Beth Custer’s Clarinet Thing

Clarinet Thing — Cry, Want (BC, 2009)

Clarinet Thing, Beth Custer’s all-clarinet group, has existed for 20 years but only has two CDs to its credit (to my knowledge) and plays only rarely.  When a show popped up at Yoshi’s last week, I figured I practically owed it to the band to show up.

Not as long-form or abstract as ROVA, not as ethereal as Chris Speed’s “The Clarinets,” not as metal as Edmund Welles, Clarinet Thing might have a closer analogue in the World Saxophone Quartet. They do get into some freeform improv and some wild free-jazzy soloing, but it’s all unapologeticly jazz at heart, down to the Duke Ellington covers that showed up on their first album.

Cry, Want draws more on Jimmy Guiffre and Carla Bley for inspiration (the title track is a Giuffre cover).  At the Yoshi’s show, billed as the CD release party, we got treated to lots of original compositions from the new disk, some covers, and a couple of tunes that are apparently being prepped for the next CD, which might be out in just six months.

A few of the pieces from Cry, Want that they played:

“Iluku,” Brown’s piece about his father, who was given that nickname while living in Africa as a boy. Lots of old-time jazzy counterpoint, a pleasant tune.

“Who Died and Where I Moved To,” a Ben Goldberg piece with a playfully sneaky beat, bluesy chord changes, and lots of catchy old-jazz borrowings in the individual parts. A highlight of the show and the CD.

“Polestar,” another Goldberg piece, this time gossamer and lovely.

“2300 Skidoo,” a Herbie Nichols composition that shows how he straddled contemporary and future jazz traditions in his time.

And versions of “Night in Tunisia” (stunning) and “Crepuscule with Nellie” (during which Custer lost her place and couldn’t locate the proper sheet music page in her folder — an experience second only to the time she forgot to put a reed in her clarinet, she said).

As for the newer stuff, Custer trotted out two parts of a five-part suite inspired by Buckminster Fuller.  It started out nicely enough but without the abstract or geometric aspect I’d expected, considering this was the guy associated with geodesic domes and buckminsterfullerene.  But then they kicked into some wild improvising and a quirky riff that kept reappearing.  Better.

The group also did a waltz, “Sweeping Staircase,” that comes from one of Custer’s silent-film scores. And the show closed with a bit of Brazilian choro music by Pixinguinha.

As for the lineup of Clarinet Thing: Custer, Sheldon Brown, and Ben Goldberg are still around from the previous quintet formation (which put out the album Agony Pipes and Misery Sticks in 2005).  Peter Josheff and Ralph Carney are out, replaced by longtime local jazzster Harvey Wainapel. The four of them sat in the usual arc formation, like a string quartet would, and they took turns introducing their songs on the mic. It was a casual show, a fun air.

Goldberg spent most of the night on the contra-alto clarinet, which resembles a one-legged tuba (it’s got a stick to help the performer hold it at mouth level). The other players covered nearly every other type of clarinet between them, including a lot of bass clarinets.

Fun concert overall, and a nice CD that of course has a similar sound.

And if you want to hear what they sounded like live on KPFA a couple of weeks ago, click here, but do it fast — that archived show will expire Thursday, Nov. 26.

Subway Series: New York

Yes, another subway picture. My short travel spree has brought me to New York. Electrical work on the E and V lines messed up my subway strategy, but I still managed to catch two shows on what’s probably my only free night.

At the Jazz Standard, I saw Go Home, the Ben Goldberg (clarinet) quartet with Charlie Hunter (guitar) and Scott Amendola (drums). Ron Miles on trumpet rounded out the band when I saw them early this year, but for these NYC shows they substituted Curtis Fowlkes on trombone.

Great stuff, as before (and now they’ve got the official CD release, on Goldberg’s BAG Production label, to show for it). It was great to see Fowlkes for the first time, but Ron Miles, who was closer to the material, played with more of a spark. Hunter really stole the show this time, spinning some tasty blues/funk lines to go with Goldberg’s complex melodies.

