“Playing these arrangements for the first time was startling,’’ recalls Carpenter, 39, who celebrates the release of the GTO’s widely acclaimed debut album, “Hothouse Stomp: The Music of 1920s Chicago and Harlem,’’ Oct. 18 at the Regattabar, the band’s first Boston-area performance since its 2006 Regent debut.
“It was like having the characters from your favorite book jump out of the pages,’’ Carpenter adds. “Everyone in the theater was just floored with the power of it. With Brandon Seabrook bowing the banjo, and Ron Caswell’s tuba, which goes way beyond the instrument’s original role playing bass lines, it’s definitely not a retro act.’’
The music was so potent that it inspired Carpenter to rededicate himself to the trumpet after several years of using the horn largely for textures and fills in Beat Circus, another eclectic band he started but which is now on hiatus. Creating the GTO enabled Carpenter to immerse himself in a body of music that he couldn’t comfortably shoehorn into Beat Circus’s two-thirds completed “Weird American Gothic’’ trilogy, which is inspired by pre-World War II America’s stark contrasting cultural landscape.
“I tried to put everything into Beat Circus, and it confused me and everybody else,’’ says Carpenter, who has been playing around Boston lately with the Confessions, a new song-oriented quartet that he debuted in January. “One particular band isn’t suited to do everything.’’
Even though Carpenter lives in Arlington, the GTO is a New York City ensemble by design. The GTO provided a golden opportunity to work with former Beat Circus comrades who had moved to New York, like Seabrook, Caswell, and trombonist Curtis Hasselbring, while forging new musical relationships.
