They’re a harmony heavy band. While there are loads of Durango-based bands that are thick with vocal harmonies, which includes bluegrass bands to the barbershoppers, for Safety Meeting, a local trio featuring guitar player Eli Emmitt, bass player Chuck Hank and drummer Alec Mayes, the harmonies come first. It’s an important facet to this band of music makers and music lovers featuring musicians who also do time in other local bands, as important as a big riff or solid rhythm section.
Safety Meeting will play next week, then they open for the funk- and jam-heavy Kyle Hollingsworth Band at the Animas City Theatre on Jan. 9.
If you go
WHAT: Funk and jam with Kyle Hollingsworth, opening local band Safety Meeting.
WHEN: 7 p.m. Jan. 9.
WHERE: Animas City Theatre, 128 E. College Drive.
TICKETS: $28/$30.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit www.animascitytheatre.com.
“Alec and I got together, I guess we started playing music together in like 2018 or 2019. I think we just loved signing together. So we started out singing some Fleet Foxes songs, some Beatles, we wanted to be some guys singing harmonies in a Durango band,” Hank said. “We said we were a First Aid Kit (the harmony heavy, female duo) cover band, and so we called ourselves Safety Meeting, and the name and the band is a roundabout Fleet Foxes joke. But that’s kind of where the band came from, singing harmonies, and we really loved to play abstract music, and so it’s kind of like a weird, R&B, fusion jazz band with three-part harmonies sung over it.”
Their first show was technically a Chuck Hank solo show: He was on stage, Emmitt was there, Mayes was there, and subtle talk about bands they liked led to an unofficial first show.
“We realized we had a lot of shared tastes, with bands like Snarky Puppy, Kamasi Washington, and really these jazz interests and R&B and funk and fusion and folk, you know, just outside the niche genre what we play a ton of,” Hank said. “So we had this show, Alec got up for a couple, Eli got up for a couple, and we called that the first Safety Meeting show.”
While these three musicians have their own projects, which includes time in bands like Desert Child and High County Hustle, Mayes said this serves as a “great outlet for what we’re not doing in our other projects.”
Yes, it’s harmony heavy, but they’ll also lay down a glorious and loud bed of 1970s inspired avant-jazz fusion in between those harmonies.
“We really love doing it,” Hank said. “There’s nothing sweeter than locking into a cool harmony. We all play instruments, but there’s really something when you heart just a solid three-part harmony.”
“It feels less traditional to me,” Mayes said. “There’s something enigmatic, it’s an anomaly I try to describe, and I get stuck on the genre.”
Genre be damned, and number of band members be damned too, as Safety Meeting remains a band open for anything.
“I think we’re a band of collaborators. We’re a trio that can sometimes be a quintet, depending on the show, depending on how much fun we want to have, depending on how much money we don’t want to make, we’ll bring a lot more people in and just have a killer time,” Hank said. “I think our roots are in vocal, harmonic folk music, but we also love fusion jazz, we love jamming hard, we love improvising.”
The future includes dropping a single in the not-to-distant future, more writing, more harmonies and more exploration from a genre-less band. It’s the simple aspiration of more music from people whose whole world is music.
“I’d love to write some more and really develop our style. I think we can farm some pretty cool, new sounds,” Han said. “That might not be as far off as it seems.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
