"Listening to the wild textures and melodies of Sauce is extremely liberating... their live show caused mass dancing and we'd love to have them back." - Vassar College
"The Sauce elicit feelings and images of spelunking, cave exploration, detectives and mysterious beauty" - New York Press
"A seamless blend of live instruments, electronics, and deep grooves." - Greenpoint Williamsburg Gazette
"Jazz What? These guys are virtuostic." -imposemagazine.com
"Combustive drum patterns pull everything together into one cohesive flux of musical energy. A distinct sound that flows up, down and everywhere in between." - Hunter College Envoy
Sauce is a band that merges dance-oriented beats and electronic music grooves with jazz and improvisation. Sauce was born from the mind of cellist Greg "Cosmo D" Heffernan. Back in 2006, while Cosmo D was visiting his government agent cousin Chris down in DC, he needed a bit of surgical tubing for his cello bow (it helps enhance the grip) so he found neighborhood store DC Mega Hardware. A simple visit to the hardware store would ultimately inspire dance fever for countless future listeners of the Sauce.
DC Mega Hardware also doubled as an all-purpose repair shop. With TVs, refrigerators, toasters hanging around the place, this was no mere hardware store. After acquiring surgical tubing, Cosmo D brought in his laptop and covertly recorded the 'sounds' of almost every machine in the shop: three microwaves and their respective beeps, the crunch of a moped brake system, the hiss of a welding iron, the klang of a waffle iron, rumblings of a German stove, the whistling of a Korean stove, the smooth hum of a laser printer, the robotic yawn of a dot matrix labeler, the pulse of a hydraulics device. Pretty soon Cosmo D had the sounds of 547 unique machines and gadgetry recorded.
He turned these sounds into dance grooves and wrote songs around them, inviting musical colleagues from Brooklyn to perform them. Toronto-native Myk Freedman brought his near-screaming lapsteel. Josh Myers added his thunderous low-end. Pat Breiner dropped in the appropriate counterpoint of tenor saxophone into all these textures.
Thus, Sauce. They recorded an album's worth of music early in 2007. The more they played, the more they realized how dance-able they could get on stage. A recent college show inspired all the girls in the audience to strip to their underwear. Toronto's Barn Yard Records found out about this and offered to record and release Sauce's next record, due in the fall of 2008.
In addition to Sauce, members of the band are very much active in the New York music community at large. In addition to spearheading Sauce, Cosmo D has performed in Grammy-winner Matt Darriau's Paradox Trio, the Fred Hersch ensemble and Lee Konitz's New Nonet. Myk, with one musical foot in Brooklyn and the other in Toronto, has lent his unique lap-steel sound to musicians John Zorn, Elliot Sharp, Cyro Babtista, Ruebbin Radding and William Parker. Briener has played with artists as diverse as the Dirty Projects and Tony Malaby. Josh, an in-demand freelancer in the NYC community, plays in at least twenty bands, including his own music collective and Gerald Cleaver's Nimbih Ensemble.
