Formed in 1999, Toronto, Canada based trio The New Deal, is a pioneer in jam-based electronic music. The group was founded by remaining members Dan Kurtz (bass) and Jamie Shields (keys), along with Darren Shearer (drums) who left tND in 2011. Since its inception, tND has remained committed to its improvisational roots and has served as a model for other jamtronica bands bridging the gap between multiple music genres as well as the border between Canada and the United States.
Recently, I was able to speak with Dan Kurtz to discuss the origin and evolution of tND along with the recent live album release, “Live//Sultan” recorded in November 2024 at the Sultan in Brooklyn (NYC), NY with Joe Russo (Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, drums).
This metamorphosis of tND, dubbed the RuDeal will return to the U.S. for 2 shows with Joe Russo on July 11, 2025 at the Ardmore Music Hall (Ardmore/Philadelphia, PA) and July 12, 2025 at Xanadu in Brooklyn (NYC), NY.
Dan, it’s great to talk with you today. To get us started how would describe the music of the New Deal?
Sure, that is always a fun exercise (laughs). The principle behind what we are jokingly calling the RuDeal (Russo with tND) is the same philosophy, putting people together to play music that is all made up on the spot. In the jazz-sense there are some themes that tND has written over the past 20 years that are helpful as lily pads to jump onto and jump off of in the pursuit of building a set that follows the same emotional arch that a good theater piece would, or a movie, or a book would, anything that is good storytelling using that arc that has been around for thousands of years.
This new version with Joey is most successful when we are intuitively leading an agreement between the band and the audience on a journey that last for 45 minutes then we take a break and go and do it again. I have done enough shows to know when that is working and when it does not. Most times it does, but sometimes we don’t catch the wave. It is like oration as opposed to dialogue.
People that are attracted to live performance go for a range of emotional experience and that is what we pursue, in a playground that would be considered organic improvised dance music played by real instruments that goes from that into new age music, into Prague-rocky fusion… But the philosophy is the same, it doesn’t matter what the style of music it is, you know when you are getting it right with the people you play with and when you are not. TND in its original inception was invented because 3 guys were getting it right all together. When Darren left, we have had different levels of success replacing him with like-minded people, but when we play with Joe it has that same effortless power we had when we started the band 26 years ago.
How did tND start?
Jamie and have played together since high school. I actually started playing bass because I wanted to be in a band with the amazing guy, Jaime, who played keyboards. Years later, I can’t remember if it was a packaged deal or individually, we were invited to play in weekly live music gigs with the founding drummer Darren. He had a revolving door of musicians he would play at clubs with and when he played with us, he was like “this is cool, let’s do it again.”
We kept playing together and essentially became a house band playing mostly covers. We started getting a little bit weirder in between all the jams and the covers until we got fired for being too weird. Then we were like, this weird stuff is really cool. We decided to take that act, we didn't know what it was called and we didn't know what the music was, to play at a really underground club here in Toronto, and very accidentally, we bought a cassette tape from the local corner store and asked the sound guy, the house sound guy to record the show. Not only did he record the show, but he did a lot of very unexpected dub, like live dub, mixing with it like very competent dub reggae style mixes on what was live while we were playing, and Jamie and I, listened to tape and we were like we were actually blown away like I was like, I can't f*cking believe what I'm listening to here. This guy did amazing stuff and frankly, I didn't even know that we played so much interesting music.
So, we did it again, another Wednesday and out of that recording we dumped it into like a 2 channel pro tools, it was just a 2-track cassette and played it in real time into pro tools and edited it up. From that we pressed up what became the 1st New Deal CD. I think we sold tens of thousands of them in the long run. The cases were homemade. I made the cases. We’d get black sleeves, and then I put this elaborate foil over them that I got printed here, and I mailed them out. I remember basically going to the post office with a burlap bag full of CDs.
