Soulive Plays The Grooves

Take a '70s style organ jazz trio and turn up the funk and soul, and you've got an infectious sound that has audiences grooving all over the country. That's Soulive.

The band is comfortable playing in small, smoky jazz clubs, but can also entertain large audiences, having opened for bands like Dave Matthews Band and the Rolling Stones.

The players came together in 1999, and their latest Velour album is called "Turn it Out Remixed."

Alan Evans (drums), Neal Evans (keyboards) and Eric Krasno (guitar) stopped by The Saturday Early Show's Second Cup Cafe to make their network TV debut and perform songs from their latest project.

Neal Evans didn't start playing the classic organ until he was 19, more than a decade after he'd started piano. He switched to keyboards after ceding his first instrument, the drums, to Alan, who is two years older.

The Buffalo-born Evans brothers played in a mid-'90s funk/rock band called Moon Boot Lover, but it disbanded when Neal went to study with Jaki Byard at the Manhattan School of Music and Alan moved to California.

Later, the brothers rejoined their talents to create a new band. They added Krasno to the mix to create Soulive. (It's pronounced "soul-live.") The Evanses originally had a vibes player in mind to complete their organ-drums-vibes trio, but he bailed at the last minute, just after they had booked studio time. That's when Krasno, a guitarist, came on board.

The band says the organ trio is the most organic, natural, and fun music to play.

"You're going to know you're not hearing some jazz organ trio," Alan Evans once explained. "Because you're going to think you're seeing Led Zeppelin in the damn room."

"Turn it Out Remixed" is a visit back to the group's 2000 record, "Turn It Out," with input from artists including Miss NdegeOcello, members of Los Angeles' Jurassic 5 and jazz guitar John Scofield, as well as some cutting-edge DJs.