and spokesman Brandon Krieg says Juice plays around forty shows a year at theaters, music festivals, and colleges all over the country.
Groove plays outside the U-M Museum of Art on September 1. Their big shows are scheduled for December 3, 2011, and March 23, 2012, at the Michigan Theater.
