Jazz
Cellar Live · 14 August 2026
Twelve grunge songs run through the hard bop mould, and the last one isn’t grunge at all: “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (7:35) is a traditional tune Lead Belly recorded and Nirvana retrieved for their Unplugged set. Ulysses Owens Jr. puts it last, gives it more than a minute more than anything else on the programme, and turns it into the point where the sextet strays furthest from its source.
The three Kurt Cobain tunes are the core. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (6:24) is where the grunge stays most visible, with Dan Wilson’s guitar solo roughed up on purpose; “In Bloom” (4:40) carries the album’s only vocal, sung by trumpeter Benny Benack III, and leans Latin; and “Heart-Shaped Box” (6:21) already existed as a single back in November 2024, as a Musora Session under Owens’ own name, and turns up here stretched past six minutes.
The rest of the programme spreads the work around. “Wooden Jesus”, from Temple of the Dog, is where Benack plays muted and where the band slips in a quotation from Kurt Weill’s “My Ship”: four and a half minutes of truce between “Teen Spirit” and Soundgarden’s “Spoonman” (4:45). “Disarm” (4:42), from the Smashing Pumpkins, and “Interstate Love Song” (5:27), from Stone Temple Pilots, are the two restrained cuts; Alice in Chains’ “Would?” (5:06) and Pearl Jam’s “Even Flow” (5:30) go the other way. Pianist Tyler Bullock is the only holdover from the Around The World With U line-up of last March, with Thomas Milovac on bass and Langston Hughes II on alto among the new faces.
Sixty-five minutes is a lot for a procedure this constant: head, solos, head again. From the fifth track on, the alternation between a fast cut and a restrained one is easy to see coming, and the second half coasts largely on the band’s craft. One choice doesn’t quite square with the premise either: “Celebrity Skin” (4:29) is Hole, 1998, four years after Cobain’s death, and sitting next to Soundgarden and the three Cobain songs it plays like a guest from out of town.
Twelve tracks, sixty-five minutes, Cellar Live, 14 August. Owens’ previous outing with Generation Y is Around The World With U (Cellar Music Group, March 2026).
Rating: 7.2/10
Text by Aina Torrents