All the talk is about Climate Change, the quartet that is

Michael Olson and Tarik Bentlemsani could joke about climate change all day long.

They’re one half of the eclectic Olympia band Climate Change, which got its name thanks in part to a serious desire to keep people talking about the issue. But the inevitable result has been puns galore.

“Traditions Fair Trade welcomes Climate Change,” percussionist Olson wrote in a news release about the quartet’s show Saturday night in Olympia. “Never before has anyone welcomed Climate Change, and some even doubt that it exists.”

Guitarist Bentlemsani has a funny bit about the demonstrators who filled the streets of New York City in September 2014, urging the United Nations to take action on climate change.

“Something has to be done about this band,” he said. “We’re just four guys. Our music’s not that bad.”

No kidding. He and Olson are proud of and excited about the music they’re making with vocalist Dennis Hastings and guitarist Ariel Calabria. (Yes, the band has four people, and two of them are guitarists.)

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to call this Olympia’s version of a supergroup.

Hastings is a veteran jazz and blues vocalist who’s shared bills with the likes of Bobby McFerrin and John Lee Hooker. Bentlemsani plays with The Brown Edition, twice named Olympia’s best band. Calabria played with the legendary Bert Wilson’s band Rebirth and is, Bentlemsani said, “one of the greatest guitar players ever in the history of the world.” And Olson, a veteran of Obrador and Ocho Pies, has long traveleled to Cuba, Haiti and Puerto Rico to immerse himself in the music there.

But the music they’re playing isn’t necessarily what you might expect if you’ve heard them in other bands or if you’re a jazz fan noticing that all four have jazz roots.

“It’s a different kind of band than any of the other groups I play with,” Olson said. “It’s a mixture. It’s a hybrid of popular music with Latin and other rhythms underneath.”

“If you listen to our group, you’ll hear elements of almost every kind of music,” Bentlemsani said. “There’s an element of avant garde in our music, but it’s fairly accessible to the average listener.”

Of course, there are a few jazz elements. There are lots of improvised solos, and Calabria plays a hollow-bodied electric guitar designed for jazz.

Bentlemsani, by contrast, plays an acoustic guitar.

“It’s versatile,” he said. “I can play folk music on it. I can play jazz on it. I can play pop. It doesn’t automatically put me in a category.”

The two instruments have very different sounds, which is one of the reasons they work well together, he said. “My guitar has a brighter sound, and Ariel’s sound is warmer and maybe a little darker.

“If you hear him solo and then you hear me solo, it’s totally different,” he said. “It’s like when you listen to a jazz band and you hear a piano player take a solo and then a saxophone player take a solo.”

Though he sings plenty of lyrics, Hastings also carries a melodic line with his voice, filling the same role a saxophonist or violinist might. He sings in different languages and shows off vocal techniques that don’t necessarily fit into his work in jazz or other genres.

“He can do stuff like Tuvan throat singing, and he can do multiphonics, which is where you are singing more than one pitch at a time,” Bentlemsani said. “One of the things I like about being in this band is seeing him get to explore.”

Hastings is not the band’s only vocalist. The instrumentalists all do backup vocals.

“When we all sing, it really changes the sound of the band,” Bentlemsani said. “It makes it much fuller.”

They sing in different languages and no language at all. They don’t sing about issues of the day — not even climate change.

But they spend plenty of time talking about it.

“People keep telling me that it’s not real, and I keep saying, ‘Yes, it is,’ ” Olson said.

“We get a lot of free press,” he added. “Everybody’s talking about climate change.”

This story was originally published March 9, 2016 at 7:20 AM with the headline "All the talk is about Climate Change, the quartet that is."