The Unsustainables Will Make You Move

Try this experiment. Next time you’re in a quiet room with your family or co-workers, play the Unsustainables album “Every Broken Heart Will Mend.” Our hypothesis: within 30 seconds everyone in the room will be moving.

It’s hard to sit still with The Unsustainables’ music in your ears. The Unsustainables is a Carrboro-based ska band playing at the upcoming Carrboro Music Festival (CMF). You can see them at the Town Commons on Sunday at 4:45pm.

Ska is a fast-paced style of music that developed in Jamaica in the late 1950s and eventually led to reggae music. A lot of people dig ska. Even your correspondent has been known to get a skank pit going when a tune by a band like The Specials suddenly appears on the office playlist.

However, The Unsustainables have a deep emotional and intellectual engagement with the music. And this music is of a specific era of first wave ska that was made from the mid-60s to the mid-70s. The band’s commitment to this style of music is infectious. When you hear them, you immediately want to join the community they are building at their shows and get dancing to their offbeat rhythms and horn-based harmonies.

Will Vizuete and Trent Jackson, bassist and trombone player/singer, respectively, graciously sat down for an interview with The Carrborean to preview their performance at the CMF and talk about their music.

Will, the founder of The Unsustainables, has been hosting jazz and Jamaican music radio shows since 1995 in Austin, New Orleans, and now across the Triangle, including at WXYC in Chapel Hill. When he moved to Chapel Hill from Austin, he found fans of ska coming out of the woodwork and responding positively to his radio show.

Around the same time, Will’s father began learning guitar and Will decided to join him. Will said, “My father is Ecuadorian. Later in life all men from Ecuador start doing this, they start playing guitar.” Once the guys who heard Will’s ska radio show caught wind that he was playing guitar, they started inviting him to jam. One of these fellows, Nuno Gomes, The Unsustainables’s current guitarist, had a bass and Will immediately took to it. He says, “I guess I was already a bass player and didn’t realize it!” Listening to The Unsustainables, it’s apparent that Will is a natural who matches traditional ska grooves with his own feel for the emotions and rhythm of the music.

A year before the COVID pandemic, Will and Nuno realized they had a special musical chemistry matched with a very particular love of first wave ska and decided to form the band. They placed an ad on Craigslist which caught the attention of Trent Jackson, trombone player and singer. Trent had just moved to Durham from New Jersey where his talent and trombone served as his ticket into  a ska community there.

Trent played with Nuno and Will and loved their talent and enthusiasm but said it wasn’t going to work unless they found a drummer.  That validation lit a fire under Nuno and Will, and they immediately got to recruiting. They found an outstanding drummer, Connor LaMontagne, who clearly could learn the traditional ska rhythms, a conga player, piano, trumpet, saxophone, and finally a band was fully formed.

Will says “We’re into that 1965-1975 era because it’s very jazz-heavy in Jamaican music. They [Jamaican musicians] were listening to New Orleans radio and getting into a lot of the jazz lines. That’s the thing that we dig.” You hear that tradition right from the first track of their most recent album, "Every Broken Heart." Your heart will rise with the stunning three-part horn harmonies and the offbeat guitar chords. The song makes you joyful and wistful as the title implies.

Jump now to “Chesterfields,” Trent’s crooning tribute to the classic cigarette brand. The work on the keys and horns is captivating, and the lyrics take unexpected twists that will make you wonder if you heard it right.  You’ll giggle to yourself during your next several replays.

Trent is the band’s primary song writer.  Describing his inspiration, “I saw a lot of things going on around my neighborhood and that became the themes for the music.” Take “Street Sweeper,” a song that is sure to make your body move. The lyrics are a celebration of North Carolina life and history, and a question about whether we can have community and tradition while demographic changes disrupt the neighborhoods that we love. 

And then there’s “Disease,” a song that the band says crowds really lock into when they perform live. Will says, “It’s a tune that’s a jam. All the horns really get to breathe; flex their stuff!” It’s true, your humble correspondent turned it on today and could not stay in his seat!

Make The Unsustainables a must-see on Carrboro Music Festival day! Also, look for their new single which will be released before Halloween. It promises to be a holiday rocker!