The return to home turf of Fort Worth's progfather Bill Pohl from his current home in Colorado Springs always brings out the Panther City's freaks 'n' geeks who've dug highly technical rock music going back to the '80s, when Bill had his first bands, through the late '90s-mid-Aughts heyday of The Underground Railroad (think Genesis-era Gabriel with Holdsworthian guitar), to his latter-day Holdsworth nights and improv excursions. So many people, a family of friends, as someone once sang, and they were all at the Grackle Art Gallery last night to welcome Bill back and, more to the point, hear him extemporize some instant music with Warr guitarist Mark Cook (Herd of Instinct) -- a veritable one-man King Crimson -- and master percussionist Eddie Dunlap (RageOut Arkestra, Master Cylinder).
"Starting and ending are the tough parts," Cook confided during the break between sets. "When we get to the middle part, we're okay." The evening started out with a lengthy exploration in free time before Dunlap hit a bashing 4/4 and the trio proceeded to rock out. Cook has a four limb dexterity rarely seen in players of stringed instruments, as he taps unison or contrapuntal lines on the bass and guitar strings of his aircraft carrier-like instrument, using his extensive pedalboard to color the sound. He plays solo lines in the higher registers that rival Pohl's for fluidity.
I could spend an entire set just watching Bill's right hand; his sweep-picking facility is a marvel. (When I see something I can't comprehend but I know is real, I call it magic.) On this occasion, he dispensed with pedals, using a Roland Cube as a preamp for his Marshall, turning up the gain when he wanted to dig in and rip. His nut-to-bridge arpeggios have always been a wonder; last night, I was particularly impressed by his left-hand vibrato, on entire chords as well as single notes, and his rhythm playing, locking it in the pocket with Cook's massive slabs of bass to support Dunlap's wildest excursions. The second set belonged to Eddie. From the first downbeat he played like a man possessed, ending the last piece in a kind of trance state. A transporting a highly satisfying experience. Eddie made a joke about having merch available; the absence of documentation makes ephemeral evenings like last night's all the more precious.
Ended the evening conversing with Bill's Underground Railroad/Thinking Plague bandmate and WRR Classical 101.1 assistant program director Kurt Rongey about the paucity of pianos for touring acts in the Metromess. Rongey, who used to sell pianos for Steinway, said that most of the concert-quality instruments in the area are owned by concert halls or universities and not available for lease. It was a particular concern for me because for want of such an instrument, DFW listeners missed out on Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet on their recent swing through Texas. Rongey had recently visited James Talambas's fledgling Dallas venue New Media Contemporary to see Ellen Fullman's Long String instrument. I encouraged him to attend next week's performance of Talambas with Denton-based composer-improviser Kory Reeder. Rongey opined that perhaps the closing of so many rock rooms in the area has opened the door to more adventurous listening. We live in hope.
My friend Marco "Mr. Trillz" Petrilli invited me to check out some performances by students from the Music and Sound Design Program of Choice (formerly known as Contemporary Academy of Music, aka CAM) at Southwest High School. (I donated a guitar amplifier to the program last December, and got to jam with some of the kids.) The event was held in the school's courtyard, adjacent to the cafeteria. (Took me a minute to find it; the Southwest campus is as big as two of my high school.)
I got a hotdog and a water from Mr. Houze, the campus monitor, who's a Southwest alum, DJ and rapper, and has been employed there for about eight years, and listened as the Is-ness Bizness house band -- Emmanuel Aremu on drums, Darius Johnson on bass, Axel Aguayo on lead guitar, and Adrian Moore on keys -- warmed up, augmented by Mr. Trillz on rhythm guitar. Aremu and Moore had the mien of seasoned pros, and Marco told me later that they play twice a week in church. Aguayo did a nice job copping Carlos Santana's "Black Magic Woman" solo, which provoked a wave of nostalgia ("Oye Como Va" and "Samba Pa Ti" were the first two songs I ever played in a band, back in prehistory). The Is-ness Bizness band has an original composition in the works with a three-piece horn section and a female vocalist (freshman Alice) singing in Arabic.
