Groove Armada Will Turn the Tables

Things have gone pretty well for Tom Findlay and Andy Cato working with other people’s music. As the core members of the London-based electronic dance music act Groove Armada, they’ve fashioned diverse elements ranging from funk shakers to a Patti Page vocal into creative and fun collages on their recent album, “Vertigo.” It’s made Groove Armada one of the hottest names in the field.

The song “I See You Baby,” featuring vocals by a woman known as Gram’ma Funk, has become a dance-floor staple and picked up some radio play via a Fatboy Slim remix. And the odd, dreamy “At the River,” featuring a pastoral Page vocal sample about “sand dunes and salty air,” also got some air time.

And when Groove Armada performed in Los Angeles a few months ago, they made a strong impression as DJs, spinning records--mostly by other acts--into a lively funk and jazz mix.

Now they’re going to go and spoil it all.

“When we come to America this time,” Findlay says of a brief tour that brings Groove Armada to the Mayan Theatre on Wednesday, “for the first time it will be completely live.”

There will be no turntables, no sequencers, no mini-discs--none of the standard tools of the dance music trade. Instead, Cato (a schooled jazz trombonist and keyboard player) and Findlay (who plays fluegelhorn), are now anchoring a nine-piece band that will re-create and expand on the borrowed and studio-concocted tracks heard on “Vertigo,” which has sold 48,000 copies in the U.S. Even most of the vocals will be live, by rapper M.A.D. (who appears on their album) and singer Mary Lee, with only a few voice bits coming from a sampler.

Groove Armada made steps in this direction last year with a few shows in Europe with a smaller band, but they still had a lot of the music on digital backing tracks.

“There will be nothing from a computer at all on stage,” says Findlay, 28. “It’s going to be weird, but exciting.”

It’s also a big risk. Where using digital tracks in concert can be a stigma in mainstream music, the opposite is true in the dance world, with the adulation of what is called DJ culture. “It’s a big challenge for them,” says Kavi Ohri, a principal in Bossa Nova, the L.A. dance music promoter that put on Groove Armada’s DJ show at the Fais Do Do in January and is involved in promoting the Mayan show. “A lot of kids who go to clubs to see a DJ, even when they’re dancing, they’re watching the DJ, looking at the technique, maybe trying to trainspot the next record that’s being put on.

“With a live show, you’re reaching a slightly different audience and perhaps losing the original fans you had that went to see you play some of your music mixed with others. “

Groove Armada has already encountered some indifference in England to its live-music ventures.

“Sadly, in the U.K. people don’t even care,” Findlay says. “It bothers me in a way--we made this effort. . . . [But] the expectations for live performance in dance music are so low that it’s all about the spectacle.”

Going with a live band is also a lot more effort and expense.

“If Andy and I just went out behind a mixing deck, we’d make a lot more money,” he says. “With nine people we’re struggling to break even. But it’s an honor to play with musicians who are in a different league.”

Yet Findlay is less worried about this step than he was coming here to DJ.

“Doing Fais Do Do, the pressure was immense,” he says. “They’d flown us out there and Jason [Bentley, an L.A. radio DJ and Bossa Nova partner] had been playing us on the radio. I’m not so nervous about coming out with a band if we get it right than coming out as a DJ. It’s not just about me and Andy anymore--it’s about a great singer and MC and guitar player, and the pressure’s being shared. Also, I just think it’s better listening to Groove Armada than just us playing other people’s records.”

The shows on this tour will have other distractions as well, with multimedia effects and exhibits of young artists who benefited from grants Toyota made to the California Institute of the Arts and New York’s School of Visual Arts and the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Findlay, raised in Cambridge, and Leeds native Cato started playing other people’s records together in London in the early ‘90s. Introduced by Cato’s girlfriend, who had known Findlay in Cambridge, the two bonded over a shared passion for old soul and funk music. In 1993 they started a London club under the name Groove Armada, which earned them recognition in dance music circles. But due to what Findlay says was their “terrible business acumen,” it lasted only two years. Still, through the exposure they started getting remix jobs, which led to making their own tracks.

From the beginning, though, their record-making involved more than just sampling, and even at DJ gigs such as the Fais Do Do experience, Cato played trombone and keyboards and Findlay added some bass and fluegelhorn over the records they were spinning.

And while they dreamed of putting together a band combining the spirited groove of Kool & the Gang or Earth, Wind & Fire with contemporary dance twists, they never expected to have enough success to make that possible. Findlay still can hardly believe it’s happened.

“Driving home today [after the first rehearsal] I thought, ‘The live thing has really accelerated,’ ” he says. “A year and a half ago that was something we never really considered. We put the album out and thought we’d sell maybe 5,000 worldwide. That’s all we expected. It’s weird now that we are at this level where people are expecting anything from us.”

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Groove Armada plays Wednesday at the Mayan Theatre, 1038 S. Hill St., 8 p.m. $21. (213) 746-4287.