Whenever crowds gather in Columbia — festivals, markets, parks — there’s also likely to be funk music.
First, the horns march in. Then, a guitarist and a keyboardist will walk by, playing their instruments and wearing their amps, followed by a few drummers and a sousaphone player.
This traveling band of musicians makes up the Mobile Funk Unit.
“We don't really do a lot of normal gigs and we don't tour,” said Tom O’Connor, guitarist and founding member of the band. “Crowds draw us, rather than we draw crowds.”
O’Connor said the fun of the Mobile Funk Unit is in its name: they’re mobile. More often than not, their performances are unexpected and they infiltrate unsuspecting crowds in a sort of funk ambush.
A staple of the True/False Film Fest “March March” parade, the band can be spotted leading the procession and jamming down Ninth Street in downtown Columbia. They follow the hand signals made by band leader and founder Travis Huff — conducting them for when to head another direction, loop a song or start a new tune.
“The band sounds really big because you're getting that reverberation off the buildings,” Huff said of the yearly parade they help kick off.
Being in a mobile band requires some infrastructure. For the horn players, it's simple enough; they lace up their shoes and pick up their instruments. However, for the rhythm section, things are a bit more complicated.
“It's not like a commercially available thing,” O’Connor said of the “rig” he wears on his person while playing in the band. “I had to build the speaker cabinets that go on my hips.”
O’Connor sourced a mix of materials intended for power tools and boating equipment, added a leather belt and industrial velcro, and the result is a one-of-a-kind wearable sound system for his guitar.
“Tom's rig definitely is a feat of engineering. It's really cool,” Huff said.
Making the band
The idea for a traveling (by foot) musical group came to Huff about two decades ago when he was living in Portland, Oregon. He was waiting for a concert to begin in a crowd of about one or two thousand people when “we started hearing this music come toward us.”
Huff saw a mobile band cruise through the crowd, surprise people and get them grooving. He was inspired and couldn’t get the idea of re-creating this experience in his hometown of Columbia out of his head.
O’Connor, Huff’s friend since high school, said his buddy talked about it for 15 years nonstop.
“Eventually he said, ‘Yeah, let's really do it,’” O’Connor said.
Over seven years, Huff has recruited bandmates largely by word of mouth. He said connecting with Mike Gill, now Mobile Funk Unit’s sousaphone player, who he calls “the rock” of the group, was a defining moment.
“For funk and soul and stuff that we really wanted to do, it was critical to have a sousaphone player that could really handle the baselines,” Huff said.
Mobile Funk Unit can most often be found at music and culture festivals — just not on the stage.
“We walk through the crowd. We're stepping on their blankets and their lawn chairs and knocking their Sprites over,” O’Connor said.
In the early years of the Columbia band, playing among the crowds gathered at the annual Roots N’ Blues festival was a frequent destination.
“That's really fun because you kind of get to steal somebody else's crowd,” Huff said.
Invaded audiences will sometimes circle around the band to dance, clap along and some even begin to follow the roving group of musicians.
“And then there's others that'll go walk off and get cheese fries,” Huff said.
Although the band has done some traditional gigs where they stay put up on a stage, O'Connor said it's not their natural habitat, more like putting wild animals in a zoo.
Funk took over
As the son of two music educators, Kyle Bauche has been in a band of some sort or another most of his life.
“Music has always been a part of my life … played in jazz band, marching band, concert band and all that through high school. (I) played in a couple rock bands in college,” Bauche said. “But then once I joined Mobile Funk Unit, funk kind of took over.”
Bauche has been a member of the Mobile Funk Unit for five years and said the camaraderie among musicians is his favorite part.
“I know it's cliche to say that we're like a little family, but it's true,” he said.
When Bauche joined the band he played the bass drum and was mentored by the more senior drummer — a favor he is now paying forward for his friend and new bandmate Sam Hayes.
Like Bauche, Hayes has been playing music for much of his life.
“I started playing bass drum in middle school because I was tall and they needed someone big enough to carry it,” Hayes said.
The 2025 True/False Film Fest's March March parade was Hayes’ first gig with the band. In rehearsals leading up to the event, Hayes positioned himself and his bass drum next to Bauche, who was practicing a traditional drum kit.
“I'm watching Kyle's foot for the most part because I want to know what he plays on the drum set, and then I'm trying to replicate that on bass drum,” he said.
Hayes thought his drumming days ended when he graduated college and his career in marching band came to a close. But now, Mobile Funk Unit gives him an opportunity to bang the drum once more — and he’s confident his skills of playing on the move will come back to him.
“Old greyhounds, if you put them on sand they just start running,” Hayes said. “I kind of have that. I haven't forgotten how to wear the drum.”
For a stage band, the drummer would usually sit at a kit that includes five or six drums and four to five cymbals. For a mobile band, the job of playing — and carrying — that equipment is split among two to three musicians.
“You're working together as a team and that element of it definitely adds some fun,” Bauche said.
When it's showtime, Bauche wears a piccolo snare drum and a high hat cymbal attached with a clamp. Hayes straps on a 20-inch bass drum, with another cymbal attached to its shell. Both rigs are decorated with stickers, twinkle lights and tape that spells “M-F-U.”
During Mobile Funk Unit performances, Bauche can often be spotted walking — and dancing — backwards as he hits his cymbal and the one attached to Hayes’ rig.
“The music that we play is so funky and so much fun that you just naturally want to move around a little bit, at least I do,” Bauche said.
Partying down the road
Band leader Travis Huff recalled a gig in which the Mobile Funk Unit accompanied newlyweds from the Boone County Courthouse upon the conclusion of their wedding ceremony and marched them down the street to their reception. The funk ambush in this case was a surprise for the groom.
“So we're hiding behind the courthouse. At the same time we're looking up at the sky at this dark, dark, ominous storm, and we all know that it's coming,” Huff said.
The band decided they were going to play, come what may from the clouds.
“As soon as the wedding was over the sky opened up,” Huff said.
Nonetheless, the funk ensemble, wedding party and guests danced for four blocks in the pouring rain.
“It was one of those times where you didn't really care that you were getting rained on — just drenched — because we were all just partying down the road,” Huff said.
The future aspirations of Columbia’s groovy, roving troupe are simple: to continue bringing joy to local audiences, whether they are expecting it or not.
“We're not the 1% that's making a ton of money at this,” Huff said. “We just do it because it feeds our soul.”