The PA sounded good outdoors. I'd nearly forgotten what it's like to feel the bass and kick drum through your solar plexus in the open air. Marco reminded me that most of the students had never been to a rock concert, so this was a new thrill for them. (My thanks to him for the use of all his photos included here.)
The most poised and professional performers were vocalist Niyaa (Aniya Walker) and her producer, rapper Money Reezy. Niyaa sang an original R&B ballad, then dueted with Reezy, who returned later to do a solo rap. DJ Amare provided the backing track, and ran sound for the other student bands (occasionally relieved by Adrian Moore). Another strong vocalist was Tae (Tamia Washington), who worked through some initial jitters to deliver some heartfelt originals and a noteworthy performance on a jazzy number.
At one point, observing the crowd, I asked Mr. Houze, "Don't kids dance anymore? Or do they just not dance to live music?" As if on cue, DJ Amare spun Mr. C the Slide Man's "Cha Cha Slide," the song that used to fill the floor every time I went to prom at my wife's old campus, and the kids (and adults) responded instantly (the youngers probably saying, "Ooh, my aunties love this!"). Apparently after I left, they were up again for the duo ParaSights (guitarist-singer Jackson O'Daniel and drummer Hannah Stevens, who also designed the show flyer).
Marco told me the band Cicada -- Gannon McDonald on acoustic guitar, Preston Moore on drums, Mateo Perez on bass, and vocalist Mariana Cazares -- had formed during Covid, when FWISD was on virtual instruction. They played a repertoire of grunge covers (Alice in Chains, Nirvana), and backed Tae on a few numbers. I'm not sure whether they're aware that they have the same name as the venue that's now booking all the local shows that Lola's (RIP) used to get.
I had to bounce early because my wife was holding dinner for me, but on the way out I got to hear Axel Aguayo playing a punky version of "Misirlou," backed by the ParaSights duo and guitarist Cristian Sanchez. They're hoping to play it with the aforementioned Alice singing the original Arabic lyrics to the melody. I regrettably missed the performance by the band Saira (Mali on pink Stratocaster, Kirey on vox, Chloe on drums, and Aguayo subbing for regular bassist Monserratt, taking me back to the early Aughts when band members never had surnames). The acts I saw, plus a couple more, will perform in the Southwest auditorium for the entire school from 2:45-3:45 on April 5. And I'll be back to visit any time Mr. Trillz invites me.
Another edition of Molten Plains at Rubber Gloves. Rolled up after a stop at Recycled Books to find a bar full of bass players with UNT connections: Denton stalwart Drew Phelps; Matthew Frerck from the evening's bill-toppers Trio Glossia; North Texas legend Lynn Seaton (whose son Aubrey runs sound for Molten Plains); and Tom Blancarte, UNT alum now living in Copenhagen and touring with the quartet Tactical Maybe (also on the evening's bill).
I'd been wanting to see Bitches Set Traps for awhile; I'd seen Elizabeth McNutt and Kourtney Newton duet at a house show, but this was my first opportunity to see them doing their feminist improv/performance art thing with Sarah Ruth Alexander (who'd told me beforehand, "It's different every time"). Their set was built around an original piece, "Meditation on Genius," which Alexander introduced as "a guided meditation. Think of five geniuses...and if none of them are women, why not?" The rest of the program included works by several exemplars.
Following the ceremonial downing of tequila shots, they opened with "We Are Together Because" by Pauline Oliveros (a touchstone of creative music in Texas), in which they enumerated reasons for their collaboration -- including the fact that prior to playing together, none of them had played in an all-woman improv ensemble. They followed with an adaptation of a piece by Hildegard von Bingen, the German nun and polymath from the Middle Ages.
