Going Outside, a UCLA-born band, brings their live recording album “Curiosity Killed the Cats” and talks about the stories behind the band and their music.
The band started with the encounter of the drummer Alex Meckes and the saxophonist Sam Wolf, who both graduated UCLA in spring 2025, at the UCLA music club, Meckes said. Wolf and Meckes bonded over their love for the artists The Comet Is Coming and the saxophone player Shabaka Hutchings. Their shared interest prompted them to start doing music covers on the Hill, like the Covel Commons area, the drummer said. Later, Ruben Green, the key player and a UCLA alumnus graduated in spring 2023, discovered them through jamming and joined because of his adoration of the concept behind Going Outside.
“The concept of this band is that you can play acoustic, instrumental, jazz-adjacent music and you can still party to it and have fun and dance,” Green said.
The band’s beginning was a ramshackle one: only consisting of simple drums, saxophone and MIDI keyboard loops, Meckes and Wolf said. Although they were able to play decent music with the simple setting, Wolf said they reached a point where they realized an expansion for the band was needed. Since then, the band welcomed new members through jamming; they found the process of randomly picking people up a lot of fun, Meckes said. Isaac Svenson, a fourth-year geography and political science student and the bassist in the band, said the improvisational and chilling vibe motivated him to join.
Meckes said their music style can be defined as “jazz-adjacent.” In fact, their music covers a wide range, from Dua Lipa to John Coltrane, and their setlist varies depending on the gig, Wolf said. Speaking about their targeted audience, Green said it’s people that like to be happy.
As to their personal music journey, Meckes said he has played drums in rock style for most of his life and coming to UCLA gave him the first exposure to jazz-style music. Similarly, Svenson said that the experience of playing jazz on guitar and bass was eye-opening for him as a former rock player. Meckes said that compared to rock music, jazz music is fundamentally different for its much more improvisational, more reactive and less structured nature.
Green started out as a jazz piano player under the influence of his father, who he said is a jazz guitarist. Though not a music major himself, Green said that his rich experience with jazz growing up prompted him to seek performing opportunities when he came to UCLA. The band freely experiments and adds their own influence to the music they play, which Green said makes him feel like he has real ownership of the music he plays.
Meckes said that the noise they made when they first started rehearsing on the Hill was very often complained about, but the negative voices faded as they got better. When facing challenges, Green said that an important quality for a band to bond together is to play in gigs. He added that the biggest problem with a lot of bands is spending excessive time in rehearsal rooms tackling problems such as intonation and playing in real gigs trains the band by placing them under a nervous and stressful condition. A lot of their music experimentation happened in front of people, Green said, and they gradually got comfortable with messing up and recovering in the presence of the audience.
The band name, Going Outside, has a dual meaning, Meckes said. For one thing, it means to go wild and unusual, breaking the fixed musical framework when soloing. The drummer also said it refers to the literal meaning that they are always playing outdoors. Green added that “touching grass” was their first explanation.
The album, “Curiosity Killed the Cats,” is a live recording of one of Going Outside’s house shows in Westwood, Wolf said. The idea of using cat as a symbol came from the usual saying “jazz cats” or “that cat’s swinging” and they came up with a cat-themed lore about a dystopia where jazz becomes illegal, Meckes said.
What is special about a live recording, Wolf said, is that they tend to forget they are being recorded. Having fun playing in front of the crowds eliminates the stress of being in a studio, where the saxophonist said they would constantly have the pressure of being perfect in the recording. In the album, Going Outside sticks faithful to some jazz standard pieces, exemplified by “Superstition”, while getting inspirations and doing their original, improvisational renditions to some others.
In the future, they hope to publish albums with a more consistent concept and more originality, Wolf and Green said. Wolf said they are going to played at Melrose Trading Post and are planning to get some other gig opportunities, with another album coming out soon. “How can we take the core ideas that make the song work and make our own thing out of it?” Wolf said. “It’s kind of a free for all. The band behind you might change and you get to adapt to that; it keeps you on your toes, keeps you a bit more spontaneous, which is cool.”
