Entries associated with the tag "Drag City Records":

Weekend happenings that didn’t find their way into this week’s Treatment:

James Falzone’s Allos Musica, Lamentations @ Chicago Cultural Center : Falzone is one of the city’s most focused and inquisitive clarinetists, and his compositions favor a rigor and precision that’s rare. He uses the Allos Musica name as an umbrella for several distinct projects, including the fine sextet that performed on the impressive The Sign and the Thing Signified earlier this year. This weekend he revisits the trio setting he first utilized last year during a commissioned series at Gallery 37. Working with the great Palestinian oudist and composer Issa Boulos, the group—rounded out by drummer Tim Mulvenna, who plays mostly frame drums in this context—explored an intersection of jazz improvisation and Arabic maqam. A live recording from last October displays an impressive fluidity, with Boulos and Falzone finding an agreeable comfort zone; the loose arrangements give the participants plenty of space, but structurally the pieces don’t cling too tightly to the often rigid demands of maqam. The 3 PM concert at Preston Bradley Hall features Ronnie Malley of Mucca Pazza and Lamajamal replacing Boulos. The group will also perform on Monday night at Koten Chapel on the campus of North Central College in Naperville, where Falzone teaches.

Greg Osby Four, Friday and Saturday at the Green Mill: One of the most compelling saxophonists of the last two decades, Osby recently lost his long-time deal with Blue Note Records, which staunchly supported his bold conceptual explorations. It’s a shame, of course, but hardly a surprise these days, where major labels have all but banished jazz. As usual, Osby leads an interesting band featuring bassist Matthew Brewer, who’s been with him the last couple of times, drummer Tommy Crane, and pianist Frank LoCrasto. Last year LoCrasto released an impressive debut album, When You’re There (MaxJazz); although he plays with a quartet featuring Crane, reedist Chris Cheek, and guitarist Mike Moreno, most of the pieces—all originals—have elaborate arrangements and use a restrained mini-orchestra that gives the tunes a pop-like concision that you might expect from an LA pop factory. The quartet’s frontline activity is fairly subdued but still high-level, so it’s nice that the strings and horns (in this case, bassoon, clarinet, English horn, flute) don’t overwhelm it, instead shading in contours and underlining elegant countermelodies. Naturally, these intricate constructions make me wonder how LoCrasto will sound in the context of Osby’s band.  

International Contemporary Ensemble @ various venues: This new music ensemble started in Chicago and now enjoys a split residency with New York. As this recent piece in the New York Times suggests, the group has quickly become an important presenter of contemporary classical music, encouraging young composers through commissions. They also ditch the rarefied air of classical music that bums out and alienates so many young people. Expediency and comfort guide their venue choices as much as the sound of the room. This weekend kicks off ICE’s fifth annual festival, with concerts all over the city—including the Velvet Lounge, Elastic, and Katerina’s—and it’s hard to imagine the opportunity to hear so much contemporary work in such a concentrated burst any other time of the year. The complete schedule is here. 

Red Krayola and Sir Richard Bishop @ Whole Foods: Well, not in the flesh, but on Saturday afternoon at 2 PM, the Whole Foods stores in Lakeview (3300 N. Ashland), Lincoln Park (1000 W. North), and South Loop (1101 S. Canal) will preview their forthcoming albums on Drag City, Sighs Trapped by Liarsand Polytheistic Fragments. I suppose I'd rather hear Mayo Thompson wailing as I shop than a lot of other things, but this might be pushing lifestyle marketing too far.

Throughout its history Drag City Records has extended its reach beyond contemporary artists to reissue music from some of the most overlooked iconoclasts of the 60s, 70s and, 80s (Gary Higgins, Big Flame, Half Japanese), as well as put out new material by veterans still doing bold work (Mayo Thompson’s Red Krayola, Scott Walker). Recently the label has released albums by two more greats from the 70s. One's a cult hero, and the other's totally unknown.