All four guys clearly had fun, Hunter and Amendola in particular. They would maintain eye contact while anchoring the rhythm during horn solos, both grinning devilishly and responding to each other’s cool tricks, almost daring each other to come up with new ideas.

You can get a decent BBQ dinner at the Jazz Standard, too (the Blue Smoke BBQ place is just upstairs). The pulled pork was probably going to be too much for me, so the server talked me into getting the brisket, which wasn’t on the menu. Good stuff, if you’re a meat-eater. (They also have a veggie burger with a “tomato aioli,” which I think is means ketchup.)

After catching the second inning of Game 4 through the window of a restaurant, I worked my way down to the Lower East Side and The Stone.

At least once per month, The Stone throws a rent party, a concert where the proceeds go towards keeping the place up and running amid gentrification. Tonight was one of those, but the marquee players listed on the calendar (John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Harris Eisenstadt) weren’t present for the 10:00 p.m. set.

Instead, it was a trio of young musicians. Travis Just on computer electronics and saxophone, Kevin Farrell (formerly of Santa Rosa) on electric bass, and Kara Feely (I think) on vocals. Just and Feely work together in Object Collective.

They tried to make it less of a show and more of a community experience, chatting up the 15 or so people who were there and finding out where everyone was from. Just warned us that he was in a loud mood, and the first long improvisation was just that: big blasts of roaring electronics and massively distorted bass splatterings.  Feely contributed spoken text, reading from a U.S. history book in a rapid-fire monotone, like a 21st century chant, occasionally holding one syllable like a sung note. It was a nice surreal touch.

That was followed by “Lush Life,” where Just on sax and Farrell on less distorted bass played in spare, raspy bursts of improv while Feely sang the actual song, delivering a line or two then pausing to let the music continue. During this, she unwrapped several mystery objects that had been sitting on a table all this time, covered in duct tape.  They turned out to be random household items. Two were rocks; the sphere turned out to be a tennis ball.

I seem to always be in NYC for more “mainstream” nights at The Stone, so it was good to see something out-there performed by musicians I wasn’t familiar with.

Had I stayed through the weekend, I could have seen Vijay Iyer, Jessica Pavone, the Nublu Jazz Festival … and I’d be broke and exhausted. Maybe it’s better to be home.

http://jessicapavone.com/

Chicago

(Short version: The David Boykin Expanse was good. Tradition-based post-bop with some occasional rap and the star presence of Jim Baker and Nicole Mitchell. If you’re in Chicago, go seek Boykin out.)

Long version:

The Velvet Lounge is Fred Anderson’s club in Chicago, a neighborhood bar with cool blue walls and awesome, adventurous jazz five nights a week. Its former home was around the corner, just off East Cermak, in a run-down building; Anderson had to relocate, at considerable expense, as gentrification plans mowed that building down.

That was long before the recession. The hole from the demolition is still there, empty. But assuming the Lounge is doing OK financially, the forced move was been for the better.

The old place had character — and a multicolored floral wallpaper that screamed out like a colorblindness test — but the new location is clean and smart, without feeling out of place. Every time I’ve been there, someone’s sitting in the back with a styrofoam container from one of the nearby take-out food joints. The bartender is a blue-collar, eastern European type, very friendly and usually talking to one of the regulars in the corner. And 81-year-old Fred is still there some nights, sometimes even working the door himself.

I don’t get to Chicago often. When I do, I always try to work my schedule around a Velvet Lounge visit.

(I’d also used the Umbrella Music calendar to plan for a Elastic on Thursday night, to see Carrie Shull in what looks like an oboe-led improv quartet. I could have made the 11:00 set, I suppose, but the thought of going that far in a cab on a night like that was too much. Yes, I wussed out due to weather. It was severely stormy and, cliché or not, windy. Really, really windy.)