Alison Knowles' "Piece for Any Number of Vocalists" featured three contrasting/competing melodies: Alexander sang a mellifluous melody that I couldn't recognize, Newton essayed a sidelong "Jesus Loves Me" (the unwanted earworm of the night), and McNutt gave a reading of Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Want To Have Fun." Next up was Yoko Ono's "Fly Piece," including some Ono-esque vocalizing from Alexander, and Mieko Shiomi's "Air Event," which involved blowing up balloons. The closer, Bongwater's "What If?," was suitably lyrical and elegiac.
I dug the "Timeless Bitches"' multi-instrumentalism -- Newton played musical saw as well as cello, McNutt theremin and small instruments as well as flute -- and the balance they struck between Alexander's electronics and the acoustic instruments. Sound tech Aubrey Seaton gets a great sound from nuanced music in a room that would seem more suited to loud rockaroll.
Unfortunately, I was unable to get a good photo of Chicago-based guitarist Daniel Wyche, who performed the title track from his 2021 LP Earthwork. using a Fender Strat, bi-amp system, array of pedals, a wooden box (with contact mic attached) and a set of tuning forks, Wyche created a hypnotically spacious looped soundscape based on an Emaj7 chord. The occasional glitch (a tuning fork that wouldn't ring properly when struck, an odd discordant note) gave his set a more organic feel than a lot of looped guitar presentations one hears that could almost be machine-generated.
I first heard Tactical Maybe bassist Tom Blancarte in 2009 on a disc by Seabrook Power Plant, a wild and wooly banjo-fronted power trio with Brandon Seabrook. His current group includes his wife, Louise Dam Eckhart Jensen, on alto and flute; Nana Pi Aabo-Kim on tenor; and Halym Aabo-Kim on drums. (At the beginning of their set, Blancarte noted the presence of his and Eckhart Jensen's children, asleep on a pew; at one point, she put down her horn and left the stage when one of them looked like she might awaken.)
If Denmark seems an unlikely place for a free jazz outfit to originate, it's worth remembering that Copenhagen is where Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor found their voices, and Eric Dolphy famously concertized. Evidently, that spirit remains in the city's DNA. Nana Pi is known for her conductions (using her music sign language "Extemporize"), and leads the excellent band Nezelhorns (a couple of whose CDs I picked up from her post-show, along with Tactical Maybe's self-titled debut from 2022).
Their set was like a series of conversations that ebbed and flowed, sharing timbral space and blending their sounds seamlessly. Both reed players made expert use of multiphonics and extended techniques. For much of the set, Nana Pi played her tenor with a mute in the bell, and toward the end, she replaced the neck of her horn with a length of plastic tubing with a mouthpiece on the end. Blancarte played a small, amplified instrument that had the richness of a full-sized bass. Halym played with admirable restraint. When Blancarte started tapping on the face of his instrument, it was hard to tell who was playing what. All in all, the best kind of musical telepathy.
Last up was Trio Glossia, the current project of vibraphonist-drummer extraordinaire Stefan Gonzalez (Yells At Eels, Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band), just returned from a run of shows in Texas and Louisiana and blazing with explosive energy, augmented by Stefan's long-time collaborator, guitarist Jonathan Horne (The Young Mothers, last seen here with Axis Maior Palindrome). Gonzalez, the aforementioned bassist Matthew Frerck, and drummer-tenor saxophonist Joshua Miller are noticeably more comfortable inhabiting their material and playing off each other than they were when I last saw them, wa-a-ay back in December.
This night's performance was a thrilling exorcism, from alpha to omega. Stefan's a player of unmatched physicality, whether playing tuned percussion or the trap set. Over the past 20-plus years, his punk-rock ferocity has seamlessly merged with his free jazz aesthetic. Watching the nonverbals between him and Horne -- a collaborator for 15 years -- you could see them stoking each other's fire. Horne plays freeblow guitar like Sonny Sharrock was the only other guitarist who ever existed, restlessly riding his pedals and sending his fingers flying up and down the neck, but always moderating his volume so he's part of the ensemble, not overwhelming it.
