WZLY Interviews: Boots and Cats and Boots and Cats
WZLY chats with the Boots and Cats and Boots and Cats, a Wellesley BlueJazz combo, ahead of their live performance on MD Hour! Topics include discovering jazz, the magic of improv, and the songs they can’t stop listening to.
Interview by Sahana Bhaskaran ‘28 and Libby Greer ‘28
WZLY: Could you all go around and introduce yourselves? Maybe say your name, pronouns, class year, and what you play in the band?
VERA: My name is Vera. I use she/her pronouns. I'm a first year, and I play jazz violin.
LILA: Hi, my name's Lila. She/her pronouns. I'm a sophomore. I play the drums.
ANGELICA: I'm Angelica. She/her. I am also a sophomore and I sing.
DARIAN: I’m Darian. I’m a junior at Olin. I play bass.
WLZY: What is your favorite piece that you're playing in the set? And why?
ANGELICA: I think mine is probably Essa Moça Tá Diferente. Even though it's hard to sing in a language you don't speak. I think it's super groovy. I think it's fun. Portuguese is really hard especially when you speak Spanish. But I really like it. I think it's a fun tune. I think we have fun playing it.
DARIAN: Definitely The Chicken. Jaco's been my hero since I started playing bass. I've been playing the Chicken since I started playing bass.
LILA: I love playing so many of our songs. I really enjoy playing Essa Moça but my favorite has to be Fee Fi Fo Fum by Mr. Wayne Shorter. Mark and I first bonded over that album. If we could take one album to a deserted island, it would be that one.
VERA: I think my favorites have to be either Essa Moça or the Chicken. I think Essa Moça is just fun from playing the shout chorus together to playing the backgrounds and soloing. I think everyone has really interesting parts in it. And for the Chicken, it's a vibe. I used to play with a bassist who also loves Jaco.
WZLY: When did you discover jazz, or what is the significance of jazz to you? Why do you like playing it?
LILA: I definitely heard a lot of jazz in my house growing up. My dad has a big record collection, so that was very formative. Also, my brother is a jazz guitarist. He's a good bit older than me, so I grew up going to his college combo concerts and I was like I want to do that. That was very inspiring. But I think jazz has evolved for me. It's kind of become a way to connect with people. Because jazz is so improvisational it allows for so much expression and also communication. For every piece I feel like we're all communicating constantly through our music, our body language, and our eyes.
DARIAN: I started playing jazz as soon as I started playing bass. My best friends were in jazz band. My favorite memories of school are showing up at 7am and playing jazz. Or staying really late until like 8 or 9 playing jazz. I kind of lost that a little, getting to college, but I got to join combos. It also helps that my friends I play jazz with are pretty close by in Boston and Providence.
VERA: I'm really grateful that I had a private lesson teacher, Brenda Vincent, who knew classical and jazz. She is overall a very well-rounded musician and teacher. So I listened to a little jazz in general growing up because we practiced it. But I always got so excited whenever I passed by a restaurant and heard them playing jazz or whenever I heard jazz in the background of a YouTube video. I really love playing jazz because I didn't really know what it meant to express myself through music until I learned how to improvise. I know a lot of classical violin players who say that they like music because they express themselves through it but I didn't really know how to express myself until I learned how to make my own melodies and what it means to be creative with music.
ANGELICA: I never really had exposure to jazz music when I was younger. I was, however, very exposed to music in general. My dad is a guitarist and my mom was an opera singer. When you grow up surrounded by music, it has an influence on you, no matter what. But jazz was definitely not a genre that I really engaged with or knew much about until I got here. For me, starting in jazz voice lessons was kind of an accident. I just kind of got roped into it. And thenI joined combos because I was like.. “Why not?” And I think that's kind of what the beauty of jazz is. Why not? It's all of this improvisation and communication between musicians. It's a genre of music where inherently you discover things, inherently you break the norm. That's what I find so beautiful about this genre of music. Even when we make mistakes or we fumble during practice, we always find a way to come back together and figure something out. And so I think that that's why this genre has become very special to me.
WZLY: Gosh, you guys are so eloquent. Is there a specific moment that you can trace your love of music back to?
VERA: This is one of the various moments, but for me, I remember I was in Hawaii and we were walking across this town on the big island called Cona Town. There was this bar on the second floor of a building and I heard them playing jazz. I just remember getting so excited. I was like I hope one day I can do something like this. So it really feels so amazing to be here, be able to play and have our music being broadcasted and also to have opportunities to play like this back at home.
DARIAN: This is maybe not a specific moment but I was surrounded by musicians growing up because a lot of my family are musicians. I remember wanting to share that with them. It happened more often when I was a kid, but even now when I go visit family, they always bust out their instruments and start playing typical Dominican music. It's not jazz but it's still the same concept of just all playing together and improvising and playing whatever comes to mind. I always wanted to be a part of that. When the bands got together, bass was something that was missing. So I picked it up and didn't look back.
LILA: For me, it's always just been such a way for me to feel like I’m part of a community, like what you guys were saying. I definitely think back to Treefort Music Festival, which is a music fest in my hometown. I started going when I was really, really young. My parents would take me out, and as a young kid, I would just run around. I went every year with my family and it just grew into this love and appreciation for music and being able to connect with the broader community in my hometown. It really felt like we were all there for the same reason.
ANGELICA: It's hard for me to pinpoint one exact moment, but just now I had a memory come back to me. Growing up, I was in chorus a lot at my school, and I remember when we went to this thing called American Young Voices. I don't even know if that's a thing anymore. I remember they packed us in this hockey rink. It's thousands of kids from a bunch of different schools and you have this random dude conducting us and speaking to us through a speaker. That's insane, you know, hearing the voices of thousands of kids, just like you, singing. It was wild. In that moment, you experience that collective bonding through something that clearly all of us really loved in that moment.
WZLY: Okay, I’ll do one last one. What is your song of the day, jazz or non-jazz?
LILA: Okay, I'll go. Dance, No One's Watching by Ezra Collective. It is such a joyous song. I have a hard time not playing Ezra Collective every week on my WZLY show because I just love them so much. It's such exuberant music. It's just so fun and I love it.
ANGELICA: I'm gonna go with Savoir Faire by Chic. It's so good. It's really good. I have no words other than that. Listen to it. Play on repeat 15 times. It's five minutes long. I love it. It's so good.
VERA: I think my song of the day is Suzanne by Mark Ronson and Raye. I feel like this is a very underrated Raye song, even though it was just released this summer. I think it deserves more love. It's really good, like 100 out of 10.
DARIAN: There's two contenders. I've been really into gypsy jazz recently, so Django's Tiger takes the title for me today. And the other is Ease On Down the Road from the musical The Wiz. I’ve been listening to those songs.
WZLY: Thank you all so much!
