Mentone is Aki (Bass), Dave (drums), Ronen (guitar and vocals), Jason (guitar and vocals), Joey (turntables), and Paul (piano, organ, wurli and vocals).
Mentone is about a place and a time. A street, a house, midnight jam sessions that disturbed some neighbors and endeared others, wild parties, but mostly. . . just good times. Tight grooves, catchy hooks, polyrhythms, and lyrics that touch a universal nerve, spanning from the humorous to the serious.
All musicians grew up loving a wide array of music. You couldn't really look at these guys and pick out any genre allegiance. Everything they soaked up seemed to explode out, and even while crafting songs in a reggae style, many subtle influences can be detected by the careful listener. You hear it in the studio material, and even more in the live shows that feature excellent improvisation. The band formed in March of 2004 while five of the members were studying ethnomusicology at UCLA. The study of music in culture was the perfect degree for this group, and an ideal setting to absorb a nice palette of world music.
Mentone sounds like roots reggae written by guys that listen to, and play a lot of other types of music, like psychedelic rock, hip hop, and funk. The bands sound revolves around a locked tight groove in the bass and drums, and balanced out with the right proportions of vocals, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, organ, and wurlitzer piano. Samples, turntables, three part harmonies and horns are added for texture and dynamics. Improvisation and experimentation are the highlights of live shows..
You can expect Mentone’s live performance to include, catchy originals and classics by all kinds of awesome artists like Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, The Gladiators, Michael Jackson, Sublime, and The Meters performed in their own style, which borrowsfrom the rich tradition of African, Latin American and North American popular dance and rock genres. All kinds of people will be gettin' down and dancing like there is no tomorrow.
Mentone has performed for several UCLA events, concerts, and festivals as well as many venues in LA (Good Hurt, The Joint, The Westwood BrewCo, 14 Below, The Hard Rock Cafe, Warsawza).
Some thoughts:
We embrace the Rastafari movement and philosophy, even though none of us have been to Jamaica, its soul and struggle have been shared with us and have touched us through music. Whether you're white or black or brown or yellow, Jewish or Christian, we believe the power and strength obtained through the honest pursuit of justice and equality dignify the soul and bring us to God.
Mentone is a band that is rooted in the spirit of personal revolution for the fight against opression. The goal is for the music to seduce us into the struggle against repression. By nature we seek pleasure and wish to avoid pain, but reality forces human beings to renounce pleasures. Therefore reality frustrates desire. Our frustrated desire causes repression. And repression causes misunderstanding, greed, envy, intolerance and ultimately war, and enslavement. These are the sad conditions we find ourselves facing more and more. We need a way to escape reality and free our desires, so we can find happiness. That is what good art does for us. It awakens our conciousness and compels us to make personal changes for our own well being and everyone elses in the world.
As students we explored a great wealth of musical inspiration. Everything from performance training in several world genres, to sound and audio technology, to the philosophy and sociology of music. We are interested in art as phenomenology and social protest, and in how music functions in life and for life. We find ourselves nested within a society that values the physical over the spiritual; the material over the experiential. But, we don't necessarily believe that he who dies with the most toys wins. Trying to uplift our brothers and sisters with music will be a worthy enough goal.
We are also attracted to a philosophy that emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence. We argue against definitions of human beings either as primarliy rational, knowing beings who relate to reality primarliy as an object of knowledge or whose action can or ought to be regulated by rational principles, or as beings who can be defined in terms of their behavior as it looks to or is studied by others. Choice is the ultimate evaluator. We are engaged in a battle to keep the right to make choice. We love America, but we are aware of its flaws. We did not choose to be born here. And we are painfully aware of the oppression that this country inflicts on our innocent brothers and sisters. Therefore, we believe in defiance and in actively educating our peers, because we have the power to make change. We believe in the eventual liberation of the American people and to a day when we will account for all of our bad choices, and commit to building a positive and enriching world.