’60s Jazz and a Finnish Connection

The Life’s Blood Ensemble will be performing May 25 and 26 at the Berkeley Finnish Hall, (1970 Chestnut St., Berkeley, just off of University) at 8:00 p.m.

Rent Romus’ Life’s Blood Ensemble — Side Three: New Work (Edgetone 2019)

The Life’s Blood Ensemble has become Rent Romus’ vehicle for ’60s-style free jazz, using the versatile format of multiple horns, two basses, drums, and vibraphone. The new album Side Three conjures that era with some strong composing and an easygoing flow of improvisatory ideas.

Romus and Joshua Marshall play saxophones, and Vinny Golia joins the group for this album, but the album’s spotlight often falls on Finnish musician Heikki Koskinen on e-trumpet, a compact instrument that sounds like the real thing, maybe with some extra smoothness to those high-register flutterings. At different junctures, Koskinen recalls the bristling electricity of Bitches Brew or a cool-swinging easygoing vibe.

Separately from Side Three, Koskinen and Romus have composed Manala, a suite that infuses the Life’s Blood Ensemble’s jazz with Finnish folklore. They’ve performed Manala before — samples of that show are in a Soundcloud file — and will be reprising it for two shows in Berkeley this weekend, in preparation for taking the music to Finland.

Manala, referring to the netherworld of the dead, is “inspired by the mythic prose of cultural liberation and identity found in the Finnish National Epic known as the Kalevala as well as folklore of Finno-Ugric shamanic traditional stories.” It’s a product of Romus’ ongoing research into Finnish culture and music, and it sounds like an epic and inspiring work.

Getting back to Side Three — it seems like a good proxy for what to expect from Manala. Tight horn parts frame the pieces in bright energy, complemented by the cool splash of Mark Clifford’s vibraphone. Koskinen’s composition, “The Humming of Trees,” is bold and purposeful, with an anthemic feel and a cool-stepping space for a bright solo on e-trumpet. Among Romus’ compositions is “Downbeat for the Forgotten,” a funky strut that again features Koskinen’s blowing.

Golia contributed “Area 52,” a composition that pulses along lightly behind some lively group improvising. And for ’60s-style titles, you can’t beat Marshall’s “Three Rites of Recombinance,” a suite dedicated to figures from different literary/sci-fi circles: Fred Moten, Jamie Delano, and A.A. Attanasio.

The 99 Voices of Kyle Bruckmann’s Dear Everyone

A trio version of Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradiant (I’m assuming sans voices) performs at Uptown Nightclub (1928 Telegraph Ave., Oakland) on Tuesday May 14, 2019 and at the Center for New Music (55 Taylor St., San Francisco) on June 13, 2019.

Kyle Bruckmann’s Degradiant — Dear Everyone (Not Two, 2017)

The introductory movement to Dear Everyone is called “Overt? Sure,” and the first words spoken, two minutes into the 7-minute piece, are “lather up.” That pretty much sets the tone — that, and the horns jackhammering like an alarm clock out for revenge.

At its core, Degradiant is a quartet — two horns, electric bass, percussion, and some electronics — mixing free jazz with heavy math rock. But its debut recording brings in a huge cast for a large-scale concept: 99 voices reading poems by Matt Shears. For bandleader and composer Kyle Bruckmann, it’s kind of a follow-up to “… Awaits Silent Tristero’s Empire” (Singlespeed, 2014), his zany, ambitious Thomas Pynchon tribute. Dear Everyone brings a similar touch of absurdity, again framed by Bruckmann’s own Pynchonesque flair for language and love of words.

The readers aren’t pros, by design, and Bruckmann’s liner notes suggest many of them were ambushed with the idea. The result is a collage of voices and tones, some smooth, some self-conscious: male, female, varying accents, and at least one child handling the big words with some adorable stumbles.

Narrators come and go rapidly,  sometimes overlapping with an intentionally confusing intensity, leaving fragments of ideas lingering in your ears. This effect can be mysterious or, as on “Significant Details,” a little silly.

Musically, Dear Everyone ranges from humorous to disturbing, mixing the planned-and-intricate with freewheeling improvisation. Bruckmann sometimes ditches his oboe for analog electronics for darker spells of uneasy tension, and Jason Hoopes (Jack o’ the Clock, Fred Frith Trio) turns up the acidity on bass for the tough-fisted math rock passages. It all mashes together gloriously on “Sound Byte Culture,” including a nifty Hoopes solo.

There’s a sense of fun throughout the 2-CD album, but it ends on a jarring note with “Recessional and Postlude.” It’s sparse and somber, with a slow electronic pulse backing two voices formally reciting a full poem.