Melt Yourself Down

Melt Yourself Down, aka MYD, is a South London based sextet with an explosive sound that combines Afrobeat, funk, and punk jazz, and also taps into Egyptian, Afro-Cuban, Latin, and Caribbean musical traditions. The band is remarkably jazz heavy in terms of its personnel: from founder Pete Wareham (sax) to one-time member Shabaka Hutchings (sax) and every other member of the band in between, past and present, has had some connection to the London jazz scene. They are not exactly a jazz band, however. Their song dynamics are much closer to rock, though they have saxophones rather than guitars as their engine, and they play with the frenetic pace of a ska punk band. It just so happens that the core of their material is drawn from West and North African music, and it is played with a stylistic bias towards jazz. They had a more overt Afrobeat sound on their first two albums, with Hutchings as the second sax.