The presence of so many other great bassists in the house must have spurred Frerck, a schooled and thoughtful musician, to play with wild abandon. He bowed up a storm (including once on a walking line), tore into his strings on his pizzicato solos, and agilely responded to the action around him. Joshua Miller was the real spark plug behind tonight's set. On drums, he got into Roy Haynes territory with his tasteful but propulsive brushwork, beaming with joy as the maelstrom kicked off around him. On tenor, he provided the trio's strongest link with tradition (notably, Pharaoh Sanders' Tauhid was playing on the house music while Trio Glossia set up). Near the end of the set, transported by the moment, he tried to wave his bandmates off, then tapped Frerck to stop him before yelling "GO!" to Gonzalez, to end the piece in a fiery crescendo. (Later, Gonzalez teasingly asked him, "Why you angry, man?")
Drew Phelps, who'd been in Austin the previous night catching Myra Melford's Fire and Water Quintet, compared Trio Glossia's compositions with Melford's exemplary small group orchestration. As I was walking out, I heard the bass eminence remark, "These guys could hang with the New York cats." No argument here. Stefan says they want to write new material and record an album by June. All I ever need is something to look forward to.
The pandemic lockdown brought a resurgence of solo recording surpassing even the '70s, when solo performance was a rite of passage for members of Chicago's influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. In the enforced solitude Covid-19 brought, musicians were forced (or inspired) to explore the depths and dimensions of their personal musical languages. Retainer, just out on the UK cassette label Sound Holes, is one such recording from Danny Kamins. The Houston-based saxophonist runs the jazz program at Rice University and books experimental/avant-garde shows in H-Town, as well as performing solo and with various ensembles.
The cassette medium is uniquely suited to capture the intimacy of an essentially private event. On Retainer, Kamins demonstrates his ability to keep a big column of air moving via circular breathing, embellishing his long tones and quicksilver runs with multiphonics, and covering the whole range of the baritone. His sopranino excursions sometimes recall Eric Dolphy's birdsong impressions on flute.
Back in January, Kamins was in Dallas as part of the Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band. The following night, he was in Denton with his trio El Mantis. That band teams him with Andrew Martinez on electric guitar, bass, and vocals, and Angel Garcia on drums, wooden flute, and vocals. Formed in 2021, the band's music blends psychedelic rock, free jazz, and impassioned balladry, infused with Afro-Cuban rhythm, with Garcia's operatic vocals adding dramatic flair. Houston-based CIA Records released their sophomore album, II, in February.
Opener "El Espectaculo" is a good introduction to El Mantis's capabilities: a two-chord chant coupled with a freeblow exorcism. On "For Wendell," Kamins plays a plaintive lament on alto that his bandmates envelop in layers of swirling ambience. (In the studio, Martinez adds oud, sitar, trumpet, and sax to his array of instruments.) When bass and drums introduce a pulse, Kamins becomes more exploratory. "Pharaoh's Birds" sits astride the juncture of the vinyl sides. Starting with a Crimsonoid ostinato, it carries an air of hovering menace until it breaks down to a lysergic focus on microscopic detail.
The trip continues on side 2, led by Martinez's F/X-laden guitar, with Kamins careening off into the stratosphere. The little march "La Muixeranga" evokes both the cinematic image of a village band and Chilean composer Sergio Ortego's "The People United Will Never Be Defeated." It sets the stage for the album's most danceable number, "Por La Noche," and its most prog-influenced, "Sin Alma." El Mantis is a band of myriad strengths, whom I need to make sure to see next time they venture up this way.
Talking about the MC5 with Paul Bamlett for a future broadcast of The Spark on Voodoo Radio a week after Wayne Kramer's passing got me thinking about this album, even though I haven't owned a copy in 20 years. (I have 5/8 of it on Rhino's "all the MC5 music you and your family will ever need" anthology The Big Bang, but that doesn't include three of my favorite songs -- which are so etched in my synapses that I was able to wake up the day after Wayne died and write out the lyrics to "Poison" from memory.)
