The LabRats are a genre-spanning jazz quartet that’s breaking into a new frontier: musical theater. While the band can usually be found at the Torch Club on Sunday at their improv sessions, on March 21 they’ll be providing live accompaniment to a cast of Sacramento rappers and dancers at Sac Dance Lab.
The band’s drummer, Jacob Swedlow, has written and produced a hip hop opera adaptation of the 1967 French-Italian neo-noir classic “Le Samouraï.” Swedlow named the musical “Who is Jef Costello?” for the film’s titular antihero, a hitman caught between a detective and his former employer, both of which want him out of the picture.
The cast of the musical includes an ensemble of local musicians, including Jakhari Smith, Dogpatch, EGDABEAST with rapper Rudy Kalma starring as Jef Costello. The soundtrack to the musical, recorded by LabRats, will also be released as an album.
In September, the Sacramento Office of Art and Culture selected 200 local artists who would be receiving a monthly stipend of $850 for a year as part of $2.04 million fund from the American Rescue Plan Act issued to the City. Swedlow was one of the artists selected for this Creative Growth Fellowship Program; he’s used the funds to help make this opera a reality.
How has the Creative Growth Fellowship helped you create “Who is Jef Costello?”
I am able to take the time I need to produce something like this. It’s stressful because I’m a gigging musician. I teach, and that’s how I make my money to have my apartment [and] exist. Starting this month and next month, I’m saying ‘no’ to a lot of stuff. I’m creating that time for myself to come [rehearse] every day.
We’ve been working almost every single day on lighting. Usually, those are times where I teach and this grant allows me a cushion to be able to do projects like this.
Why did you want to write a hip hop opera?
The movie that this musical is based on, called [“Le Samouraï”] … It was kind of like the first anti-hero movie story, it inspired other movies like “Taxi Driver” and the classic anti-hero downfall story. I was so inspired by the soundtrack of the movie and just how it sounded, even the footsteps on the sidewalk. And I just think that it’s so theatrical and so over the top, and I think it just makes for a cool musical experience. It just made logical sense in my head to take that and make an album about the concepts and then take the album and then apply it to a musical format.
What are the big differences between the movie and your adaptation?
We’re forcing upon a lot more of a narrative. The movie is almost three hours long and only four things happen in it. It’s very artful. It’s very slow, and very vague. You can go on online and kind of just see how many interpretations people can grab out of it. And for me, the big interpretation was that freedom is an illusion. You’re kind of a product of your environment.
We should also have sympathy for those whose lives we don’t understand. Specifically, in the context of our anti-hero, he’s very clearly in a kill or be killed situation and has been for several years, almost his whole life.
What was it like collaborating with this many musicians to record the album?
It was a huge collaboration between all of our favorite people to work with in the music scene. That’s kind of how this project got started in the first place. It gave us an excuse to play with some of our favorite people, and it just grew into this thing.
It’s been a different side of us. We’ve gotten a chance to kind of expand the musical palette. We’re excited for everyone to hear what that is going to entail once it finally comes out.
What’s your musical inspiration for this project? Are you a fan of musicals?
I’m a huge fan of musicals. I’m primarily a trained jazz musician. There’s a long tradition of studying popular music and adapting that music to your stylings. And at the time when Broadway was becoming so huge and popular, everyone was playing Broadway tunes.
All the jazz musicians would go to Broadway [shows] to write out the chord changes and then play them at the clubs. Studying musicals was a big part of my own personal [journey.] I took that upon myself to study that tradition to just become more well informed in the music. … What does that look like in 2026? That looks like playing a popular style in a creative way, just like how people were doing it in the ’40s.
Are there any unique challenges that you guys have faced trying to coordinate playing live to choreography? I imagine that might be kind of difficult coming from a gigging, improvising musician’s standpoint.
That’s definitely going to be a fun challenge because we count off songs wildly different tempo-wise from night to night wherever we’re feeling the song. But we can’t do that now, right? Not only are there dancers, but we’ve also routed lighting, like timed lighting that happens. So, we’re going to be listening to a click track that only the musicians can hear. That will keep us completely in time with the dancers and the lighting. And usually we record our music to a click track anyway, so that’s not like a huge difference. But, yeah, we’re going to be playing our music in ways that we’ve never played it before.
“Who Is Jef Costello?” is a live theatrical album release of LabRats’ “Tiger in the Jungle,” supported by choreography and staging by Sac Dance Lab. The show is all ages. Showtimes are 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Saturday, March 21 at Sac Dance Lab, 1807 Tribute Road in Sacramento.
📌 Tickets here.
This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, CapRadio, Capitol Weekly, Hmong Daily News, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review and Sacramento Observer. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.
By Ruth Finch
