Eric Revis, Sing Me Some Cry

Anyone who reads this column regularly should be familiar with Eric Revis. He is a new jazz freedom bassist, composer and bandleader whose music has been addressed in several review articles over the years. We come back to him happily with a recent release of his entitled Sing Me Some Cry (Clean Feed 428).

The album features an excellent quartet in Revis on bass, Ken Vandermark on tenor sax and clarinet, Kris Davis on piano and Chad taylor on drums. All four have a hand n the compositional frameworks, with four of nine by Revis, one each by Vandermark, Taylor and Davis, one by Adam Rogers, and one a collective quartet venture.

The frameworks set up some cutting-edge improvisations by the foursome, who are rooted in the music yet determined to move forward. Each is an important voice on her or his instrument. And at the same time there is a pronounced four-way confluence to be heard.

Perhaps most impressive over the last few years is the emergence of pianist Kris Davis as a central and cogent contributor to a good number of fruitful sessions. She is a central voice here as well. Eric bears close listening too for his bass smarts. And really there is centrality to all, though Vandermark and Taylor one always expects over the years to make important contributions to whatever date they are on. That is very true on Sing Me Some Cry.

In the end one is struck by the vibrancies of the frameworks as well as the cohesive movement of the improvisations. There is individual and collective totality on all nine pieces.

There is every reason to check this music out if you want to know what is new about new avant jazz. It is a bright moment on a continuum of continual effervescence out there. Grab it and spin it and you'll no doubt get it!

Chicago Reed Quartet, Western Automatic, Mazzarella, Rempis, Williams, Vandermark

From Dave Rempis and his Aerophonic label comes another satisfyingly advanced project, a saxophone quartet, more specifically the Chicago Reed Quartet and their album Western Automatic (Aerophonic 009). It is a worthy gathering of four great avant reedists from Chicagoland in a program of eight composition-improvisations.

Joining Dave Rempis on alto, tenor and baritone is Nick Mazzarella on alto, Mars Williams on sopranino, soprano, alto and tenor, and Ken Vandermark on clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor and baritone saxes. Each contributes two compositions.

If you think of the Rova Sax Quartet on one hand and the World Saxophone Quartet on the other, the Chicago Reed Quartet perhaps gravitates towards the edgy qualities of Rova, yet also has the soulful demeanor of World Sax. That is only a rough approximation to give you an idea of what you will hear. The music stands on its own, ultimately. They do not sound like either as much as they sound like themselves.

For all that we get sounds that are robust and full, avant in their expressive thrust, filled with structural-compositional significance and improvisational excellence, both collectively and individually. There is always a good deal going on that brings out the collective and individual personalities of the artists. There is a tang and classicism to the music that somehow strikes me as being exemplary of Chicago style these days, something of course present in much of the original AACM outings, but then extended and worked through anew today as well.

Each work has its own compositional touchpoints and so we hear a spectrum of possibilities that keeps the ears and attention focused in great ways. All who appreciate virtuoso energy saxophonics will find much to like and a good deal of form to fit it all into as well.

It is an essential recording for anyone interested in sax ensemble avant jazz, certainly. This is a group to be reckoned with, and the album maps it all out for us so that in the end we have an offering of substance and, yes, soul! I hope they can come together often and do more. Meanwhile get this one!

Ken Vandermark, Made to Break, Provoke

Made to Break moves mountains. Virtual mountains. With sound. Music. It's Ken Vandermark's new group, who improvise around structures in ways Ken has devised but there is no need to go into exactly how in this space. The liner notes to today's release explain. Ken's lately been influenced by punk rock and Ethiopian music and in some ways that gets in here.

There is a combination of electro-acoustic sounds (Cristof Kurzmann) and instrumentalists (Tim Daisy, drums, Ken on reeds and Devin Hoff, electric bass).

Provoke (Clean Feed 273) is a nice set with three long numbers recorded live in Lisbon. The band gets a full chance to find their maximum level of expression and they surely do.

This is avant improv that swells, rocks, grooves and explodes in very nice ways. Hoff plays electric bass in a foundational but innovative way. He's excellent, with a big sound. Tim Daisy is a drummer who can go anywhere and do it with his own kind of authority. He does. Ken you I am sure know and he is strong and unpredictable as always. Christof's electro-acoustics add plenty of color and a thickening texture, at times sounding like more than one voice, which of course is what you can do with such possibilities, and he does it all well.

This set is an adventure and a challenge--to be free, to be more than acoustic, to be big in sound and to be small too in contrast. It's a hip outing. Out with hippening happening.

