Archive for April, 2008

I've only had a chance to listen to it a couple of times, but Look Around (Innova) by the Minneapolis-New York combo Fantastic Merlins immediately worked it way into my head. The superb production by tenor saxophonist Nathan Hanson shows how electronics can brilliantly enhance the sound of an acoustic group--they give the music a huge wallop from the bottom and a pleasing plumpness all the way around.

The album finds a wonderful halfway point between jazz and chamber music, reveling in a thick, elegant atmosphere with slow-moving tunes and carefully intersecting and overlapping lines. Hanson, cellist Jacqueline Ferrier-Ultan, and bassist Brian Roessler are a tight unit, often playing either monolithic unison lines or intricate contrapuntal constructions where the pieces lock together like parts of a puzzle. Italian drummer Federico Ughi alternately caresses and throttles the dense frontline activity.

I'm not sure how this big sound will translate in a live setting--a few live tracks on the record lose some of the atmospheric beauty--but the record is so strong I have to imagine that there's more than enough substance to easily survive the transition. The group plays tomorrow night at Elastic. The superb trio AAT--bassist Josh Abrams, vibist Jason Adasciewicz, and drummer Nori Tanaka—share the bill.

Today's playlist:

Andrew Bishop, Hank Williams Project (Envoi)
Tubby Hayes and the All-Stars, Return Visit (Fontana)
Bobb Trimble,  Iron Curtain Innocence (Secretly Canadian)
Arthur Russell, Springfield (Audika)
The Cats and the Fiddle, We Cats Will Swing for You, Vol. 2 (Fabulous)

The great Japanese drummer Nori Tanaka had lived in Chicago for a decade when immigration authorities forced him to return home last July, and at the time I wrote about his struggle to stay. Now he's back in town, but sadly it's not for good--though he's playing a slew of gigs over the next couple weeks, after that he'll be leaving again.

Wednesday night Tanaka will be at Heaven Gallery to take part in a record-release celebration for The Art of Dying (Delmark), a surprisingly swinging session led by bassist Jason Ajemian early in July 2007, as Tanaka's departure loomed (and Ajemian prepared for his own move from Chicago to New York). Billed as Smokeless Heat for this show (after the album's lengthy closing track), the group is basically the trio of Tanaka, Ajemian, and superb tenor saxophonist Tim Haldeman, with support from guitarist Matt Schneider, trumpeter Jaimie Branch, and vibist Jason Adasiewicz (playing marimba).

Though both Tanaka and Ajemian seem to favor settings where the rhythms and textures mutate rapidly and  kaleidoscopically, on The Art of Dying they maintain a hard-swinging pulse. Such a sensibility is at the root of Tanaka's style--he only ventured into more abstract terrain after nailing the basics earlier in his career--but you'll rarely hear Ajemian laying down so many walking lines. I've also never heard him put his penchant for weird vocal incantations to better use--on the spooky, spellbinding "Machine Gun Operator," a simple ascending figure keeps rising into a falsetto cry.

Ajemian wrote many of the album's catchy and often pretty themes, but lots of the credit for the record's success should go to the three guests, who add wonderful harmonic detail and extra melodic lift. The performances are a little rough around the edges here and there--likely due to lack of rehearsal, a persistent problem with folks who don't make enough scratch with their music and have to spread themselves a little thin with various projects--but that's easy to overlook given the lyrical, tender playing and sharp tunes.

For many years Ajemian, Tanaka, guitarist Jeff Parker, and video artist Selina Trepp got together every Tuesday night at Rodan as A Cushicle, shaping rising and falling grooves with purely improvised materials--their shows became one of the most fun and reliable weekly events in town. Parker has kept the gig going (if not the name) with bassist Josh Abrams and drummer John Herndon, but unfortunately the original lineup isn't reuniting while Tanaka and Ajemian are both in town. At least it's finally possible to hear A Cushicle recorded: Ropeadope recently released Introducing the Freakadelic Sessions (available only as a Ropeadope Records digital download), which captures the first set of the group's Rodan show on April 25, 2006. It kicks off with a version of Thelonious Monk's "Think of One," certainly an apt point of departure, but after that the trio's stream-of-consciousness flow never returns to composed material. This approach works because these players know how to think on their feet--though the recording is raw, with the murmuring of the audience audible, the loose electricity that A Cushicle made seem almost routine is on full display.