After the cathartic chaos of live-recorded debut Kick Out the Jams and the tight-assed calculation of sophomore album Back in the USA, High Time was an attempt to establish the Five's stature as writers and players away from the influence of countercultural guru John Sinclair and wannabe industry player Jon Landau. They had a tough row to hoe. Their early radical political stance incurred the wrath of rock establishment figures like Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and promoter Bill Graham (not to mention the FBI and the collective law enforcement agencies of Michigan), and they'd alienated their core audience (the politicized hip community of Detroit-Ann Arbor) by breaking with Sinclair.
High Time was tremendously important to me when I was 14 (when I was also listening to the Rationals' Crewe LP and Mitch Ryder's Detroit album a lot). I filled my high school English class journal with Bangs-influenced drooling over the Five and Stooges (Creem magazine having just become available via the place where I used to buy comic books), which might have contributed to my getting to go see the school shrink that year. I miss all the funny shit from inside the High Time gatefold sleeve: the pics of the band in costume (Wayne as werewolf, Fred in his "Sonic" Smith superhero costume), Rob's cartoon of the cosmic egg hatching, the funny sayings ("Show me a man who's chasing dreams and I'll show you a man who's sleepwalking"). The album's street level political lyrics were age appropriate for me as I tried to make sense of the messed up place and time in which we lived. And I stole lots of guitar licks from Fred and Wayne, at a moment when I was trying to progress from copping solos off of Yardbirds records.
After Wayne died, I started studying some of the songs as playing forms, and thinking about the album in general.
Recorded in the UK, where the Five had gone to play the Phun City festival, album opener "Sister Anne" was the Five's "everything plus the kitchen sink" production. High Time marked the emergence of the band members as individual songwriters, with Fred penning four out of eight songs. The lyrics are naive and sometimes sexist, but heartfelt and of their time. Fred and Wayne overdubbed so many guitars that it might have contributed to the album's cloudy sound as much as the presence of producer Geoffrey Haslam, who'd let Doug Yule get away with the same excessive thing on the Velvet Underground's Loaded. The arrangement here is equally overloaded. Two verses and a bridge are followed by two choruses of dueling lead guitars, then two choruses of Rob Tyner and Fred's dueling blues harps before another bridge, a final verse, and an extended tag which ends with a Salvation Army band playing something that sounds similar to "The Pledge Song" from John Sinclair's Power Trip outtakes-and-rarities compilation.
"Baby Won't Ya" is a rollicking rocker on which Fred used a signature Chuck Berry lick in a structure that's a far cry from a standard I-IV-V. Michael Davis plays a real Motown bass line, as if to underscore producer Jon Landau's folly in taking him off the instrument and having Wayne play bass on Back in the USA. The dissonance in the IV change comes from stacking a Gm7 (Wayne) on top of a Cm7 (Fred). Like "Sister Anne," this song is a treasure trove of overdubbed guitar licks that I plundered at will as a terrible teenage tyro. I still lean on those lessons: Fred's 16th-note facility, Wayne's double stop bends. Fred's bandmate from Sonic's Rendezvous Band, ex-Rationals front man Scott Morgan, recorded a faithful cover on the debut album by his '90s European band, the Hydromatics.
Slow ballads were never the Five's forte, but "Miss X" beats Rob's sincerity on the previous album's "Let Me Try" with Wayne's classic chord progression and salacious lyrics. This song really demands horns, a B3, and a soulful singer like Sharon Jones or Lisa Kekaula.