Friday night, I got off work in time to hit Jazz Record Mart, for better or worse — great store, tough on the pocketbook.

JRM happens to be a couple of blocks from Andy’s Jazz Club, and while I was leery of mainstream jazz in a touristy part of town, I also needed to eat, even if it meant a $10 cover. I gave it a shot.

The Moshier-Lebrun Group (quintet: sax, guitar, piano, bass, drums) wasn’t too bad. It’s what I call “contemporary jazz,” modern stuff descended from post-bebop modalism (Andrew Hill would be a good model) but with sugar, a velvet sheen that makes the music airy and, for most audiences, an easy eveningtime experience. Contemporary jazz can rock, and this group did, getting especially stormy during one guitar solo. And it does draw from worthy jazz masters like Hill and even Ornette Coleman. But it can lack grit, and its fire isn’t guttural. Still, not a bad way to spend a dinner hour.

From there, it was a quick bus ride to the South Side and the Velvet Lounge. (For the ride home, I would figure out that the Red Line is a faster, cozier trip.)

The David Boykin Expanse is a quintet led by Boykin on tenor sax and sometimes he adds rap or rap/singing. He’s got terrific MC skills, delivering supersonic rap packed with creative rhymes, and I think he even freestyled a band intro at the end of the second set.

The first piece, “Sunrise,” was a slow, reverent wail in late Coltrane mode. That would be unique in the set; from there, the band went into modern bop pieces with knotted, twisty themes that were mostly upbeat. Solos were usually taken in sequence — Boyken (tenor sax), Nicole Mitchell (flute), Jim Baker (piano), Josh Abrams (bass), drums.

Most of the songs stuck to a conventional format, with solos taking place over rhythm and harmony that pointed towards the heads but were really an improvised jam. One exception was “Omni Valley,” the closing piece, where the convoluted rhythm of the theme was retained during the solos. That was really nice, a different color.

A fill-in drummer named Avery was especially impressive with his solos. Instead of reaching directly for firepower, he’d often work in crisp, calculated off-rhythms, toying with ideas that keep the swing of the song going but divert freely from the flow (I think I heard a few cycles of 5-time in there).

(Didn’t catch Avery’s last name. Or rather, I didn’t pay enough attention because I figured I could look it up on the Velvet Lounge calendar — but it just says drummer “tba.” I lose.)

Not everything worked to perfection. Many of the solos seemed to end abruptly, although that could have been a function of me getting absorbed in the rhythm instruments, which sometimes happens. Baker, a great pianist, was having an off night. On one solo in the second set, he gave up early, his hands raising up as if to say, “What the-?” The solo was actually good, but I think he lost his train of thought, so to speak. He got a good-natured round of applause anyway.

Baker’s got a crucial role in this band, by the way; it’s in his solos that things get the most “out” and the most convoluted. Wouldn’t be the same without him.

The crowd was sparse, as often happens with venues (and music) off the beaten path. That’s a shame. I hope the Velvet Lounge is doing better on average and won’t die of neglect. On the plus side, it was good to find out I wasn’t the only audience member who didn’t already know someone from the band. One couple, in particular, was chatting up the musicians and buying CDs, which was nice to see.

Eric Hofbauer: Pocket Chops

Fighting jetlag on my recent run through Boston, I tossed my sleep cycle into the shredder, hopping the “T” one night to take in a jazz show at the “Y” on Mass. Ave. in Cambridge.

Guitarist Eric Hofbauer is a young guy with a casual and charismatic stage presence, and his Infrared Band was worth staying up for. Its compositions are jazz at heart, with the occasional free-form diversion and some adventurous soloing. Very nice outside-in stuff, fronted by Hofbauer’s jazz guitar but drafted with ample soloing space for everyone.