Add this to your Maestro Vandermark corpus and you will be glad you did. I am!

Platform 1 Takes Off, with Ken Vandermark and Steve Swell

Platform 1? The name of a very lively "free jazz" quintet. Platform 1 Takes Off (Clean Feed 255) is the name of what I take to be their first CD as a unit.

It's Magnus Broo on trumpet, Steve Swell on trombone, Ken Vandermark on tenor and clarinet, Michael Vatcher, drums, and Joe Williamson on bass. All but Vatcher contribute compositions for the outing, and they have a memorable head blast off quality.

The rhythm section is loose and first-rate. The front line gives us extroverted improvisational joy and collective madness of the best sort. Swell and Vandermark come though as expected with their well-developed artistry. Magnus Broo holds his own among them.

It's a beautifully performed set of modern, cutting edge avant improv. Those who know these folks from past haunts will not be disappointed; those coming to this music for the first time, with a little patience, will find themselves digging in and digging the sounds, I certainly think. Yes!

Side A, "A New Margin": Vandermark, Wiik, Taylor Get it Going

Side A? A trio of Ken Vandermark, reeds, Havard Wiik, piano, Chad Taylor, drums. Their A New Margin (Clean Feed 235) seems like the right combination of inspired improvisation, appropriate and memorable composition, and collective spark.

The compositional assignments are equally divided among the three, which makes sense since Ken and Chad do good work, and it turns out Havard does too.

"Boxer" is a fitting and stirring beginning with a sort of modified ostinato that is in a lineage to Dolphy's "Hat and Beard". Ken sounds like he is on baritone for this (and indeed for others as well, though the album jacket credits him as playing tenor and clarinet only) and he and Chad do some lively improvising. "What Is Is" switches to another interesting ostinato, and they groove on in a free rock zone, taking it out.

"Trued Right" has a chordal-melodic line in the piano that swings along well with the addition of Chad's drums. Ken's clarinet puts forth some goodly improvs.

That's a sample of what you hear. It is not all ostinato-based. There are balladic outnesses, postboppishness and some pointilistic, whole group improv phrasings too, among other things. Chad Taylor comes through with the excellent drumming he is known for. He can swing strongly in ways that reference the tradition but do so with originality. And he can get into a freetime that spurs the group on but also has a musical language going that shows you Chad the musician, the musical drummer. Havard Wiik articulates structure often enough, playing a centering role in the trio. His solos have some of the motor outness of Cecil, and the hunt-and-peck aspect of Havard's style has a kind of discursive logic--like he is saying something from A to B, B to C, sequentially. Ken V. is as always highly articulate, fired up, a person who pays as much attention to the sound he gets as to the notes he plays.

This is measured out avantness, music that has been thought through, that uses ostinato and other repetitive compositional devices in contrast with freely firey variables and/or compositionally lengthier phrasing. It is pretty tightly sequenced episodically. That makes for some exciting listening.

It's an important outing. Chad and Ken hit it off together very well here, as is no surprise, and Havard puts his piano at the center in ways that make things click. Compositional-improvisational inspiration is in no short supply throughout. One of the best out small group excursions of the year!

Ken Vandermark Solo "Furniture Music"

If you think it's easy to make a solo woodwind improvisation album and keep it interesting, then you have an optimistic outlook on just about everything, I would think. It's you, your instrument and a microphone or two and that's it.

Ken Vandermark made such an album a few years ago. He perhaps ironically titled it Furniture Music (Okka Disk 12046). For those that don't know, "Furniture Music" was the name of a set of pieces Eric Satie composed for social situations where the music was to be a background to the convivial gathering of folks, their chatter, the tinkling of ice in cocktail glasses and the like. He was ironically adament that the music be ignored. The music was purposely banal and repetitious, but since it was Satie doing it it turned out that the music was really quite fascinating and a prophetic forerunner to what was later known as minimalism.

For Ken to call his solo reed recording by that title, he was applying a bit of modest irony to his own music. Like Satie's piece, this is not really background music at all, and in a way it was a comment on how difficult it could be to improvise on a single-line solo instrument for any length of time while retaining audience interest.

Vandermark's Furniture Music succeeds because he is a very creative cat. The bulk of the recording was made in the studio, but the final numbers are from a live date. Ken's strategy was to keep each segment relatively short, to vary the instrumentation, and to limit the tone production and sound qualities of each improvisation to certain parameters. So you get explosive pops as a sound event on the baritone sax, legato clarinet, boppish bari phrases, squealing shrieks on the clarinet, subtones on the bass clarinet, and so on.