The history of the New Deal is that everything is kind of an accident. Jamie had sent out to his buddies on Phishnet, in 1998 or 99. Hey? Would anybody like a CD of my band? The 1st 10 people who respond I will mail one to you. He mailed out 10 CDs and one of them got into the hands of a guy who was booking the Berkshire Music Festival (Great Barrington, MA), so we played at Berkfest and we were seen by Jake Safniorowski, who was the booker at Wetlands (NYC, NY) at the time. He gave us a year long, residency playing every month at the Wetlands, and from there our American career began.
For Canadians this was pretty amazing, the band was most successful at resonating with people. When we were really at the bleeding edge of what we do, we were capable of playing and inventing together. After a thousand, 1,500 shows later, it's nice to know that that attitude still exists amongst us. Now, with Joe, in the very competently assuming of the role of Darren, who is like a powerhouse in the band.
What are some of the big highlights for you with tND of the past years?
I think the very existence of it has been an ongoing highlight, because it's almost impossible to imagine that a bunch of Canadian guys could… it's significant only because our career was in the U.S. and that already is quite a hurdle to jump over. To make a lasting, durable impression on a music scene, doing something that would only be qualified as whatever we want and not only whatever we want, but on in the minute, just get on stage and play whatever we want, that is a gift actually that's given to us by the audience. That kind of trust and enthusiasm, so whenever I just think about that, alone it’s an ongoing highlight.
Otherwise, I turned 30, on tour with Herbie Hancock opening for his band and thinking, wow, man, I grew up as a kid, loving this guy's music, and he's standing right beside me, and it's my birthday, and I get to do this because of the New Deal. We would play with Herbie for a tour and then would be opening for Crystal Method the next week, or be playing at some American hippie fest. From our perspective, it felt like when we were, you know, we'd never seen anything like the jam scene in the U.S. because it doesn't exist here and think, wow, what a breadth of experience this has been!
Another highlight came as recently as 2 months ago, when we did “Done”, a song with a friend of mine who's a singer. Her name is Feist. She was on a record of ours in 2003. I wrote the song in an afternoon, and somebody phoned us and was like, we’d love to put this in a “Law and Order” episode, the Toronto “Law and Order”. I was like, wow man, this is 23 years later, and the song’s got this second life, and those all feel like really lucky moments in life. Making creative stuff that is relevant to people, that has an enduring presence is remarkable.
Wasn’t that used on an NCIS episode also?
I sometimes occasionally still see that as a line item on my royalty statements, it’s like $1.22, but again, same thing, wow, man, somewhere our music is getting consumed. In an era, frankly, where there is more music than there is time in this world to listen to. It feels good being chosen,10,000 people listen to our music this month on Spotify. That's amazing, it doesn't buy you a Porsche, so to speak. It doesn't mean anything in another entirely different calculus being able to make like a career, you know, pay your bills and stuff from music, that also feels good when it happens. But the truth is that almost no one is in this business, for that part. They're not in the business of it at all. They're in it for the act of making music.
TND can be classified as jamtronica music. How does TND fit into the history of this genre?
I think we’re at the beginning of the history of jamtronica. There weren't many bands like, I think there were bands that were jamming, but playing a different sounding music with the same philosophy… First, we're instrumental. That's different than having songs, not having a guitar in it that it doesn't sound like jam music but again, the philosophies are more similar than different.
I think that we came around coincidentally around the same time as like the Disco Biscuits and Sound Tribe Sector 9 and a host of other bands that I would remember their names if I was reminded of them. That’s not a coincidence. I think it's people of the same age having grown up with the same kind of influences, being curious about how to marry these 2 worlds classic rock, and then kind of eighties pop that had the sound of synthesizers in it into the early dance music from Chicago, New York, Montreal… plus all the pharmaceuticals that went along with that double down on the experience of dance music.