Tanaka's got more gigs coming up--I hope to highlight some of them later this week.

Today's playlist:

Mick Barr, Octis: Iohargh Wended (Tzadik)
Dewey Redman Quartet, The Struggle Continues (ECM)
Neil Young, Hawks & Doves (Reprise)
Gene Vincent and His Blue Caps, Blue Jean Bop! (Capitol)
Notekillers, Notekillers (Ecstatic Peace)

The husband-and-wife team of Johnny Irion and Sarah Lee Guthrie (Woody's granddaughter) return to town on Saturday night, opening for the glib jam band ukulele whiz Jake Shimabukuro at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Together and apart the pair traffic in California-style country from the early 70s, steeped heavily in the cosmic twang of Gram Parsons via the Jayhawks, whose Gary Louris produced their most recent album, Exploration (New West, 2006). Last year Irion (a former member of the forgettable alt-rock combo Dillon Fence) issued his second solo album, Ex Tempore (Rte 8), and let's just say the absence of Guthrie on all but two tracks makes the heart grow fonder--her harmonies soften Irion’s occasionally strident, high-pitched cry. He advantageously works within his limitations when he lets his intonation wobble a la Neil Young, another clear influence, but I’m glad his wife will be around (and get to sing some of her own stuff as well) here. They're due to release a new album together next year.

Last night I watched the limber free jazz quartet Engines rip through a set of new-ish tunes at Elastic, fine-tuning them for a Sunday-night performance at the Hungry Brain, where those pieces will be recorded for a forthcoming Okka Disk release. The rigorously organized riffs and rhythmic inspire tough improvisation from trombonist Jeb Bishop, reedist Dave Rempis, bassist Nate McBride, and drummer Tim Daisy, but the quartet also generates extra improvisational meat using visual cues, altering the background and rhythmic accents bubbling behind other parts or solos. The group will play two sets on Sunday.

Although the Dagar family remain the most brilliant performers of dhrupad, the purest and most austere form of Indian classical music (it dates back to the 15th century), over the last decade or so brothers Umakant and Ramakant Gundecha (pictured) have been contenders. (Here's a link to a Critic's Choice I wrote for a 1999 show.) They play tonight, with Chicago’s own acclaimed Indian dance troupe Kalapriya, at International House on the campus of University of Chicago.

Last month when I spoke with George Lewis he expressed hope that someone would soon write the history of Chicago jazz in the 50s. Whoever takes on that task, it got a little bit harder last Wednesday, when pianist John Young died at South Shore Hospital from multiple myeloma. He was 86.

Although he released only six albums under his own name during a career that spanned as many decades, he was a crucial presence on the city's bop scene. (Sadly, only his excellent 1959 album, Serenata, on Delmark, is currently in print.) He was a product of Du Sable High School, under the leadership of the legendary Captain Walter Dyett, and he got his first serious professional experience as a member of Andy Kirk's orchestra in the early 40s. By the decade's end he was back in town working with everyone from saxophonists Eddie Chamblee and Von Freeman to blues guitarist T-Bone Walker to singers Lorez Alexandria and Nancy Wilson. In the liner notes to his 1963 trio album, A Touch of Pepper (Argo), Jazz Showcase proprietor Joe Segal observed, "He is constantly sought for all types of live and recording dates; from preferred anonymity on rock 'n' roll gigs to 'elite' pleasing fashion and club dances."

Letting Segal's characteristic tweaking of rock slide for now, this touches on a key trait of so many Chicago jazz greats: To make a living they needed to be able to play in any context, and that range inevitably bled back into the work that mattered most to them. Young's own music was thoroughly within the bop tradition, fusing a deep feeling for the blues with a lyrical elegance and a genuinely effervescent touch, but it couldn’t help but be informed and strengthened by knowing how other styles functioned.

Here's hoping that his passing will prompt the reissue of some of his records, because he'll certainly live on through their contents.

