Their music spans several genres — jazz, electronic, rock, hip-hop — and incorporates sounds and rhythms of the world's cultures and traditions — Western orchestral, African, Latin, Asian.

Material on M'lumbo's earliest releases was a mix of originals and innovative cover versions which gained recognition and acclaim,[1] [2] and ensuing airplay.

In the later 2000s and early 2010s, M'lumbo would return to covering pop-culture "standards" with versions of such favorites as Hawaii Five-O revisited, Sesame Street and Beat It.

M'lumbo has been active through the pandemic, writing and recording new material, collaborating mostly remotely with each other and with special guests Jane Ira Bloom and Page Hamilton.

Its earliest, hand-made cassette releases were instrumental, semi-acoustic, African-inspired, live performances of originals and reimagined, sometimes medleyed covers (Mickey Mouse, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, The Flintstones, Perry Mason, In A Gadda Da Vida, Crossroads/Hava Negila/others), performed as structured pieces that allowed for improvisation and for cued or gradual transitions between sections.

The cassettes began selling well at local East Village record stores (Tower Records, Sounds, Multikulti, Generation, Kim's Video, others), leading to radio play on over 100 U.S. stations and many appreciative reviews which compared their sound to Sun Ra, electric Miles Davis, King Sunny Ade, and The Bonzo Dog Band.

To approach a merely adequate description, try and imagine a combination of Miles Davis, Sun Ra, traditional African music, and early Bonzo Dog Band...

By the later 1990s M'lumbo had become as much a multimedia collective as a band, having expanded to a line-up of six musicians, four filmmakers including Josh Ferrazzano[12] and Matt Bass,[13] and a live soundman.

In 2007 M'lumbo released Angel Wars, a two-disc package of all original material, consisting of a CD album and a DVD of live-in-studio performances of three tunes (The Invisible Plane, Always Looking Forward To Tomorrow, Plastic and Transparent).

Members of M'lumbo have musical relationships with Jane Ira Bloom and Page Hamilton going back decades, which have continued with shared bills and special guest appearances both on stage and on albums.

M’lumbo has performed many times over the years at both the original and second Knitting Factory (and even the third), as well as at other NYC venues such as Bowery Electric, Joe's Pub, SOB's, Mo Pitkin's, and St. Anne's Cathedral, with opening acts such as The Jazz Wannabes, Neotropic, Sean Lennon, Badawi, Mantronix, virtual reality inventor Jaron Lanier, Jojo Mayer's Nerve, dj Muttamasik and Duncan Sheik.

— Mike Gunderloy, Factsheet Five Of their most recent release, Celestial Mechanics, one reviewer drew parallels between M'lumbo's approaches to pop culture material and those of Sun Ra, noting common strategies both have used to transform and reconceive (or "deconstruct") very familiar melodies.