Popular Funk/Jam band Pigeons Playing Ping Pong is releasing its latest album, Presto, on Jan. 24. On March 5 the group will kick off a tour in support of the album in Cleveland. The tour makes its way to Covington’s Madison Theater on March 11, where the quartet will play with special guests Goose.
Tickets for PPPP’s return to the Madison go on sale Friday, Jan. 17 at 10 a.m. via ticketmaster.com.
Pigeons Playing Ping Pong — guitarists Greg Ormont and Jeremy Schon, bassist Ben Carrey and drummer Dan Schwartz (since replaced by Alex “Gator” Petropulos) — came together in 2009 in Baltimore, where the members met while attending the University of Maryland. The group’s engaging style — a mix of Funk, Electronica, Jazz and Rock — made them a popular draw on the Jam band circuit and they spend well over half of the year on the road appeasing their fervent and growing fanbase.
Presto is PPPP’s fifth album. The band says it was partly inspired by their fun thematic Halloween and New Year’s Eve shows, where they’ve mixed original songs with covers of other artists. Those shows have included “Stop Making Cake” (featuring Talking Heads and Cake tunes) and “Dead Hot Sergeant Peppers,” which featured Beatles, Grateful Dead and Red Hot Chili Peppers songs.
“Those shows have been crash courses in learning new ways to play and arrange music,” Ormont told Jambase. “We picked up different techniques from all these different genres that we were able to draw on when writing Presto.”
Here’s the lyric video for Presto track “Dawn a New Day”:
This article appears in Jan 8-21, 2020.
