Jeremy, a trumpet player of a more established band, the Allstonians, recognized that Skavoovie was ripe. He did, however, play a nominal role in the band's development.

"A number of names were being thrown around by the band, and Jeremy, before our first show with the Allstonians, said 'I'm not letting you guys go on unless you call yourselves 'Skavoovie and the Epitones.' I love that name,'" he explains.

"It's kind of an unwieldy name, a lot of people are like" and here Natchez slips into a gruff voice, "'Skawhoozy and the Whatones?' We've had so many misspellings of that, we've had so many places have listed it as two separate bands."

"Skavoovie is the word that ska comes from, all right? Back in the late fifties and early sixties in Jamaica, there was a bassist called Cluet Johnson.... His greeting to people was hey mon, peace, love skavoovie. Instead of saying hey daddy-o, or what's up mon, he'd say that."

When he turns on the music to illustrate a point, he lights up. Leaning forward intently, he mimics a guitar.

"One of the things that defines ska is the offbeat. When [Johnson] was working with musicians and trying to get that sound, he's like 'No, no, no, I want you to play ska, ska, ska, ska, like skavoovie, ska, ska. That's where the word ska comes from, the sound that the guitars make on the offbeat.'"

His voice becomes a percussion instrument and he taps his foot.

"That's the offbeat, this is one and one and, like it's the 'and' of the beat. Ska is defined by the rhythm section."

Though the band plays ska, the style is only a small part of Natchez's eclectic tastes. At Harvard, he plays a lot of jazz, sometimes joining Flubber, a first-year Harvard band. But his heart is with Skavoovie.

In the first year after he joined the band, he met an alto sax player whose experience Natchez uses to illuminate the distinction he sees between jazz and ska.

"He was playing jazz gigs around Boston and he said he just got so sick of playing at some club, looking out into the audience and seeing half-drunk people, kind of swaggering in their chairs, eyes closed. That's one kind of vibe you get, that's cool, if people are really listening and digging your stuff, but now he gets to look out into the audience and see everybody dancing and grooving and totally having a good time and swinging their butts off."

"It is really a music that you gotta get up and dance to, a totally live music. Even with us, getting our CD out, that's fun or whatever, but it's still much more rewarding to play a really, really good show, cause that's where it's at," he finishes, satisfied.

Although Skavoovie travels to cities like New York and New Haven and has appeared in ska compilations, "I could never do this band professionally," Natchez says. "It's just ten guys in a band--there's just no way to make a living off that."

"Right now we're all kids, we started doing this in high school, you know, and we just have a really good time with it."

The summer's tours took them in an even wider orbit, west in their van. "We were staying in people's houses and $30 a night motels, cramming six people into a room. But it was fun."

"It's not like we're emissaries of ska. We're one of the newer bands,...but it's not like we're going out to these towns and the people at the shows are like 'Whutz this thang culled skaah?'"