Entries associated with the tag "Ken Vandermark":

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)

Musician, a documentary by local filmmaker Daniel Kraus about reedist Ken Vandermark, will make its national television premiere on Sunday, February 17, at 9 PM CST (and again at midnight) on the cable channel Ovation, which is carried here by the Dish Network and Direct TV. Part of an ongoing series of occupational profiles by Kraus that he calls The Work Series (the first was Sheriff), it's an exceptional piece of storytelling that leaves all the action to Vandermark and his cohorts--no talking heads, no voice overs, no fancy editing. And it torpedoes any notion that there's anything glamorous about being a jazz musician. Facets Multimedia will release the film on DVD on May 27, with about an hour of additional unreleased footage.

Today’s playlist:

Waverly Seven, Yo! Bobby (Anzic)
Junior Cook Quintet, Junior's Cookin' (OJC)
Dungen, Tio Bitar (Kemado)
John Renbourn, The Lady and the Unicorn (Shanachie)
Ghostface Killah, The Big Doe Rehab (Def Jam)

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)

The music lineup for November’s Sun Ra symposium, Traveling the Spaceways, has been announced. It will take place at the Hyde Park Art Center, which is also hosting Pathways to Unknown Worlds: Sun Ra, El Saturn & Chicago's Afro-Futurist Underground, 1954-68, a major exhibition of art and ephemera from Sun Ra’s Chicago days. (My piece for the Reader on the exhibition is here.) At the symposium, short performances will be sandwiched in between various discussion panels. On Saturday, November 11, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and his trio will play Sun Ra tunes; later in the day saxophonist David Boykin and his group Expanse will perform his “The Solar Suite,” which is dedicated to Sun Ra. The following day reedist Ken Vandermark will debut his Sun Ra Composer Quartet (with him and Dave Rempis on baritone saxophones, and Frank Rosaly and Mike Reed on drums), and flutist Nicole Mitchell leads her group.

On Friday, November 10, before the symposium starts, Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore will play in a quartet with pianist Jim Baker, Sun Ra alum and bassist Rollo Radford, and drummer Avreeyal Ra at the Hideout. My Barbarian, a troupe of artists and musicans from LA that includes art curator Malik Gaines (who is speaking at the symposium), opens.

Reedist Ken Vandermark presented the latest installment of his long-running Territory Band last night at Millennium Park's Pritzker Pavilion. It was an impressive concert, revealing the international ensemble as one of Vandermark's most rewarding and exciting vehicles; his episodic writing and meticulous arranging does a masterful job of sparking a variety of improvisational situations.

Things like instrumental combinations, rhythm, and color can’t be isolated from the composition in which they’re embedded, but the performance allowed discrete elements to emerge. A passage that featured only bassist Kent Kessler and Swedish tuba player Per-Ake Holmlander put the focus on low-end sounds, as the bass bounced and the horn blubbered in some gloriously gut-rumbling statements. Each section of the set-length piece flowed nicely into one another—an area where Vandermark is improving—but the real satisfaction was in getting absorbed by each one of them.

Fred Anderson was the featured soloist, and it's to Vandermark’s credit that he challenged one of his biggest heroes by putting him in unfamiliar settings: it’s a sure bet that the veteran tenor saxophonist had never dueted with the kind abstract electronics that Norway’s Lasse Marhaug produced. Anderson has an unflappably patient, deep-toned style, ruminating over the subtlest intricracies of a given phrase, and Vandermark presented some frenetic sections that created a nice tension while set against Anderson's playing. The concert was recorded for future release on Okka Disk Records, the former Chicago imprint that’s issued all of the Territory Band recordings, including the brand new 3-CD effort by Territory Band-5, A New Horse for the White House.

Last night Ken Vandermark ’s Powerhouse Sound gave their second performance, bringing down the house at the Hideout. Usually the leader’s brawny tenor saxophone muscles its way to the top of the mix, but in the company of electric bassist Nate McBride, drummer John Herndon, and guitarist Jeff Parker it had to fight for its place. The group plays a stunning amalgam of electric music—I heard bits of Funkadelic, the early 70s work of Miles Davis, and spacey dub reggae—but it can’t be reduced to a simple composite of those sources.     

I’ve heard Parker play in loads of different contexts, where his preternatural mastery of funk and rock is hinted at, but this was the first time I can recall him ever visiting those styles with such purity; the spirit of Eddie Hazel loomed large, but Parker’s gooey, lacerating tone and his unpredictable melodic shapes were all his own. Herndon was a revelation, too. He provided a deep funk, but he consistently varied his rhythms with spontaneous accents and discrete improvised sections that provoked his bandmates without disturbing the music’s surprisingly graceful flow. Too often in such hard-hitting funk projects the bass player finds it necessary to strut his stuff, but McBride was a model of economy--no Jaco noodling here--laying down thick, muscular lines that bypassed the typical slaphappy simplicity of most funk for something more ethereal yet forceful. Instead of seeing how many notes he could cram into each bar, McBride frequently laid out to provide meaningful space. Vandermark, who wrote and arranged the music with both authority and a light touch, pushed as hard as he could, playing nicely angular lines that criss-crossed with the patterns of Parker and McBride, a mix of barwalk honk and free jazz abstraction. For all of the music’s rigor, it was incredibly fun. Here’s hoping that they become a more regular presence.