T Bird and The Breaks - Album Release Show

T Bird and the Breaks are a big, funky, band.

Horns? Check.

Female singers that swing-it-while-they-sing-it? Check.

Fire-in-the-hole rhythm-section of drums, bass, guitar, and keys? Check.

Gravel-voiced front-man who always leaves it on stage? Check.

Hailing from Austin, TX, T Bird And The Breaks play a style of dance music that has it's most basic and obvious roots in the Funk and Soul music of the late 1960's and early 1970's. It'll get you dancing. It'll make you sweat. It'll make you smile.

But...it can't be classified as strictly throw-back, retro, Funk/Soul. The original songs belie lyrical influences such as Beck. Or Bob Dylan. And the contemporary swagger of The Breaks' live show especially pays homage to the creativity and positivity of early and golden-age Hip-Hop. The band's "kitchen-sink-style" of music is evident on their cover of Shirley Ellis' 1965 R&B hit "The Clapping Song" in which they include verses from Tom Waits' "Clap Hands".

It's a melting-pot of funk but one that people of all ages, and across musical genres, can dig. In the last few years they've been invited to play shows with artists as eclectic as The Flaming Lips, The Funky Meters, Sting, Robert Randolph and the Family Band, and Galactic.

2014 will see T Bird and the Breaks releasing their third studio album, "What It Is (Harmonism)", and bringing their electric, tear-a-hole-in-it, funk-bomb of a live show to a stage near you.