“The Chump Killer” is a standout of their playbook. You can’t miss it. Hofbauer explaned that the Chump Killer is a hero who searches the earth to go defeat evildoers and generally nasty people (“chumps”), and not necessarily in violent ways. After a cool, overlapping call-and-response theme between sax and guitar, the music took an extended break for saxophonist Kelly Roberge to play the roles of the Chump Killer and the Chump, using electronically enhanced, cartoony voices. His dialogue had the Chump Killer taunting the Chump but then winding up in some sort of trap. Pretty funny stuff (inspired by a kung fu movie, it turns out). The rest of the mini-suite followed, and given its chipper nature, you have to assume things turned out OK.

There were also some tunes at once catchy and tricky, like “Pocket Chops.” Hofbauer explained how the term arose in conversation, when someone asked him — I can’t recall the story exactly, but I think he was telling someone about the contrast of playing in Boston versus somewhere else. “Oh, man, you gotta have pocket chops,” he said at the time. Of course, Hofbauer had no idea what that meant, but he rode with it and, years later, wrote it up as a piece.

In the rental car the next day, I took a quick sampling of the CDs I’d bought at the show: The Infrared Band’s Myth Understanding and Hofbauer’s solo acoustic American Vanity. Not the best listening environment, but it was the one available to me, and I thought a car listen would be an interesting blogging experiment.

Uptown

Last week, I finally made it to one of The Uptown’s avant-garde Tuesdays. Took long enough. For several months now, the club — normally a rock venue, and one with a nicely renovated bar at that — has handed the keys over to the improv crowd for an evening of no-cover music.

It’s great when clubs do that. The Uptown is particularly well suited for it, because the regulars who do trickle in on these otherwise slow nights don’t have to watch the music. There’s a long wall separating the stage and performace space from the bar. The sound goes around the wall easily, so the bar patrons and the musicians are probably distracting each other the whole time — but as bar gigs go, it’s not bad at all.

(Flashback: This space used to be called the Black Box, and the bar half was an art gallery. Moe! Staiano’s Moe!kestra did a gig here where two orchestras were set up in each half, with Moe! sprinting back and forth to conduct each group. I wasn’t there, but the results were recorded for the album, 2 Rooms Of Uranium In 83 Markers: Conducted Improvisations Vol. II.)

I hope they keep this up. Don’t know what the bill is for September yet. (These shows tend to get posted to the Uptown’s calendar only a week or two ahead of time).

Anyway, a summary of what I managed to see:

Ingrid Laubrock and Tom Rainey — A sax/drums duet from NYC who had crossed this way a few months ago on tour. This time, they were on vacation and just taking the opportunity for a quick gig. They did two mid-sized improvisations, probably 10 minutes each, showing off a good rapport and a nice variety of styles. I’m familiar with Rainey through his work with… well, everybody, especially Tim Berne, so it was great to get a chance to chat with him for a minute or two.

Tim Perkis, Phillip Greenlief, G.E. Stinson — An interesting middle piece with the lights down, and abstract video projected onto a screen. After a while, you could tell the video consisted mostly of outdoor shots of streets and lonely buildings, distorted beyond recognition. The music shifted from ominous droning sounds to occasional slashes of noise, particularly from Stinson (guitar). Greenlief’s sax often stuck to subtle tones and bleats, blending into the mix of electronics (Perkis) and guitar effects.

Aram Shelton Quartet (pictured up top) — Back to more acoustic-minded improvising, although the quartet included Perkis for some more electronics fun. The quartet, rounded out by Damon Smith (bass) and Jordan Glenn (drums), played a few good improvisations. Nice stuff, and a good contrast to Shelton’s jazzier work with Dragons 1976 and the Ton Trio (as noted here).

Outsound Summit: InterMedia Night

That’s Bonfire Madigan Shive behind the flames, at left, possibly living up to her name by handing out sparklers after her performance, which capped the Friday night (July 24) bill at the Outsound New Music Summit. It was an impromptu post-4th celebration, with the musicians whooping it up among the silhouetted light barrels that were the evening’s art installation (more about that later).

