Root Cellar is an experimental music project from Buffalo. The chamber quintet formed in 2017, bringing together a diverse group of musicians with backgrounds in jazz, rock, classical, and the avant garde. The juxtaposition and cohesion of these styles can be heard in both the ensemble’s original compositions and their exploratory improvisations: angular hard bop figurations which melt into hypnotically motorik grooves, poignant post-rock textures erupting into cacophonous free jazz convulsions; and cannily polished ensemble arrangements flowering into atmospheric spaces, always emphasizing each player’s idiosyncratic improvisational voices.

All this and more can be heard on Fermentations, the band’s recorded debut. Captured live in 2023 and 2024 at Revolution Gallery in their hometown of Buffalo, the album is an odyssey through the band’s heterogenous creative practice. On “Blackwell,” an affecting main theme is transformed as it kinetically winds through the quintet’s instrumentation of trumpet, cello, guitar, bass and drums. Mysterious Residents-esque improv, “Garlic Bread Problems,” coalesces into “Simple Suite,” a lush ambient environment structured around rhapsodic melodies. On closer “Bookhouse,” muscular pentatonic guitar riffs alternate with quirky brass interjections before the band locks into a Tortoise-esque groove, a journey unto itself that eventually brings the album to its animated conclusion.

Root Cellar’s “fresh perspective on music-making”—according to Jeff Miers of The Buffalo Spree—”is both fearless and forward-looking,” and “borders on the iconoclastic.”

Root Cellar is:
Kyle McGinty (trumpet)
Katie Weissman (cello)
Evan Kaderbeck (guitar)
Ed Klavoon (bass)
Bill Conroy (drums)