Needless to say perhaps, but this is not a disk where one expects Ken to break out into a version of "Body and Soul." And he doesn't. It IS a varied and adventurous trip through the colors of sound and tone poetry Vandermark creates in the course of the 65-minute program.

This may not be an album that changes the universe and its ordering. It may not even change your idea of music if you already have sampled "free" improv. But with a Zen sort of concentration on the part of the listener this is music that is far from boring.

Territory Band and "New Horse for the White House"

Territory Band is/was an 11-piece avant jazz collective with an all-star line up of musicians from Chicago and Europe. New Horse for the White House (Okka 2006) is a generous 3-CD set of the band at a peak period, and it's at a great price. Two of the disks were recorded in the studio, one was recorded live, all in 2005.

Personnel highlights include Ken Vandermark and Dave Rempis on reeds, Johannes Bauer, trombone, Kent Kessler, bass, and Paul Lytton and Paal Nilssen-Love on percussion.

Ken Vandermark wrote the compositions and in many ways serves as the guiding light. The pieces combine idiomatic written sections and collective improvisations spiked by an out-front soloist or two when it seems right.

It's a marvelously varied sound they get. There is tightness, looseness and a sense of structure and direction that comes out of a clear vision and talented players logging in a good deal of playing time/rehearsal. At least that's how it sounds.

There is so much good music here that demands your attention. It may make a handsome adornment to your shelves but it was meant to be heard. It is worth the effort. This is another important disk from one of the seminal cats to come out of Chicagoland.

Spaceways Incorporated Do Sun Ra and Funkadelic, 2000

Concept albums spice up musical life a bit. Most of the time. That's true of Spaceways Incorporated's Thirteen Cosmic Standards by Sun Ra and Funkadelic (Atavistic 120). Spaceways was/is Ken Vandermark on reeds, Nate McBride on acoustic and electric basses, and Hamid Drake on drums. The session was recorded in 2000. It's a bit of a hoot. These are some of Chicagoland's finest, of course, and they seem to have been stimulated by the contrast between the two musics. You get out funk for the Funkadelic tunes, and you get interesting trio blowing and arrnagements of the Sun Ra pieces.

Hamid gives the funk rhythms his skillful twist and of course he can play in any manner of outness or swing powerfully. And he does. Nate is solidly there on the electric funk lines or the finessed Ra on the upright. Ken V. goes to various places as only he can do. It's a fun record!

Karayorgis, McBride and Vandermark in a Freely Lucid Setting

Like with yesterday's post, I am catching up today with some music that is a few years old but too good to be ignored. No Such Thing (Boxholder 018, 1999) is precisely that. Of course one never knows until the CD hits the player and the music tumbles out. But this turns out to be an auspicious meeting between Boston based pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, and two of Chicago's finest: Nate McBride on bass (who played on the CD reviewed yesterday) and Ken Vandermark on reeds. This is freewheeling but structured music. There are tunes by each band member and group improvisations as well.

It gives you plenty of out-and-in improvisation and some very good chemistry between the three. Highly recommended.

Ken Vandermark & Free Music Ensemble, 2005

Something about Ken Vandermark, and by extension the Free Music Ensemble as represented on Montage (Okka Disk), playing it safe is never an option. By "playing it safe," I mean a sort of free blowing blow-out that, while there is nothing wrong with it and it can give the listener an exhilarated experience, has a sort of built-in safety factor.

What the Free Music Ensemble does on these two live dates is beyond blow-out. They work with contrasting group dynamics, they allow for various instrumental combinations and densities, they get into a variety of propulsive channels, and they have worked out compositional elements that spark the music and set up the blowing segments in a nice way. Now of course there are many groups who do this, but Vandermark and company do it so well.

That is in no small part due to his colleagues in this group. Nate McBride is a bassist that can maintain interest and momentum with all the available free bass techniques and knows when any given attack will work best for the moment at hand. Drummer Paal Nilssen-Love is a really sensitive instrument who can bash or get cosmically sound-oriented when needed, in ways that bring out the vibe of any given segment.

Ken Vandermark is one of those reed players who finds varied and rewarding projects and excels within each consistently. Here Ken unleashes an ensemble of reed instruments, clarinet, baritone, bass clarinet, tenor, etc., and does something interesting on each one. He has been at the forefront of free players for a pretty long time now and he's the sort of artist I look forward to hearing regardless of the context.

Montage gives you two CDs of great live trio music. You should not miss it.