This was the InterMedia night in the Summit schedule, and the only night I could attend. I really wish I could have seen more, including the “Touch the Gear” mini-expo, but at least I got treated to some unique performances.

The place was packed, by the way, thanks to Madigan’s appearance, billed as a one-time, 36-minute piece. And you could tell who was there just for her set: the goth piercings, the dyed hair, the anarchist ripped-jeans look.

Jess Rowland and The Dreamland Puppet Theater: An opera performed by marionettes, with prerecorded music and singing, and live piano accompaniment by Rowland. Surreal, especially with the prerecorded electronics sounds adding an eerie sheen even over the pleasant melodies. The sung lines followed dissonant paths and were recorded by untrained vocalists, possibly the puppeteers. Arch and serious music.

The story, though, was packed with random fun. Falou, the worst poet in the world, joins Amelia Earhart in her kingdom of the air. But Earhart turns out to have a dark side, and prodded by J. Edgar Hoover, she turns on Falou and banishes him. I probably shouldn’t give away the ending … let’s just say Falou has an epiphany and a transformation — some real dramatic pull there — but it also involves Britney Spears and Saskatchewan.

Rowland wrote the opera with the puppet theater in mind, and the DIY sets added some charm to go with the overall sense of humor. Still, there’s some quite serious stuff in there about the nature of art and freedom. The audience didn’t know quite what to make of it at first; you don’t want to laugh at what seems silly but might be quite serious, right? But when a glittery Michael Jackson comes down from the sky after someone mentions “god” … yeah, that pretty much sets the tone. Rowland apparently explores similar moods in The Trouble with the Soda Machine, which is based on e-mails from her work. I gotta hear that.

Kathleen Quillian & Gilbert Guerrero: They’re visual artists, and they provided the installations outside the Community Music Center for the performance: translucent barrels of light with scenes silhouetted to the outside world, and subtle electronics sounds (the roaring, staticky kind) emanating from within.

Their performance, “Hypnodetonation,” involved taking snippets of films and selecting one instant to play on repeat. So on the screen, you saw that instant — a handful of frames — repeated over and over, accompanied by a barely discernable fragment of dialogue or music. Then they’d shift to the next fragment, adding its sound to the previous one. Then another. What built up, over time, was a writhing wall of sounds. Guerrero was picking the clips, and Quillian seemed to be doing the edit of the overall sound, fading out the older clips so the newer ones could take over. That produced a sense of slow migration in the piece. I liked it, but it went on awfully long.

Bonfire Madigan Shive: Then came Bonfire Madigan, with the 36-minute “Portrait of the Artist as a Transliminal Criminal.” We were told it was divided into 12-minute thirds representing past, future, and present, but the divisions weren’t easy to discern. Oh, heck, I had no idea where the divisions were. But there was a very nice, bold instrumental theme that dominated the beginning and came back at the end, so maybe that was a clue.

After playing around with that main theme for some time, Madigan added a few songs of conventional length. Good stuff — she’s got a gruff delivery that goes well with tough cello slashings, and she contrasts that with passages of airy, gossamer melody. She has the theatricality of Tori Amos but doesn’t aim for that kind of delicacy; Madigan is more capable of punching to the gut.

Going with the “Intermedia” theme, Madigan had video running through the performance. Mostly this was a blurry image of the stage itself, for that mirror-within-a-mirror effect, but the final segment of the piece had Madigan playing the aforementioned cello theme as accompaniment to the silent short film “Transliminal Criminal,” some stills of which can be found on her Web site.

The film itself featured images of Madigan running through fields, jumping gleefully around the world’s biggest Prozac pill, and paddling a land-stranded rowboat. More about atmosphere than storyline, obviously.

Madigan weathered some technical difficulties, particularly towards the end, but overall put on a dramatic and visually arresting show, what with the spare stage, lighting washes (yellow as seen in the photo, blue later on), and the overall ambitious nature of the piece. The Madiganites sitting next to me were blown away, gabbing excitedly after it ended. And then Madigan herself blew off some steam handing out sparklers.

