The Aristocrats: No Words to Describe Them

Like the boundary-pushing and scandalously vulgar joke for which they’re named, The Aristocrats aren’t for everyone. But their brand of genre-blurring music – combining jazz, hard rock, fusion, prog and more – has won the group a legion of hardcore followers. Drummer Marco Minnemann, bassist Brian Bellar and guitarist Guthrie Govan all rank at the top of their respective fields as instrumentalists, and the members of this international group share a love of infusing their work with outrageous and irreverent humor.

The three musicians got together in 2011 for what was initially thought of as a one-off performance. “I remember when we started,” says Govan. “A lot of people assumed, ‘Okay, these are three musos; they’ve flung together a supergroup, and they’re going to do one album, and the name of the band will be the three guys’ surnames, and then we’ll never hear from them again.’”

But fourteen years and ten albums later, they’re still together. “We knew we wanted to make something with longevity,” Govan says. “We wanted to carry on watering the garden and see what it becomes.” He says that a key to the band’s enduring is “a shared worldview” among the three. “We do have overlapping senses of humor, and I think that informs the sounds that we make. And it also helps us to keep our show on the road.” Remarkably, The Aristocrats convey that humor without the use of vocals or lyrics.

The Aristocrats’ latest release is Duck, an ambitious concept album about an Antarctica-based bird who’s pursued by a penguin policeman across a 10,000 mile journey to New York City. But wait: a concept album without lyrics?

“Well, why not?” Govan retorts. “There’s lots of classical music out there that has a narrative attached to it. Why should our field of music be any different?” He explains that when composing instrumental music, he and his band mates often have some kind of background story or mood in mind. And in the case of Duck, each of them wrote their tunes independently, with no knowledge of what the other two were composing.

>Govan says that when he, Minnemann and Bellar reconvened in the studio and reviewed their new material, they made a surprising discovery. “We realized, ‘Hang on: if we just move everything around a bit, we can get a whole narrative out of this that actually makes sense!’” Duck was released in February, and a text version is being shared online in installments. “I’m not sure how many fans are going on the website and reading,” he says with a chuckle. “But it is kind of a coherent story.”

For listeners who are happy simply sticking to the music, there’s still plenty to enjoy. Tracks like “Sitting With a Duck on a Bay” navigate a thrilling journey through jazz, heavy funk and progressive rock, all in the space of just over seven minutes. “What we’re really trying to do,” Govan admits, “is write songs that [we all] enjoy playing, and that we’d all like to listen to.” Readily conceding that The Aristocrats’ musical approach makes them harder to sell, he concludes, “we figure it’s worth it.”