Today's playlist:

Davy Graham, Midnight Man (Fledg’ling)
Comus, Song to Comus: The Complete Collection (Castle Music)
Drive-By Truckers, Brighter Than Creation’s Dark (New West)
Lone Ranger, On the Other Side of Dub (Heartbeat)
Kelis, Kaleidoscope (Virgin)

According to his current label, Yep Roc, the ultra-prolific Jim Lauderdale plans to release three stylistically disparate albums in nine months. Two are already out: last fall he issued a fine bluegrass outing called The Bluegrass Diaries and in February he released Honey Songs, which doesn't fall neatly into any category. (The third will be a collaboration with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, their second effort together.) The dominant feel on Honey Songs is the cosmic vibe of chill 70s country, but Lauderdale's songs embrace and transcend just about every style of American music. Bluegrass, honky-tonk, soul, rock 'n' roll--they all collide and coexist with little fanfare.

Cut with a crack band that includes James Burton, Garry Talent, and Al Perkins (and backup vocals from Emmylou Harris, Kelly Hogan, Buddy Miller, and Patty Loveless), the new record is packed with Lauderdale's typically catchy melodies. The powerful tunefulness of his songs is what defines them, far more so than any genre signifiers he might happen to use, and Honey Songs includes some of his strongest. On a ballad like "It's Finally Sinking In," an otherwise roiling Crazy Horse grind contrasts with Lauderdale's dolorous melody (and Perkins's sublimely liquid pedal steel), which is so gorgeous it's easy to miss the pain.

Lauderdale's consistency might be his biggest enemy, since it makes it so easy to take him for granted. He doesn't make bad records, and aside from organizing albums around relatively benign themes like "bluegrass," he refuses to dabble in conceptual bullshit. He just puts his stuff out there. Ignore it, though, and it's your loss.

Lauderdale plays solo on a diverse roots-music bill dubbed "The American Beauty Project" Saturday night with Ollabelle, Larry Campbell, Catherine Russell, and Teresa Williams at Dominican University in River Forest.

Today's playlist:

Kay Adams, Wheels & Tears (Sundazed)
Rashim, Suns.Shadows (Mosz)
Dells, It's Not Unusual: The Very Best of the Vee Jay Years 1955-1965 (Charly)
Dead Meadow, Old Growth (Matador)
Jane, Berserker (Paw Tracks)

Thursday evening visual artist Rose Lazar and her husband, artist and musician Robert A.A. Lowe (Lichens, Singer), present a one-night show of work from their recent book-and-music project Gyromancy, the third in Thrill Jockey's series book/CD combos. The event runs from 6 to 9 PM at the Hejfina Boutique.

The book is a four-by-six-inch paperback limited to 1,000 copies, and it includes a three-inch CD of music by Lowe called "Psygning Off." The 15-minute piece is the perfect accompaniment to the couple's simple ink drawings, which run the gamut from abstract geometrical doodles to mushrooms and raindrops, among other things, all rendered with an appealing mix of the whimsical and the psychedelic. Lowe and Lazar each get half of the book, and some of Lazar's images include bits of text, reflecting her work making letterpress greeting cards under the name the Great Lakes Goods. The music, made with a synthesizer, has a similarly childlike simplicity and playfulness--with swirls of cascading music-box tones that evoke a horrible magic show and flanged-out long tones that sound like meteors hurtling through space, it's like a fantastical redux of early Tangerine Dream.

Today's playlist:

Volapük, Where Is Tamashii? (Orkhêstra)
Glenn Branca, Lesson no. 1 (Acute)
The Techniques, Queen Majesty: The Best of the Techniques 1965-1974 (Trojan)
Lina Nyberg & Magnus Lindgren, Brasil Big Bom (Caprice)
The Sword, Age of Winters (Kemado)

Country legend Charlie Louvin, who played at Schubas in December, returns to town with a gig Wednesday night at the Heartland Cafe. Louvin and his brother Ira are famous for the sweet sound of their vocal harmonies, but they sang some pretty dark songs--"Great Atomic Power," for instance, is about a potential apocalypse, and "Knoxville Girl" is a story of murder at the singer's own hands.