Yes, I’m more than a week late in posting this, but it was a good, adventurous show worth writing about.  Hopefully it lays the groundwork for further ambitious directions out of the New Music Summit.

Spirited Music in San Jose

I might as well be honest: I had a dread of being the only audience member at Works San Jose last night, where Jim Ryan brought in a couple of improvising bands.

But the show drew a handful of people, including some passers-by who saw and heard the music from the sidewalk — a very pleasant surprise. Downtown San Jose deserves credit for having some edgy art museums downtown, Works being one of them, but they’re overshadowed by the children’s museum and the Tech museum, and on weekends, by the dancing-and-alcohol nightlife that’s just blocks away.

Still, a few people showed up and seemed to like the experience. That’s great. Quite a few more onlookers lingered by the windows, one or two at a time.

They were drawn in by the music and the promise of an experimentally jazzlike band, but a few theatrics helped too.

The aesthetic behind Ryan’s Left Coast Improv Group includes improvised poetry and vocalizing, and Bob Marsh got up from his cello to deliver a poem about revolution. (“Is it in your socks? Do you wear it on your wrist?”) He then brought up a couple of audience members for an improvised faux-ballroom dance, showing off a little whimsy.

The Improv Group consisted of sax/flute, bassoon/sheng (Michael Cooke, from the SFCCO), two cellos (Marsh and Doug Carroll), trumpet (Darren Johnston), and Ryan drawing from a collection of small percussion. They played sublime stuff, mostly longer pieces. Carroll and Johnston took advantage of the gallery’s big, empty spaces by wandering around (yes, Carroll plays cello).

The first set came from the trio The Spirit Moves Us, with Ryan on sax/flute, Marsh on cello, and the one-named drummer Spirit. And Spirit does play a huge role in the band’s sound, with his free-jazzy style of long drum-rolling statements, often tough and stabbing.

It was terrific stuff, with the drums filling the echoey space. (In actuality, that can be a problem; I’ve seen shows where the drums eclipse everything because of the acoustics. But in a trio setting, with amplifiers for Marsh and for Ryan’s flute, it worked.) They did quieter pieces, too – Spirit busy on brushes, Ryan improvising on flute.

Ryan has put out a CD for The Spirit Moves Us on his own Jimzeen label. Hoping to give it a listen soon.

Terrence McManus/Carney & Co.

Kind of a jazzy night at the biweekly SIMM series in downtown San Francisco last night. Terrence McManus presented a blend of electronics noise and dense jazz guitar. Then a quartet of Ralph Carney (sax etc.), Bill Noertker (bass), Mike Elias (guitar), and Dave Mihaly (drums) put up a fun set of improvised jazz.

To call that Carney’s quartet is probably incorrect. By the look of things as they set up, Noertker was the leader, or the instigator.

McManus, working solo, used his electric guitar to produce a variety of crackling sounds. A brush pressed against the strings, for instance, or a screwdriver handled twirled against them. (Made great sounds with the strings muted with McManus’ other hand.)

He’d follow that up with flurries of jazz chords, stuff suitable for a club, full of twists and thick, mottled harmonies. Two extremes of music, in a way.

(I’d never encountered McManus before. He’s into some interesting projects, like a 60-minute composition called “The Machine” that’s going to be performed at The Stone in NYC later this month. A segment called “The Dream of the Ants” can be found here.)

The quartet then dug into a few amusing jams, taking a free-form, jazzy path. Elias on guitar used a pointillistic sound with a psych-rock reverb, for a spidery, spacey fee. But every now and again, as the mood got deep and probing, Carney would leap in to mess with his bandmates. Duck calls were particularly effective there (and you’d be amazed how much variety and musicality can be squeezed from those things). Carney also broke out two slide whistles, all manner of percussion, and an interesting instrument made by a guy in San Jose — it was a flexible metal tube with a springy feel and a saxophone mouthpiece and reed at the front. By bending the tube, Carney could produce different notes. Like the sax equivalent of a washboard bass.