It was a particular moment in time where people who had grown up taking piano lessons, had learned the discipline of playing instruments, had listened to records and tapes playing along with them on guitars and basses and drums and keyboards. There was an ideal confluence of competence and proficiency, or even more than that, in actual playing, being able to play instruments, a great ear which is only developed through hard work. This explosion of really interesting dance music that I was like, how do I make that music myself? I don't play keyboards, but I have a bass, and maybe if I plug it into some effects. Pedals, I can make music get like that. That's another thing, in terms of things that make me feel really good is that I see a lot of bass pedal rigs that look a lot like the bass pedal rig that I'm pretty sure I invented in 1999. That’s cool because it has created another dimension for bass guitar, giving it another life in contemporary music.
What is the process for the band to write songs and compose music?
Strangely, the more intentional we are about writing music, the farther we get away from what the New Deal is. There are times like, I listened to a song on our album, “Mercury Switch” the other day, I don’t remember the song’s name, but I know every note that I played on it the minute I hear it. I was like, yeah, that this is one of those songs that I actually love, and we wrote it in the studio. But every other thing that's resonated for tND has literally been written on stage. It's not logical that you wouldn't be able to take that same creative energy, same people, same gear and put them in a studio, but I haven't seen it with us. It's better to leave it to what, to the moment.
How does the live experience of tND compare to in the studio?
I think the immediacy of it, of the live. Really thinking on your toes and getting visceral feedback. There's nothing like playing a live show and having people in front of you filling you with everything they can. How delighted they are to be there, and that you’re hitting the mark, that creates an energy that creates different music than looking at a pro tool screen and seeing like, that bass note is a little ahead, and I should probably edit that and move it back. It's just a completely different beast. If we had begun as a studio project, writing music and had success with that then would have been the origin story for us, it might have been something different. But that's not, it just comes back to who we are and where we get the energy from.
I think over the years tND has had notable and memorable tracks/songs. With that in mind, how does tND come up with setlists? If a lot of what you do live is improv and “happy accidents” how do you structure your shows to capture the song side of the live experience?
What guides the structure of the show is what I was talking about earlier. The universal arc of a journey. It's a story that nobody sets out to articulate. We set the stage for the band to tell a story that we don't know what the particulars of the story are, but we will hit all the marks, intuitively to create drama and tension, and then resolve it, and then do it again. Like going to see a play and the interlude after the 1st act happens to end at either a high note or a question mark. For some reason, that’s what we have always agreed on as the band. When we have decided to chase the dragon, meaning like, look, people really like big, heavy dance music right now at 130 bpm, if we just play that for 45 min it has no affect. It's like drinking too much coffee or eating too much of the same food.
If we break from this principle of laying the bed to tell a story that sounds like it has a universal arc, it generally works out well for us. But we, you know, Jamie and I look at each other, and he tells me, okay, I'm gonna play and he gives me a hand signal, and I know what key that is, or I don't even need to see his hand signal. I know that cord. I know that keyboard and Joey sets the tempo, and off we go.
Could we say the setlist works like chapter titles in a book? There is a point you are writing to but what is happening in those chapters is written organically in the moment on stage?
Correct and sometime, there is something, say our library, the liturgy of the New Deal, where any one of us can kind of signal, musically or otherwise, to the other guys and be like, this might be a nice time to slot this lily pad hook in for us to land on to evolve the next chapter. That is how we structure sets. There are no set lists. Sometimes we'll say, let's play this song sometime in this set. Let's get there. See if we can get there, but the more it's structured, the less effective it is.
I noticed this on the new live album; it is structured more like you are tracking progressions and then giving them names as you put the album together?”
Let’s call the album the Sultan because that is where we played and then let's just make it Sultan. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Those are going to be the track titles, because it's like almost post rationalizing an argument or something when you're like now this song sounds like this. I was uploading the record to the distributor, and they came back with these song titles are too generic. We can't accept them. You must title the songs. That’s how Jamie came up with song titles which I like hate doing.
For example, when we did a lot of live records, maybe 8 years ago, we just named every song after hurricanes, because hurricanes are just named alphabetically, and then you go back and start again. We were doing the same thing. I titled all these songs on the live album, and then suggested them to Jamie and Joey, and Jamie's like let's just name it after different sultans. We ended up with a few of those, I just distributed the sultan names amongst the songs that sounded most like the magnificent, or the benevolent, or the whatever I was like this sounds more magnificent than this one. But again, it's because they needed names.