"Gotta Keep Moving," drummer Dennis Thompson's one solo contribution to the canon, is based on the same Bo Diddley riff as pre-Elektra B-side "I Just Don't Know," and is all relentless forward motion. The breaks -- six of them -- are two bars each, with two extra beats after the last one before going to the IV change. Fred takes the solo after the first bridge, while Wayne takes the one with the key change, after the second bridge, and plays the ascending line on the outro. This shit swings. Rob was wise to adopt the half-time delivery he uses on the released version, rather than trying to spit the words out a la Chuck Berry, the way he did on the alternate take included on ROIR's Babes in Arms and Sinclair's Human Being Lawnmower. There's a version of this on the one album by New Race, a 1981 one-off that teamed Thompson and once-and-future Stooge Ron Asheton with members of Australia's Radio Birdman, a band running on Detroit fuel and founded by Michigan expat Deniz Tek.
Rob Tyner's sci-fi rock masterpiece "Future Now" was the only MC5 song we played in Stoogeaphilia (we tried "Looking At You" but dropped it after a couple of shows; not enough song there). Like Dodge Main (Wayne's 1996 project with Deniz Tek and Scott Morgan) in their cover version, we dispensed with the slow "Oh Well, Part 2"-like section that contains my favorite Five lyrics after "Poison" (and also makes a great soundtrack for the opening shots of the wrecked Grande Ballroom in the still goddammit unreleased A True Testimonial documentary). We used to segue into "30 Seconds Over Tokyo" instead. For my two cents, the version of this on High Time is Dennis Thompson's finest recorded moment.
The aforementioned "Poison" was Wayne's first great song (later revived on The Hard Stuff in 1995), and as close as Michael Davis came to singing a lead vocal; dig the way he breaks down the line "But I ripped my pants / Doing some dance / That I learned in France / And they think there ain't nothing to know." The lyrics tell the story of the Five; the Rolling Stone reviewer scoffing at the line "Nature and peace are my shelter and companion" told you all you needed to know about the cynical state of the counterculture in 1971. Wayne also got in some great licks, including one of his signature descending single-string lines, over the recitative, and the Spanish tinge at the end is especially nice.
The album's centerpiece is "Over and Over," with Fred's bemused Everyman contemplating life in the USA at the cleavage of the decades. Dodge Main omitted the intro from their cover; they were wise to omit the last chorus (after verse 3), which makes the song drag on too long without adding anything to it. On the High Time version, Fred's ascending solo before the reprised intro and verse 3 is perfection.
Fred's "Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)" is another kitchen sink production, opening with a percussion jam featuring seemingly everyone in Detroit (notably Bob Seger and some Rationals) and closing with a jazz coda featuring Dr. Charles Moore, with whom Wayne would make a jazz album in the 21st century. I dig Fred's feedback chords at the very end. In between, it's all forward motion which I understand could be quite compelling live. I think "Over and Over" would have made a better album closer. No matter. For my two cents, High Time is the best MC5 album. If you dig the rock and haven't heard it, you owe it to yourself.
Always late to the party, I've been aware of San Francisco guitar sage Bill Orcutt for over a decade, but I didn't take time to investigate his work until viewing the Tiny Desk Concert of his Guitar Quartet with Wendy Eisenberg, Ava Mendoza, and Shane Parrish last spring -- which means I missed his solo stand at Rubber Gloves back in the summer of 2022 (my biggest missed concert regret of the current decade). My earliest exposure came in the form of acoustic versions of songs like "White Christmas," "Over the Rainbow," and "The Star Spangled Banner," played on a battered 4-string acoustic (in standard tuning, but missing the A and D strings, the low E string sometimes tuned up to G). This caused me to inaccurately peg Orcutt as a rustic eccentric in the mold of John Fahey, which he isn't -- not exactly. I also noted that he releases a lot of music on his Palilalia Records label, in small pressings which tend to sell out quickly and become difficult to obtain. (These days, I'm prone to buy any Bill Orcutt record I see.)