With that in mind, Louvin's current label, Tompkins Square Records, is a fitting home for him; late last year it released a phenomenal three-CD box set devoted entirely to human death and suffering. People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs, 1913-1938 is a survey of early American folk styles--country, old-timey, blues, gospel, Cajun--that consists entirely of tunes chronicling acts of violence and destruction. They're broken down into three categories, one per disc: Man vs. Machine, Man vs. Nature, and Man vs. Man (and Woman, Too).

In the wake of the rerelease of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, it's not uncommon for reissues like this to ignore genre boundaries. Erasing those relatively arbitrary lines makes it easier to apprehend the tropes, melodies, and forms that were most universal in the early days of American recorded music.

The superb liner notes, by 78 rpm archaeologist Hank Sapoznik, make a point of reminding us that the American public was bloodthirsty long before Grand Theft Auto. Artists churned out records about death because people bought them. Obviously murder ballads have been around for a long time--they were brought here by some of the earliest British settlers--but in America a new fascination with timely reportage created a whole new industry of "event songs" or "news ballads." Singer-songwriter Andrew Jenkins would probably have Geraldo Riviera's job if he were alive today, reporting on location from one sensational disaster after another. His 1929 song "The Alabama Flood" was written while rescue efforts were still underway after the flood of the Pea River on March 14: "The little town of Elba met its fate / With cries and screams and groans / The people fled their homes / They tried to leave that town . . . it was too late."

The set also includes some genuine masterpieces, which transcend the quotidian details of the tragedies that inspired them. Mississippi bluesman Charlie Patton contributes songs about a 1927 flood along the Mississippi ("High Water Everywhere Pts. 1 & 2") and the once costly scourge of the boll weevil ("Boll Weevil Blues") that tap into larger truths about human nature and survival. There are other equally important artists represented--Son House, Clarence Ashley, Furry Lewis, the Skillet Lickers, Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Poole, Memphis Minnie--but the real strength of this set is its breadth and historic value. It's fascinating stuff--and, as if to prove Sapoznik's point, the lovely booklet includes plenty of postdisaster photos and shots of caskets and corpses.

For this Saturday’s Record Store Day, a nationwide celebration honoring independent music stores, Tompkins Square is offering a copy of the set--autographed by Tom Waits, who wrote the introductory essay--as a contest prize. Chicagoans can enter at Reckless Records and Permanent Records.

Today's playlist:

Television, Adventure (Elektra/Rhino)
Lichens, Omns (Kranky)
Jan Dukes de Grey, Mice and Rats in the Loft (Breathless)
Jason Kahn, Norbert Möslang & Günter Müller, Signal to Noise Vol. 3 (For 4 Ears)
Ramones, Too Tough to Die (Sire/Rhino)

Last night at the Hungry Brain I caught the Chicago debut of a nine-piece band from Richmond, Virginia, called Fight the Big Bull (clearly someone in the band is fluent in Spanish--it's the default language on their Web site). They'd been invited to town by Ken Vandermark, who met bandleader and guitarist Matt White in Richmond a few years ago. Since then White has looked to Vandermark as something of a mentor, picking his brain (mostly in e-mail) about the improvised-music biz. (I can only assume he was being metaphorical when he compared Vandermark to "an old rich uncle.")

Fight the Big Bull's debut album is due later in the year from the excellent Portuguese label Clean Feed, and on Wednesday night the band plays at the Hideout with Vandermark--together they'll debut some new music they're cooking up for the occasion.

At the Brain the band's repertoire--composed and arranged by White--was very impressive, but the songs repeatedly stalled during the solos. The combo is well rehearsed and the players all have fine technique and good sounds, but they looked like a university big band gone avant-garde, sitting behind music stands and dutifully rising when it was time to solo. And when it comes to improvising they've got a ways to go yet--every solo I heard last night just staggered in place with little sense of structure or development.

That said, though, I'm impressed that nine players have committed to such a project--and it is a commitment, since I'm sure their pay from these gigs won't even cover the gas they burned on the trip. They're mostly still very young, and I hope they do stick with it--when they learn to solo they're going to be dangerous.

