The Project H defies classification and seeks out new collaborations

Ryan Heinlein gives me a cringing look of terror when I ask what style of music his band, the Project H, makes. He tenses up and scoots ever so slightly away from me.

“You don’t have to know the answer,” I say.

Heinlein sighs, slumps in his seat and reaches for his coffee. He tells me that he has always struggled with that question and has developed a sort of phobia about it during the Project H’s six years of existence.

“We’ve been described as fusion jazz,” Heinlein says and shrugs. “Everyone has a different description for us, and I think that’s great.”

“Jazz” seems to be the safest classification, given that the seven-piece’s songs float through so many amorphous musical regions. The group’s full-length, We Live Among the Lines, begins with the piano-driven “Not a Person,” which is closer to the sort of introspective pop instrumental you’d hear underlining a romantic comedy than it is to standards in a jazz club. That’s probably why, Heinlein says, most jazz clubs in town “won’t touch us.”

“Probably the easiest way to say it is that if I told you that record was a jazz album, you’d automatically have a preconceived notion of what it will sound like,” Heinlein says. “And I just like to mess with that idea.”

We Live Among the Lines does its best to spin the listener in happy circles. “A Bear’s Cage” grooves with cool guitar, and just when you think it sounds a little lounge-y, a horn section sweeps in. “Uncool Kids” begins with blues chords that give way to a quick Latin-feeling rhythm. Throughout it all, the brass section — Heinlein on trombone, Brett Jackson on woodwinds and Clint Ashlock on trumpet — accentuates the space, demanding the spotlight one moment and quietly fading the next.

“To me, a line represents a genre, and we weave in and out of genres,” says Heinlein, referencing the album title. He’s right: We Live Among the Lines is jazz music for people who think they don’t like jazz, blues for people who want it with some spice, soul for those who don’t get enough brass.

“We do whatever we want,” Heinlein says, at ease now that he isn’t trying to fit his band into a box.

These days, Heinlein’s focus is on finishing school. He’s on track to graduate in the spring from the UMKC Conservatory of Music and Dance with a doctorate in classical trombone, the instrument he has played for 22 years, since he was an 11-year-old in a middle school band.

The pained look returns when Heinlein talks about grad school. The decision to go back for his doctorate was, he says, his only option.

“When I first moved here [from Wichita in 2008], I worked at the parking garages in Power & Light,” Heinlein says. We share a rueful look. “That might have been the worst job ever, dealing with people until 4 a.m., and it was the first job I ever had that didn’t involve music.”

Attending to parking garages was a world away from the high school band room in which Heinlein was teaching before he moved to Kansas City. But that job also had a downside: Too often, Heinlein was faced with students who expected easy grades or were forced into the class by their parents.

“I love teaching, so that was hard for me, because I want to teach kids who love music,” Heinlein says. “You get into college and you get kids that are financially invested in it, especially these days, and you get kids that, for the most part, really want to learn. But when I moved here, there wasn’t an opportunity to teach at the college level — I’d need another degree. And I hated those parking garages. So I decided to just bite the bullet and jump through all these hoops and do the horrible things they make you do to become a doctor.”

The field for classical trombonists is narrow and competitive; Heinlein tells me that in 2012, there were only 12 trombone positions open in the nation. It must be an incredible love, I tell him, to take such a chance. Was there a significant moment for him, when he knew that the only way forward was with a trombone in hand?

“I was in high school and I played sports and I loved it, and I was ready to quit band,” he admits. “I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t thinking of it as a career path. But I remember there was a performance we had, and at the end of the performance, I got goosebumps, just from the way we performed and the way I performed and the reaction that we got from the crowd. I just remember having goosebumps, and I had never had that feeling before. So I stuck with band in high school, and it just grew. Now I don’t know what else I would do if I wasn’t into music. I’m certainly not qualified to do anything else.”

What gives Heinlein goosebumps now are the moments with the Project H at the group’s monthly gig at Westport CoffeeHouse. And every other month, the boundary-pushing Heinlein invites an artist outside his usual sphere of jazz musicians to collaborate on a set. This month, it’s local rapper Reach.

“We’ll be playing the beats and the hooks behind two old rap tunes from the ’90s, and then we’ve got kind of a jammy, improvised thing where Reach is going to freestyle and we’re going to come up with some stuff,” Heinlein says. He again looks at ease, comfortable with the thought of an open-ended night. “That’s kind of the point of this — to celebrate the amount of great people and great artists in Kansas City, to expose our fans to other music … and just to do something different.”