Ellen Bunch grew up around music, but a lot of it was the kind of music most people flee from. Her father, a professor of music, moved the family repeatedly to follow teaching gigs in Minnesota, Texas, and Chicago (at Roosevelt University). Though he played mostly low brass like trombone and tuba, he did much of his composing at home on the piano. “He does avant-garde stuff, so he kind of beats the piano,” says Bunch. “You can hear it across the house. It’s like bom, bom, bom, bom. He would choose churches based on who had the best organ and music program so he could write for them.” One postlude he composed, which required extensive work with the church’s organist, cleared out the congregation somewhat faster than intended. “As soon as it started, people ran,” she says. “It was just so loud and insane.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Bunch, 33, took up music as a kid, and by the time she finished high school in Corpus Christi in 1994 she’d earned a diploma in piano from the Texas Music Teachers Association—a certification she’d been working toward since sixth grade. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in ’98 with a degree in photography but soon returned to music. In 2001 she moved to Chicago, where for most of the past decade she’s been translating her inherited love for the avant-garde into an indie-rock idiom. She played electric piano with ZZZZ from 2002 till that group’s breakup in ’05, and since then she’s led Reds and Blue, singing from behind the keyboard.
Since then Bunch has opened up to the idea of writing as a group, and though the music on Reds and Blue’s forthcoming album, Son of the Stars (out August 17 on Addenda Records), still defies easy categorization, its experimental elements are tempered by more pop. Bunch is relieved to have loosened her grip on the band’s reins. “It feels a lot better, ’cause when you grow up playing the piano you’re like, everything has to come from it,” she says. “I have to have the rhythm, I have to have the bass, I have to have the melody. I have to keep it all interesting. For me to be like, ‘I don’t have to do all that, and these guys can totally bring in great things,’ you know, it’s helped my ears to open up and relax.”
On Friday the band plays a release party at Schubas, but plans for an east-coast tour later this year are in limbo now that Sless-Kitain has accepted a gig drumming for the Eternals on a fall tour of Brazil (Tim Mulvenna left the band earlier this year). For now audiences outside Chicago will have to wait to see Reds and Blue live. But if there’s anything to learn from the group’s unrushed development, it’s that patience has its rewards.