Today's playlist:

Webbie, Savage Life 2 (Trill Entertainment/Asylum)
Juan Carlos Romero, Azulejo (World Village)
Antietam, Opus Mixtum (Carrot Top)
Jill Scott, The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3 (Hidden Beach)
Lee Morgan, Indeed! (Blue Note)

I've never been able to get too worked up one way or the other about Akron's Black Keys, who've been churning out stripped-down blues-rock for the past six or seven years. They've never offended me, but then again I haven't ever paid much attention to them either.

I had to suppress some knee-jerk cynicism after learning that their new album, Attack & Release (Nonesuch), was produced by Danger Mouse. I figured they were trying to hitch a ride on his coattails, but as it turns out he contacted them. He invited the duo to write some songs for an Ike Turner album he planned to produce, and though Turner's death late last year put an end to that project, the work they'd already done together led to DM's involvement with the Black Keys' own disc.

The band's primitive wallop--Dan Auerbach's grimy guitar and thin white-soul howl, Patrick Carney's post-Bonham thud--is still at the music's core, but Danger Mouse does a surprisingly good job fleshing out the arrangements without compromising their punch. There are a handful of guests--including former Tom Waits sidekicks like reedist Ralph Carney, the drummer's uncle--but DM's ghostly presence is the masterstroke, adding an aura of dread and lamentation without calling attention to his role. A few tunes shoot for more sophisticated old-school soul-rock feel, too: "Lies" sounds a bit like a Led Zep tribute band dabbling in the Stax songbook, with a dash of Otis Rush thrown in. A description like that would probably make me cringe if I hadn't written it myself, but I dig this record.

I have no idea whether the sound of Attack & Release will affect the Black Keys' live shows, but if you have tickets for the group's sold-out Riviera gig on Saturday night, you'll find out. The band will be back in town in August for Lollapalooza.

Today's playlist:

The Mars Volta, The Bedlam in Goliath (Universal)
Oakley Hall, I'll Follow You (Merge)
The Stoner, The New Pink (Hoob Jazz)
Pitbull, The Boatlift (TVT)
Kevin Parks and Joe Foster, Ipsi Sibi Somnia Fingunt

I don't mean to harp on any of the points I made in Friday's post, but considered next to the bands I referred to as "second-rate American acts who feebly pillage third-hand notions of world music," a group called Burkina Electric that's making its Chicago debut Wednesday night at the Old Town School is a useful counterexample. Burkina Electric's lineup includes both European and African musicians, and their music is a broad-minded, contemporary-sounding fusion that draws heavily (and knowledgeably) on ethnic traditions.

The group was formed in 2004 after percussionist Lukas Ligeti, son of famed Hungarian composer György Ligeti, traveled through Africa and met some musicians from Burkina Faso in neighboring Ivory Coast. On the group's recent debut, Rêem Tekré (Ata Tak)--the title means "musical exchange" in the Mooré language--dynamic, soulful vocal melodies by Maï Lingani and bubbling electric guitar lines by Wende K. Blass complement a sparkling mixture of acoustic and programmed drums, contrapuntal synthesizer parts, and samples (German electronic-music producer Pyrolator rounds out the lineup, though two dancers from Burkina Faso are also credited).

A second disc includes five remixes of four tunes from the first--including work by DJ Spooky, Mapstation, and Badawi--and they achieve the rare feat of sounding just as interesting as the original tracks. To be honest, the music doesn't grab me the way I'd hope, but at least Burkina Electric aren't taking the easy way out--they've neatly and intelligently integrated the two musical worlds they straddle.

Today's playlist:

Roky Erickson, I Have Always Been Here Before (Shout! Factory)
Lionel Marchetti & Seijiro Murayama, Hatali Atsalei (Intransitive)
Lafayette Gilchrist, 3 (Hyena)
Harry Nilsson, Skidoo and the Point (Camden)
William Parker & Hamid Drake, Summer Snow (Aum Fidelity)

I got pretty steamed last weekend reading a splashy one-page Tribune feature by Joshua Klein called "The Fading Borders of 'World' Music." It's behind the paper's online pay wall now, but I don't recommend spending the money to read it unless you're itching to be appalled yourself--the piece couldn't have been more wrongheaded and provincial.