I was expecting to hear tND canon on this album, but it really is all new material.
I think even if Jamie, Darren, the original drummer, and I like got together after 3 years and played together the music that would come out would be different, simply because we're in our fifties and not in our early twenties. We feel different as people. and I think tND has typically always been the music that we individually play, and then, collectively, what it gets expressed has been a reflection of where we are. It's not like I could say, oh, you know in 2003, when I was this age, I know that I played the bass this way because I felt like this at that age. It's not that simple. But I just mean that we are going be making music differently, at a different pace, or different tempos, or like spending less time at a really peaky energy.
I think each era all have their great lenses. Each version is equally representative of tND. With Joey it's a whole other dimension, because he's an extremely musical drummer. We've always needed a drummer, but we've needed somebody who's like inconveniently, uncomfortably behind the drums. They need to be as good as conductors and melody writers and great producers and great arrangers, bursting out of that instrument. Joey ends up like tuning his drums. He becomes actual musical notes that give us another melodic dimension to work from. It's totally new.
How did the collaboration with Joe come about?
He phoned and was like I would love to be playing some music in the style that you guys play, we’ve played shows with him and The Duo (Russo with Mark Benevento, now also part of JRad) over the 20 years we've known each other. Jamie's played with them several times. Joe asked, why don't you come down to my studio in Jersey, and we'll jam, and then just play a couple of little shows and see what happens, that's what happened.
What has been the preparation with him getting ready for the upcoming July ’25 shows?
I would love to say that there's a lot of preparation. But the preparation is we're gonna go to his studio the day before the show in Philly. We're gonna set up and make sure all of our gear works. We'll jam for an hour, and then we'll see what happens the next day. The exercise of making the record was such a happy accident, I blinked, and the baseline technology used to record live shows went from pulling data with that mini disc recorder and 2 mics up into the air, to instead, the house sound guy recording every single track, every mic channel at 192 kilohertz, and producing an 18 GB file, that is a multi-track master to start working from. We didn't even need to have very much dialogue about what to put in the album. What was the best stuff to put to make a record of. We had just talked about putting a couple of clips up on Youtube and I was like why don't we just make a record of it? And let's not put it on SoundCloud, just put it on Spotify and rise to the occasion. I look forward to doing it again. We'll have 2 shows to contemplate making another record from.
With the 2-show run, do you think there will be room to revisit tND older canon, maybe play some of the tND hits?
Joey has got some familiarity with them, but in a way, mercifully he doesn't, in the sense that it doesn't become like a like a fallback position, an easy fallback position for us. I can't delete those songs from my muscle memory, even, much less from my brain. So, I think there's a very high chance that that will happen. It's so fun, too. It continues to blow my mind that people in some cases 20… It’s 25 years later and they are not only still coming to shows, but like songs, and love when they hear like a tease of a song, like holy sh*t it's happening, so I feel the same way. I'm like holy shi*t… It's still happening!
Joe recently toured with his Selcouth jazz quartet. I saw them at the Vogel (Red Bank, NJ), maybe a coincidence but the “Live//Sultan” is the jazziest I have heard tND sound…
Joe can push us that way, or there's certain parts of mine and Jamie's lexicon that are easy for us. And then Joe brings his own kind of independent lexicon and the thrill for us is like individually, maybe together, let’s dive into this and see what we could do with a new palette that's been thrust on us in front of a room full of people.
The RuDeal (tND with Joe Russo) will perform on Friday 7/11 at the Ardmore Music Hall in Ardmore (Philadelphia, PA) and on Saturday 7/12 at Xanadu in Brooklyn (NYC), NY. Ticket information for these shows, information about the New Deal and their recent live album release can be found at www.thenewdeal.com.
PHOTOS BY CHRIS PAUL
or region of New Jersey
click here for our advanced search.