There were serious moments, too. During one particularly involved passage with Elias taking a lead role, Carney responded in kind with a gentle solo on pocket trumpet.

The Musicians’ Union Hall on 9th Street, where the SIMM concerts are held, has a piano, which everybody but Elias took a stab at. Carney and Mihaly each sat down at the bench, Carny splashing about with madcap, cartoony pecking, and Mihaly prodding with slower, serious chords (interrupted by Carney going all madcap on the drums). Noertker and Carney each reached into the piano once in a while to pluck strings.

Good stuff, and a fun pair of sets to have witnessed.

Yoshi’s Goes Out

I managed to get to the Go Left Fest at Yoshi’s San Francisco last night, and it was awesome. Six acts, headlined by Matthew Shipp (piano) / Marshall Allen (sax, EVI thingie) / Joe Morris (bass). Not a sellout crowd, sadly, but a warmly receptive one, folks who very much came to hear this kind of music.

Six acts in all, spanning four hours, including intermissions of varying length between acts. I’ve only got time to skim through the specifics.

The important thing is: They’re doing it again tonight (Tuesday June 23) and probably wouldn’t mind your support … It’s very hard for folks like these to tour the west coast, so it would be great to encourage Yoshi’s to continue sprinkling some outside acts into its schedule…

Anyway, the acts:

1. Beth Custer trio/quartet: A couple of pieces from her current Buckminster Fuller project, a couple of jazzy songs, and a catchy old-school jazz stomp called “Wag the Puppy,” written by guitarist David James.

2. Positive Knowledge: Oluyemi and Ijeoma Thomas (reeds, poetry) plus drummer Sunny Murray in the chair Spirit normally occupies. One long piece with lots of phases; generous applause for some of Oluyemi’s more breathtaking, overblowing solos on bass clarinet and soprano sax. Positive Knowledge weaves a spell of joyous improvised jazz, not only in Oluyemi’s playing but in Ijeoma’s recital, which often dips into abstract vocal sounds before returning to grounded, pre-written material. Sunny Murray was in a great mood, joking around with the audience while the band set up.

3. Myra Melford/Mark Dresser: Piano and bass, doing chamber-like compositions with a jazz jump to them (Melford’s specialty) and of course lots of improvising in the middle. Great rapport. My angle, behind the piano, was perfect for this set — I could see Melford’s light touch on the keys (even when she was splashing big chords with palms and wrists) and Dresser’s face and the top of the bass’ fingerboard. They finished with a really fun, small piece that gave Dresser a chance to goof around.

4. Ismael Reed: An author and poet, Reed performed with a band of sax (or clarinet or flute), piano, guitar, and drums. (Sunny Murray again, IIRC.) He started heavy, with pieces about the nonsensical waste of war and the unfair villification of “welfare queens.” Most of the remaining pieces dealt with jazz and jazz icons. Straight-up jazz backing throughout. Reed ended with the band playing “That’s What Friends Are For” — a bit cheesy, but his text was a thank-you note to various organs (heart, liver, and brain, mainly) for getting him this far.

5. Roswell Rudd: With Lafayette Harris on piano, who didn’t get enough credit from the crowd for his mix of standards-jazz styles, avant-garde dissonances, and rhythm-opening spacing. The set, sometimes augmented by trumpeter Earl Davis, was a mix of inside-out pieces (fairly straight stuff with free-ranging soloing) and some out-there screechiness. Fun, but Rudd lost track of the time; he announced a waltz piece written for his wife’s recent birthday but didn’t have time to play it. “You’ll hear that one tomorrow!” he said.