The story opens by citing the 1981 David Byrne-Brian Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (reissued in 2006 by Nonesuch) as "an album cheekily designed to imitate the exoticism of so-called 'world' music." Where to begin? The term "world music" didn't come into currency until 1983, after a consortium of DJs and label folks met in England to come up with a way to market records that had no clear home in Western music stores--they found it frustrating that African records were routinely shoved in the reggae section, for example. Given that "world music" hadn't yet acquired its present popular meaning in 1981, much less its connotation of shallow exoticism, how could Byrne and Eno have set out specifically to tweak it?

Perhaps more ridiculous is the claim that Byrne and Eno were being cheeky. Those guys have keen senses of humor, for sure, but more than most musicians they harbor a deep, sincere interest in global traditions. Even if Bush of Ghosts had been a "world music" record--and it's not, at least not exclusively, since the varied samples layered atop its thick, funky rhythmic musculature include familiar American music side-by-side with African sounds--there's absolutely no reason to characterize Byrne and Eno's treatment of foreign material as snarky, irreverent, or mocking.

Klein goes on to provide short profiles of six acts that are supposedly "new faces of world music," and it's here that he really goes off the rails. Of course he includes New York's Vampire Weekend (pictured), who play a sold-out show at the Metro on Sunday and whose inexplicable popularity is clearly the engine for this asinine trend piece. I'm not necessarily down on the band--all I can blame them for is being mediocre and dubbing their indie pop "Upper West Side Soweto"--but the alleged African elements in their sound have allowed plenty of rock critics to demonstrate how little they know about music from that part of the world. Robert Christgau wrote a thorough analysis of the situation a couple of months ago, so I won't go into detail here--except to point out that Klein is only slightly less than 100 percent wrong when he claims Vampire Weekend use "Congolese dance rhythms." They do ineptly ape the bubbly, crystalline guitar sound of Congolese rumba on a few songs, and on a few others they bang on a conga. Otherwise there's nothing remotely African about their music.

I have no idea why Klein mentions Panda Bear of the Animal Collective, aka Noah Lennox, except maybe because he lives in Lisbon, which is after all in a foreign country. The same goes for the Ruby Suns, a New Zealand group fronted by a Californian expat, Ryan McPhun--if you sing one tune in Maori on a bland, boilerplate indie-pop record like Sea Lion (Sub Pop), does that make it "world music" now?

Klein also nominates New York's Yeasayer, and I admit, I actually kinda like their recent debut, All Our Cymbals (We Are Free)--but it reminds me more of Genesis than of any kind of world music. Rounding out the list are sampladelic acts El Guincho (from Spain) and Kutiman (from Israel), but only the former builds its music mostly from international sounds. By the end it's clear that Klein is giving "world music" a definition even more debased than the one it already has--he's talking about Western pop that has some exotic spicing, nothing more. He doesn't seem to give a fuck about music that actually has its roots in Africa, Asia, or South America.

To be clear, it's not the bands I'm taking issue with. Music from other countries has always bled into rock--hell, early gems by New Orleans proto-rockers like Dave Bartholomew and Professor Longhair were practically built on the Cuban rhythmic unit known as the clave. I just find it depressing that so many music writers still aren't willing to do some exploring on their own to discover interesting and progressive artists from other lands, even with the Internet making it easier than ever--instead they fall in line to hype second-rate American acts who feebly pillage third-hand notions of world music. Imagine the alternate universe where an article about "new faces" in world music would point you at X Plastaz, Os Ritmistas, or Mahala Rai Banda.

Today's playlist:

Anthony Ortega, Afternoon in Paris (Hatology)
Christine Sehnaoui, Solo (Olof Bright)
Hecker, Electronic Music Soundtrack for "The Disenchanted Forest x 1001" by Angela Bulloch (Editions Mego)
Vierergruppe Gschlößl, I Take Everything (Jazzwerkstatt)
Skyphone, Fabula (Rune Grammofon)

Every so often Enemy, the experimental-music space booked by Jason Soliday, lands a really great show, but sometimes it seems like most people aren't supposed to know. For example, on Friday the great French pianist Frédéric Blondy makes his Chicago debut playing duets with cellist and former Chicagoan Audrey Chen, who now makes her home in Baltimore. As I write this on Thursday morning, the show's still not listed on the Enemy Web site--I just happened to stumble across the info on Tushar Samant's invaluable concert calendar earlier this week.  It's a shame, because Blondy is pretty great.

