Mahogany Frog's fourth album, Mahogany Frog on Blue, was released in the spring of 2005. Matt Blair spoke with founding members Graham Epp and Jesse Warkentin via email.

Your bio notes that Mahogany Frog began almost ten years ago as a college entrepreneurship project. How does such a thing develop into a band?
Jesse: Graham and I were assigned a project at Rosthern Junior College '“ yeah, high school '“ in which we were to formulate a hypothetical entrepreneurial venture, complete with projected budget, marketing plan, business name, advertising and a logo. Because at the time the only thing that we cared about was rock and roll, we decided to team up on the assignment and lay out a plan for a grand album, a sure-fire vision which could only succeed. Naturally, at the time we knew it all, and the last eight years have been a wonderfully terrifying reality check. The only thing that we've kept from the actual assignment, besides the general vision and each other, is the band name.

There's been a lot of collaboration and experimentation in your career, and you've worked with a lot of different media live. For you, where does the music begin and end within that?
J: Mahogany Frog has always been about creating music. Our focus is rarely other than challenging ourselves and our listeners with unorthodox sounds, melodies and song structure. Recently, as we are becoming more confident and creative in the studio, we have concentrated on rewarding the listener with an ever-broadening array of dreamy sounds. Indeed, we've been associated with multimedia presentations since the beginning, and have collaborated with not only an array of different musicians, visuals and performance art, spoken word and general location and atmosphere. Although many of these collaborations have been our idea, we've left our collaborators to their own devices for the most part, and have remained focused on performing the most intense show that we are able.

Looking at your last couple of releases in particular, it seems as if you're concentrating more on a four-person lineup. Has this given you a clearer sense of your direction and what you want to do musically?
Graham: Mahogany Frog has always been a four-piece group with exception to the Living Sounds album, where we added a keyboardist, which was our first attempt with keys, and a sax player. That lineup only performed two or three times, I think only once with the sax player. Playing in a larger group is great, especially in improvisation, because each musician just has to play a little bit and you still have a very full sound. Miles Davis' Bitches' Brew is a perfect example. That album has been studied and debated to death, but to me just stands on its own. It's not a masterpiece in terms of composition. It's the whole more with less strategy. I would love to play in a band of that size. I guess it helps when you've got the greatest jazz musicians in the world.
J: We certainly haven't excluded the idea of having more or less people, but in the recent past we haven't had any reason to initiate a drastic personnel change. A smaller band doesn't really give us a clearer musical direction, as most of the music is composed in advance, but it does challenge us to stretch our abilities. I enjoy a quartet a lot, because it is vulnerable, but still capable of sounding as full as a big band.

You've been incorporating synthesizers into your material to a greater degree in your more recent releases. Do you think this marks a move into more electronic, and perhaps even less organic musical territory? G: It's true, we have been using a lot more keyboards. The addition of these instruments into the Mahogany Frog sound has really opened up a whole world of possibilities for me personally. Sometimes I'll write something on a guitar and maybe it just doesn't sound quite right, so I try it on the keys and suddenly it really works. I think a lot of the ideas that I have lately are leaning more toward electronic music. However, we're not using sequencers and computers.
We play every note. Sometimes there are four hands playing four different keyboards at a given moment. As we progress as a band, we may get into some heavy electronic territory, but we'll still be running all the gear through old tube amps, with the accompanying hums and distortions. We're rock and rollers at heart.

By Matt Blair