Ulysses Owens Jr. & Musora - Kind of Grunge (2026)

In early 2024, Ulysses Owens Jr. walked into the Drumeo studio, sidled up behind the kit, and plugged a pair of IEMs into his ears. He was there to take part in Drumeo’s “For the First Time” series in which drummers are challenged to play along with a famous song, its drum track extricated from the mix. Host Brandon Toews cued up “In Bloom” – a once inescapable rock-radio hit off Nirvana’s 1991 major-label debut, Nevermind.

Taking the measure of the tune’s opening chord progression, the Grammy-winning jazz musician and renowned music educator settled into the pocket of the song’s verse, intuiting the song’s soft-loud dynamics, shifting into high gear for the chorus with a burst of increasingly-technical flourishes. Not only had Owens Jr. never played the song before. Much to the surprise of his host, he’d never even heard it. “I’m not really a rock guy,” Owens Jr. told a stunned Toews, who remarked, “That was insane.” The video quickly amassed several million views on YouTube.

The viral success soon inspired another novel endeavor. Less than a year later, Owens Jr. and members of his ever-shifting ensemble, Generation Y, were challenged to – without previous foresight or preparation – reinterpret another classic from the grunge canon: Nirvana’s “Heart Shaped Box.” The resulting video racked up nearly 10 million views, lending more credence to the notion that Owens Jr. and Drumeo had arrived at, well… something.

To what do we owe the popularity of these videos? It’s a good gimmick, sure – classically trained musicians reframing the primitive wallops of nineties rock. Such highbrow-meets-lowbrow mashups aren’t without precedence, either: French pianist Maxence Cyrin’s haunting piano interpolation of influential alt-rockers Pixies’ “Where is my mind?” certainly registers.

“People love seeing music being created in real time,” Owens Jr. said when asked to reckon with the popularity of his Drumeo sessions. “It’s nostalgic. It’s what used to happen.” In an era of algorithmically created chill-vibes playlists of nameless and faceless music meant to encourage passive listening, Owens Jr. argued, “People are desperate to hear real music played by real musicians.”

There’s certainly something to that. Nirvana’s chief creative force, Kurt Cobain, was an inventive songwriter and competent guitarist, despite his neophyte posturing (he once told an interviewer “I’m not into musicianship” and that he had “no desire to get better at guitar”). He loved music and believed earnestly in its transcendence. In order to recenter music as something born of human struggle, he sought to strip it of artifice. In the face of a commercial rock landscape that promoted virtuosity and puffery, Cobain served up three chords and his truth.

And wasn’t that sorta what Miles Davis was up to? After an era in which bebop’s evolving complexity goaded audiences to listen, Davis emerged from his “Birth of the Cool” period armed with fewer chords and more human-centered voicings. He compelled us to listen but, more importantly, to feel.

And that may be the key to understanding the power and appeal of Owens Jr.’s work with Drumeo. By challenging himself with unfamiliar pieces – even as technically simple as those songs may be – he’s seemingly arrived at a way to hotwire feeling.

Kind of Grunge pushes the capacity of this delicate circuitry. Recorded over three days in April of 2026 at the Drumeo studios in Vancouver, the album finds Owens Jr. and Co. feeling their way through a collection of new-to-them tunes that, in this environment, have been all but stripped of cultural milieu. Unrehearsed, save for three songs, the band relishes the freedom of exploration.

But while this approach may have emancipated the group from the strictures of a typical session, the album is not free of context. Individually, Dan Wilson (guitar), Thomas Milovac (bass), Langston Hughes II (saxophone), Benny Benack III (trumpet), and Tyler Bullock (piano) each brought a wealth of experience to the sessions. This is a road-tested ensemble, a nimble collective that’s grown intimately familiar with one another over years of global touring. Rather than disrupting the group’s synergy, Kind of Grunge’s unconventional nature – and nonstandard track list – seems to have accelerated the group’s cohesion, amplifying the whole beyond the sum of its parts.

Through Hughes’ saxophone, the lyrical melody of pioneering grunge band Mudhoney’s “Touch Me I’m Sick” is rendered in the fiery, internal conflict of spiritual jazz. On “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Nirvana’s Kingsmen-hearkening chord progression is de-emphasized in service of the song’s raucous energy, which Wilson, Benack and Bullock foreground with dynamic and dissonant interplay. “Even Flow,” Pearl Jam’s strident top-ten hit, is reengineered through the cool-era idioms of exotica and Latin jazz, the melody of Eddie Vedder’s forcefully voiced lyrics deployed in laidback bursts of brass and reed over Milovac’s incessant groove.

The collection of tracks – from Alice In Chains’ discordant “Would?” to Stone Temple Pilots’ jangly “Interstate Love Song” to the Smashing Pumpkins’ symphonic “Tonight, Tonight” – finds the group reaching deep into its bag, proving grunge as nebulous a genre as jazz. Conceptually, album closer “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” is the album’s most explicit effort to trace the throughlines between these two disparate musical styles. A 19th-Century American folk song, a version recorded by bluesman Leadbelly in the 1940s is most recognizable today for Nirvana’s 1993 performance of the song for MTV Unplugged. While Cobain’s take connected the Mississippi Delta to the Pacific Northwest, Kind of Grunge’s version finds Wilson in the driver’s seat, parking the band somewhere off Highway 61 with an electric-blues take.

In his own framing of the blues, Miles Davis kept his aperture wide open. He readily pushed back against the clichés that might have inhibited him – “My father’s rich and my mama’s good looking,” he famously told an interviewer, arguing “I can play the blues.” His opus was not Very Blue or simply Blue. It was Kind of Blue. Kurt Cobain, for his part, never embraced the word “grunge,” which he believed was nothing more than a commercial perversion. Neither artist would let themselves be constrained by genre. Instead they pushed against and beyond sonic boundaries.

On Kind of Grunge, Owens Jr. and Generation Y do the same. Despite its cheeky title, its novel conceit: There are no tricks, no gimmicks. It’s just music. Pure and simple.

Matthew Shaw
May 2026

Ulysses Owens Jr. - drums
Thomas Milovac - bass
Benny Benack III- trumpet & Vocals
Langston Hughes II -alto saxophone
Tyler Bullock- piano
Dan Wilson- guitar & percussion