Too Many Zooz is billing this fall run the “Live in Canada (Mostly!) Tour,” and the parenthetical earns its place: the November leg moves almost entirely through Canada, with Buffalo as the opening exception. Asbury Hall gets the first night of a group that has been making something they call Brass House — instrumental, kinetic, and exactly the kind of thing a historic music hall is built for.
About the Show
The trio is Leo “Leo P” Pellegrino on baritone saxophone, Matt “Doe” Muirhead on trumpet, and David “King of Sludge” Parks on drums — three people who found each other in the New York City subway, where they started busking in 2013. A 2014 video of their Union Square Station set spread widely enough to turn that transit work into an international touring career. The sound they built there, which they call Brass House, blends avant-garde jazz, EDM, and punk rock into something entirely vocal-free: no lyrics, no singer, just two horns and a drum kit, and press covering their live show has described the result as making a room “feel like a rave in a subway car.”
In 2016 the band appeared on Beyoncé’s Lemonade and performed alongside Beyoncé and The Dixie Chicks at the CMA Awards, a pairing that put their music in rooms most jazz-adjacent acts never reach. Their 2024 album Retail Therapy, their first in nearly five years, returned to the transit system as subject matter and frame, with tracks like “Subway Devil Blues” pulling the origin story forward. Muirhead has said: “The subway is where we came from. It shaped our music and us as people equally.”
Horns have been at the center of communal music for generations: the brass tradition that ran through jazz and funk and gospel, the call that needs no lyric to be understood. Too Many Zooz carry that lineage and run it through different circuitry. The Buffalo date opens the band’s Canada run, continuing through Hamilton, Waterloo, Toronto, Ottawa, and Montreal before a closing night in Portland, Maine on Nov. 21.
Venue & Logistics
Asbury Hall at Babeville is at 341 Delaware Ave in Buffalo, one of western New York’s anchor rooms for touring acts of this reach. The show starts at 8:00 p.m. More information at babevillebuffalo.com.
Tickets
No ticket price was available from sources at the time of publication. Buy tickets