He's recently released a spate of new discs, including Obdo (on the excellent new Another Timbre imprint), a duet with German synthesizer master Thomas Lehn, but I haven't been able to track any of them down yet. I can vouch for his work, though, in the collective Hubbub--a quintet that exercises gorgeous restraint and patience in its carefully pitched, dialed-down improvisations.

Perhaps more germane to tomorrow's performance is Blondy's wonderful duet with percussionist Lê Quan Ninh, Exaltatio Utriusque Mundi (Potlatch, 2003), where he dissolves the lines between so-called lowercase improvisation, contemporary classical, and free jazz. Considering that Le Quan is a master of textural exploration on minimal setups--often he uses only a bass drum, laid flat and modified with objects placed on its head-- it's no surprise that Blondy keeps things quiet on this disc. I'm curious to see what he'll do with the more freewheeling Chen.

Today's playlist:

Ingar Zach, Thomas Lehn & Ivar Grydeland, szs zcz cze zec eci cin (Musica Genera)
Odawas, Raven and the White Night (Jagjaguwar)
Keith Hudson & the Soul Syndicate, Nuh Skin Up (Pressure Sounds)
Brigitte Fontaine & Areski Belkacem, Vous et Nous (Saravah)
Tisha Mukarji, D Is for Din (Creative Sources)

Among the extended techniques that occupy such an exalted role in the vocabulary of free improvisation, rubbing and scraping may seem humble, but they're vital all the same. Obviously many instruments are played by rubbing their strings with a bow (what those in the biz call arco), but an infinite number of objects can be rubbed or scraped to produce a surprisingly wide variety of sounds--it's common, for example, for a drummer to bow his cymbals or rub a moistened finger across a drum head to create evocative whines and moans. The Chicago trio called the Friction Brothers push this idea to an extreme: on the group’s self-titled debut, released by the Pittsburgh label Abstract on Black, all the sounds are generated by some kind of friction.

Cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm long ago moved beyond the bow, just as percussionist Michael Zerang has gone beyond drums. Michael Colligan (pictured) barely uses musical instruments at all, creating most of his sounds with dry ice and metal. The list of instruments they're credited with sounds like the contents of a kitchen cabinet, junk drawer, or utility closet: knitting needles, cheese slicer, coins, pachinko balls, frying pan, clothespins, marbles, popsicle sticks, and on and on.

Since so many of the sounds are hard to identify by ear, watching the group play live has a special appeal. Many a Chicagoan has thrilled to the sight of Zerang rubbing one of his drums with a vibrator, but no improviser in Chicago (or maybe anywhere) is as fun to watch as Colligan. Over the years he's elaborated on his basic setup: a couple of teakettles, heated on an electric hot plate and then placed on, pushed into, and dragged across the dry ice to produce wonderfully excruciating shrieks and ominous rumbles. These days he also uses the aforementioned frying pan, trombone and trumpet mouthpieces, tin cans, spoons, keys, and more, all of which produce slightly different timbres and resonances when heated and touched to the dry ice. The last time I saw him perform, he lodged a variety of small metal objects in the ice and left them there, which not only made a steady drone but altered the notes he got when he placed other objects on the ice or against those lodged pieces.

It reads almost like an absurdist joke, and if it were only about making weird noises in unusual ways, it'd sound like one too. But the Friction Brothers' ensemble sound is diverse and extremely tactile, blending resonant long tones with abrasive blats, and the three players coax all of these noises out of their hardware in the context of a deeply intuitive spontaneous musical conversation.

The Friction Brothers celebrate the release of their CD with a performance Wednesday night at the Hideout. The Green Pasture Happiness, an electronic trio with Aaron Zarzutzki, Daniel Fandiño, and Brian Labycz, plays first.

Today's playlist:

Skygreen Leopards, Jehovah Surrender (Jagjaguwar)
Oscar Brown Jr., Sin & Soul (Columbia)
Randy Newman, Good Old Boys (Warner Bros.)
Various Artists, Avanto 2006 (Avanto)
Kelley Stoltz, Circular Sounds (Sub Pop)