Alumni Band ILL Doots Talks With UArts
June 22, 2020
UArts sat down virtually with alumni band ILL Doots as they prepared for their July 10 virtual concert for their new album, The Mess. The concert, which was originally planned as an in-person event at Johnny Brenda’s, will now be live on YouTube. ILL Doots is a hip hop band whose music includes elements of funk, jazz, rock & soul. In addition to their members, the band frequently works with other artists, making for a truly collaborative musical experience.
Jordan McCree BM ’13 (Music Performance), the band’s drummer, described the virtual concert as “a blessing in disguise,” because ILL Doots was able to include acts not just in the Philly area, but from anywhere. Some of these acts include Dan Shearin from Asheville, North Carolina; CJ The Genesis from Waldorf, Maryland and ThunderRolling from Johannesburg, South Africa, among others.
The concert celebrates The Mess, which the band started writing in 2018. While on a trip to the family home of bassist Scott Ziegler BM ’13 (Music Performance) in Maine, the band got down to business writing new music. “We had a ton of equipment and zero songs, so we basically worked for the first five days nonstop, and we came up with 35 songs,” said Andrew Nittoli BM ’13 (Music Performance), MM ’14 (Jazz Studies). Eight of those songs ended up on the new album.
This album marks a little over a decade of the band working together. ILL Doots got its start at UArts when McCree and Ziegler held jam sessions in their freshman dorm room in Pine Hall in 2009. It was around that time when Ziegler met Anthony Martinez-Briggs BFA ’13 (Acting) at an open mic where he was performing poetry. Martinez-Briggs recalled that Ziegler asked him to “rap over some of his beats,” and the group ended up collaborating.
With LaTasha Morris BM ’06 (Vocal Performance) on vocals and Nittoli on the keys, the group began recording and performing their own music. “We were all basically intertwined, but we didn’t make things official until later,” said McCree.
At UArts, the group members were all influenced in different ways by their coursework. Ziegler noted that after taking a course on Paris in the 20’s, the group had the idea for a hip hop salon that they hosted at the Tasker House, a venue and place for artists to collaborate. “That’s where we largely got plugged into the larger Philly hip hop scene,” he commented.
As for their name, ILL stands for I Love Living/I Love Learning. Although they had gone by ILL Doots before, it wasn’t until around 2012, when the band was on tour, that the acronym “revealed itself,” as Martinez-Briggs puts it. “Everyone could have a different reason for ‘I love living,’ but we all shared that need for expression and that need to make music and that need to create together.”
“There’s always room for improvement,” added McCree. “If we’re not growing, then [we’re] dead. If you’re not learning, then you’re dying,” he said, paraphrasing a quote of Albert Einstein’s.
That commitment to learning led the group to community outreach. Morris talked about a particular collaboration through BrideNext at the Painted Bride Arts Center, which involved creating a performance that tackled social issues concerning the community. One of those issues was the ongoing gentrification of North Philadelphia. “We had gotten to engage and build connections with the people in those communities,” she said. “We still have relationships with folks in that North Philadelphia community with our work in the Village of Arts and Humanities, as well.”
When listening to the band’s politically relevant lyrics and seeing their community outreach, one might say ILL Doots is an activist entity, but Martinez-Briggs made the distinction between advocacy and activism in the band’s work. “Individually we might be activists, we might be actively doing actionable steps for change, but I think that advocacy is in the music,” he said.
“Our music certainly doesn’t create legislation or tangible change, but it does potentially elevate the ideas that we believe in and that we hope other people might believe in, or maybe just don’t know about,” added Ziegler. “There are many ideas that we feel strongly enough [about] to go march about that also find their way into our music. Even though those are two different channels that we’re trying to work in.”
A part of this advocacy is the band’s mentorship of younger artists. When asked what advice they would give to current students at UArts, McCree first said that language around “student” and “teacher” is something he doesn’t subscribe to. Instead, he calls his mentees “young collaborators,” because they’re “working together.”
“Sometimes being in art school and trying to find your path, and going down so many wrong lanes, your adventure becomes just winding and winding until you reach whatever new height that you want to get to.” He tells his collaborators, “Your self is enough.”