Entries associated with the tag "Flying Luttenbachers":

There’s usually no deader week on the local concert calendar than this one, but for fans of improvised music there are a couple of Christmas presents: On Wednesday reedist Ken Vandermark and drummer Tim Daisy meet up at the Hideout for an evening of spontaneous music-making that will surely be akin to the fine 2006 Empty Bottle gig captured on August Music (a limited CD-R release). The two work together in several contexts these days—from the Vandermark 5 to the Frame Quartet to Bridge 61—so they have a strong, natural rapport, whether they're shaping high-octane, heavily rhythmic blasts or focusing on slow-moving textural excursions.

Then on Friday former scene mainstay/gadfly Weasel Walter will play duets with trombonist Jeb Bishop at Heaven. Back in the 90s they worked together in an early line-up of Weasel's Flying Luttenbachers, the long-running, frequently morphing project that he just recently disbanded. Since moving to the Bay Area in 2003 Weasel has maintained a hectic pace, playing with the Luttenbachers, XBXRX, and Burmese, among other groups, but the biggest shift has been his return to free jazz and improvised music, which will be the context for this gig. He’s just released three new albums on his own ugExplode label, including what may be the final Luttenbachers opus, Incarceration by Abstraction, on which he played everything himself. More germane to this gig is the scorching Firestorm, recorded live in New York and Philadelphia this past February. Some heavy hitters join the fray—including veteran Sun Ra reedist Marshall Allen, bassist Lisle Ellis, drummer Marc Edwards, and saxophonist Marco Eneidi—but ultimately this album is about the massed sound the whole group delivers, a roaring maelstrom of pure energy music. Lichens, a trio date with bassist and frequent collaborator Damon Smith and Italian reedist Gianni Gebbia, is more restrained and, dare I say it, reminiscent of the jazz tradition—swinging rhythms, walking bass lines, and postbop horn licks. It’s nice to get the chance to hear Weasel play in such a spacious, limber context.

Today’s playlist:

Paul Motian Trio 2000 + 2, Live at the Village Vanguard (Winter & Winter)
Ravish Momin’s Trio Tarana, Miren (A Longing) (Clean Feed)
Oren Ambarchi, In the Pendulum’s Embrace (Southern Lord)
Maria Rita, Samba Meu (Warner Music Latina)
Orion Rigel Dommisse, What I Want From You is Sweet (Language of Stone)

Former Chicagoan Weasel Walter hasn’t exactly mellowed out since he moved to Oakland a few years ago, but the notorious provocateur has loosened up. Perhaps it was the change of scenery or good old-fashioned age, but the Weez has become less doctrinaire and rigid than he was during his Chicago days, whether that means retiring his horned buzz cut and war paint or returning to the high velocity free jazz he started out playing in the earliest days of his long-lived Flying Luttenbachers, when folks like Hal Russell, Ken Vandermark, and Jeb Bishop were members.

He recently released a new CD by the Weasel Walter Quartet called Revolt Music on his Ug/Explode label and it's unabashedly free jazz, albeit hyper-charged and relentless. (Some things don’t change.) Walter kind of sounds like a Sunny Murray lp played at 45 RPM, all stuttering kick drum and careening cymbal splash, occasionally so free of space it sounds like a drone. A number of saxophonists appear on the album’s eight tracks--including former Chicagoan Aram Shelton--while bassists Damon Smith and Randy Hunt fill out the group, laying down plucked and bowed lines that writhe within the maelstrom, flailing like downed power cables. Famed guitar master Henry Kaiser makes a cameo on one track with a ferociously corrosive solo. There's interplay going on, but at such high speeds it’s often hard to make it out.

Walter is still playing “brutal prog” with the current incarnation of the Luttenbachers. The recent Cataclysm added Orthrelm’s Mick Barr to the line-up and included, among other stuff, a version of Messiaen’s “L’Ascension." But on his current US tour--which, oddly, skips Chicago--he’s playing free jazz in numerous incarnations. For years Walter complained about being ostracized by the Chicago free jazz community, but he’s certainly managed to find heavy-duty companions recently. Among the people he’s playing with on the tour is former Sun Ra saxophonist Marshall Allen, Kaiser, ROVA saxophonist Jon Raskin, and bassist Lisle Ellis. Could a Chicago reconciliation/love fest be far off?

In the fall of 2004 Chicagoan Jeb Bishop, who ranks among the world’s best jazz trombonists, started a year-long hiatus from playing music, limiting himself to just a handful of gigs during that time. Since 1999 Bishop has been suffering from tinnitus, the product of his years of playing rock music. Before devoting himself to jazz full time, Bishop played in various bands in North Carolina, including Metal Pitcher—a pre-Superchunk outfit with Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance—as well as his own Angels of Epistemology. In Chicago he joined the even-louder Flying Luttenbachers, playing bass in the group for a couple of years.    

He struggled to play through the condition for years, but eventually it became too much for him. “It was increasingly a problem for me psychologically, and some of the symptoms were making themselves felt on stage, making it harder for me to perform,” he told me yesterday. His decision meant he was no longer a member of several key ensembles, among them the Vandermark 5 and the Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. But last fall he returned to the stage and has been a reliable presence ever since. “I pursued a couple of therapies for the problems that did help," he says. "The damage can't be reversed, and the ringing is still there, but I've learned to cope with it a lot better than I was before, and I don't feel bothered during performance the way I did previously.” 

Bishop recently performed at the Chicago Jazz Festival with the Lucky 7s, a ensemble of Chicagoans and some displaced New Orleans players that formed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (Fellow trombonist Jeff Albert still lives in the Crescent City.) And this month his quartet the Engines—with drummer Tim Daisy, bassist Nate McBride, and saxophonist Dave Rempis, is playing every Tuesday at the new Velvet Lounge. In November Bishop will join some powerful company when he joins Alexander von Schlippenbach’s German free-jazz ensemble, Globe Unity Orchestra, for a 40th anniversary concert at this year’s Berlin Jazz Festival, enhancing a powerful trombone section that also includes Paul Rutherford, Johannes Bauer, and fellow American George Lewis.