6. Marshall Allen, Matthew Shipp, Joe Morris: Playing together for the first time, and you always wonder if “first time” is going to be a letdown. It wasn’t. Shipp was stormy on piano throughout — in fact, I don’t think he ever stopped playing during any of the three or four long improvisations they did, aside from a Morris bass solo early on.

Allen was in prime form, wearing an Arkestra outfit and playing what I think was the “EVI,” an electronics gizmo controlled by a combination of breath, buttons, and dials. Lots of futuristic weirdness to be had there. The EVI produced the same kinds of sounds you’d get from laptop electronics, but with a more direct sense of control. It fit well but was turned up a bit too loud; Shipp’s playing is so tumultuous, it ought to eclipse the sax/reeds voice in spots, I think.

Again, I was behind the piano, so I got to watch the Matthew Shipp fireworks show. Man, he’s terrific. His hands seem to be flying everywhere in random stabs, but the chords that come out make so much sense. (Caveat: I suspect any pianist playing free jazz is like that.) He’s got a couple of trademark moves that were interesting to see in person — like one where he pokes a chord stacatto and (I think) hits the sustain pedal an instant too “late,” for a distant kind of echo/reverb. I’d never seen Shipp play before, so this was a particular treat. I’m going to go put his Symbol Systems solo CD on now.

Joe Morris gets a raw deal here — not only is the bassist often the hardest element of a combo to describe, but I couldn’t get a clear view of him with the piano blocking the way. His mercury-fluid guitar style does seem agreeable to the fast, wide-ranging wanderings of free-jazz bass, and that theory proved out well in this set.

Ivy Room Mondays

I wasn’t at Kingman’s Ivy Room tonight, but I was a few weeks ago, and what better excuse to write a blog.

The Ivy Room is a mid-sized bar, plush and casual and friendly, located in Albany just blocks north of Berkeley, or so it felt to me as I drove up. The place is being kind enough to let the improv crowd take over on Monday nights, either for a few short sets or an all out Improv Hootenanny Night that has its own MySpace page.

It’s a fun atmosphere. There’s no cover, and the Ivy Room is airy and clean — the kind of place where you’re welcome to sit on the carpeted floor in front of the music area, and you don’t worry if anything’s been spilled there. (Caveat: Monday night crowds aren’t usually the spilling type.)

Some photos from my May 25 excursion. Yes, the date on my camera was wrong.

Up top, you’ve got Lisa Mezzacappa’s Bait and Switch, the successor to Before and After. It’s free jazz, with compositions derived from the best segments of group improvisations. The result is like Ornette Coleman taken a step further into abstract territory and noise rock at the same time, with a mood that jumps like ’60s free jazz. That’s Mezzacappa on bass and John Finkbeiner on guitar.

At left is a second picture of the band, with Aaron Bennett (sax) at left. In this one, Vijay Anderson (drums) and Mezzacappa are obscured, making it look like the two white guys are all that matters. Hey, it was dark. All I do is point the camera and hope.

The trio of Jacob Felix Heule (drums), Aurora Josephson (vocal), and Damon Smith (bass) did one long improvisation, a dark and keening piece with Josephson’s voice spiking in anguish. Nice stuff.

I don’t recall the details of the quartet at left. I’m pretty sure that’s Tony Dryer on bass at the far left, and two of the four members were from Norway (the guitarist and other bassist?). They, too, played a single long piece, concentrating on smaller, quieter spaces; the guitarist, in particular, buckled and thrashed to the music but was producing small crackles and crinkles, a kind of studied intensity.

It’s always nice to see a bar or restaurant take a chance on experimental music. A good cluster of these series has sprung up, maybe because venues are more willing to take chances in the face of recessionary crowds. The Make-Out Room (San Francisco, Mission District) has been hosting creative jazz on the first Monday of each month, and The Uptown (Oakland, downtown) is letting Weasel Walter curate an avant-garde program on third Tuesdays. The next of those will be tomorrow, and I’m hoping to be there, sleep cycle permitting.