Bill Fay was one of the most interesting and literate folk-rockers to emerge in England on the cusp of the 70s. He made two superb albums for the Decca subsidiary Deram—1970's Bill Fay and 1971's Time of the Last Persecution, both reissued last year by Eclectic Discs. He was backed by some of the country’s most progressive jazz musicians of the time, players who were conversant in myriad styles and shared a sophisticated improvisational and harmonic language. Bill Fay featured nearly 30 musicians, organized by arranger Mike Gibbs; among them were saxophonist John Surman, Soft Machine drummer John Marshall, and guitarist Ray Russell—a titanic talent who bridged the gap between free jazz and psychedelic rock like no one else. (A new Russell album, Goodbye Svengali, was released on Cuneiform earlier this year). The follow-up was much darker and stripped-down, with Russell’s searing leads emerging as a key lyric feature.

The record-buying public didn’t respond to the records, and Fay stopped recording under his name and took on day jobs. But in the mid-70s he did hook up with an aggressive jazz-rock trio called the Acme Quartet, made up of younger musicians who were fans of the Russell-era style, but capable of adapting to Fay's more relaxed vocal style. They recorded an album’s worth of material between 1978-1982, but it remained unreleased until Jnana--the label affiliated with Current 93’s David Tibet—put it out in late 2004 as Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow. It’s a gorgeous collection that sets Fay slightly wry but melodic singing amid elegant piano figures, stately rhythms, and the occasional guitar explosion, courtesy Gary Smith. While Fay is often compared with Nick Drake and Bob Dylan, his idiosyncratic, gentle singing doesn't really owe a debt to anyone; there are things about the album that remind me of the solo work by fellow Brit Robert Wyatt, but their voices sound nothing alike.

Drag City released Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow on vinyl in late July, and it's shown similar good taste in the case of fingerstyle guitarist Mark Fosson. A few years back, while asking her mother is she had any John Fahey records, singer Tiffany Anders (daughter of filmmaker Allison Anders) discovered that her cousin had once played with the legendary guitarist. In her charming liner notes to The Lost Takoma Sessions she explains that Fosson had sent an unsolicited demo to Fahey, who was thrilled with the music--a photo of the tape package features Fahey’s scrawled note reading, “best demo tape I’ve heard since Kottke”--and asked the Kentucky native come to LA and play some gigs with him. He left for LA in January of 1977 and recorded an album for Fahey’s Takoma imprint the following month. Unfortunately, by then the label was in deep financial trouble, and before Fosson’s record was ever released Fahey was forced to sell Takoma to Chrysalis Records. Fahey returned the master recordings to Fosson, who tried in vain to find another label to release the music. It was soon relegated to his garage until Anders’s curiosity led to him digging it out, which eventually led to Drag City getting hold of it and releasing it late last month.

Early Leo Kottke is certainly a good point of reference for Fosson’s playing, a technically dazzling mix of gorgeous melody and deft counterpoint. Compared with the complex, blues-derived constructions of Fahey, which drew upon elaborate structures of Indian classical music, Fosson sounds straight-ahead, but his original tunes are filled with shape-shifting episodes sewn together with invisible threads—the music rolls forward with the fluid motion of the finest bluegrass picker, but its studded with fanciful harmonic thickets, counter-melodies, and pinpoint rhythmic clarity.

It’s actually not Fosson's first album. After the Takoma deal went sour he remained in LA and started pitching songs to MCA Records. He didn't have much luck, but he did get involved with the city’s underground country and singer-songwriter scenes, and even had some tunes included on A Town South Of Bakersfield Vol 2, a 1988 collection put together by Dwight Yoakam producer and guitarist Pete Anderson that also included tunes by Jim Lauderdale and Lucinda Williams. But it wasn’t until last year that Fosson finally released a collection of own music, Jesus on a Greyhound. It's a solid collection of rootsy country-rock, but the music on The Lost Takoma Sessions is something really special.

If that’s not enough, in October Drag City is releasing The Black Swan, a terrific new album by Bert Jansch, a long-time guitarist in the excellent 70s folk-rock band the Pentangle. The new record was coproduced by Jansch and Noah Georgeson, who worked on Joanna Newsom's The Milk-Eyed Mender, and features some guest spots from Beth Orton, David Roback, and king of the cameo whores Devendra Banhart.