The music the Orcutt Guitar Quartet played for NPR was from his 2022 release Music for Four Guitars, on which Orcutt overdubs himself playing 14 short pieces on a 4-string Telecaster through a Fender amp. The music is rhythmically insistent and replete with spiky counterpoint, repurposing the syntax of blues-based rock guitar -- the drone-based modality, the hammer-ons and pull-offs -- into something entirely other, an engaging sound that, in its hypnotic repetition and metallic clangor, can be quite magnificent. Parish -- a folk-based player who also performs in the prog-punk band Ahleuchatistas -- transcribed the music from the album. Once he, Eisenberg, and Mendoza had familiarized themselves with the score (which required emulating Orcutt's guitar setup, and the occasional use of a capo), the four took it on the road last year, and Four Guitars Live was recorded on tour in Europe last November (a couple of weeks before I saw Eisenberg at Molten Plains Fest in Denton!).
It's great to hear the interlocking parts going down in real time, and as Orcutt points out in one of his brief onstage raps, the concert is an hour, where the album was half that length, and they make up the difference by improvising. There are solo spots for all the players and a duet for Mendoza and Parish, the better to appreciate Orcutt's burbling bursts of melody, Eisenberg's classical fluidity and percussive right hand, Mendoza's blues grit and whammy bar fluency, and Parish's Celtic roots and penchant for atonality. The energy exchange with the audience is palpable in the music, and by the time they tear into "Barely driving" (an arrangement of "Barely Visible" and "Glimpsed While Driving" from Four Guitars) at the top of side D, you can feel them entering a rarefied realm of group interaction. Then Orcutt pulls out all the stops for the solo encore -- recorded at a different concert than the rest of the program, because you know he wanted us to have the best.
Music for Four Guitars is an essential masterpiece, but I'm going to keep Four Guitars Live on the shelf with all my favorite electric guitar noises: Trout Mask Replica, Marquee Moon, my favorite live Richard Thompson and Funkadelic rides. Buy it for your pleasure, miss it at your peril.
A lot of records I dig these days are primarily documents of a live event (whether said event took place in a studio or in front of an audience), but when I stumble on a record that involves an innovative compositional or conceptual approach, or a unique presentation, I often see producer David Breskin's name in the credits -- most recently on albums by Ches Smith, Brandon Seabrook, and Patricia Brennan. Breskin co-produced 2022's Dedication, the fourth album by drummer-composer Dan Weiss's trio with bassist Thomas Morgan and pianist Jacob Sacks. On Weiss's latest album, Even Odds, out on Cygnus (the label run by Weiss and guitarist Miles Okazaki) on March 29, the format is similar, albeit with different players, but the compositional stakes are higher.
Weiss brought a half dozen fully composed pieces to the sessions. The opening "It Is What It Is" gallops and skitters with a tension that belies its apathetic title (a mantra for many during the pandemic years); it's followed by a somber memorial for "The Children of Uvalde." "Ititrefen" pays homage to Wayne Shorter's "Nefertiti," while "Max Roach" is based on the bebop pioneer's masterwork on Charlie Parker's "Klactoveesedstene." "Fathers and Daughters" is a tender evocation of love for Weiss's daughter Vivienne (for whom his publishing company is named). Equally versed in bebop and classical Indian tabla, Weiss pays homage to other forebears in the improvised "Bu" (inspired by an idea of Art Blakey's) and "Nusrat" (based on a Qawwali rhythm and dedicated to Pakistani singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan).
Other pieces were based on drum patterns which Weiss recorded solo, then gave to his trio mates -- Grammy nominee and Guggenheim and MacArthur fellow Miguel Zenon on saxophone and versatile pianist Matt Mitchell -- to improvise over. The results are presented in juxtaposed fashion, with three of the drum sketches preceding their trio realizations, while the delicate sax-piano interplay of "Horizontal Lifestyle" is heard before the full trio "Vertical Lifestyle" from which it came. The solo "Recover the Mindset" features Weiss at his most Tony Williams-esque, which Zenon and Mitchell transform into the tumbling, turbulent "M and M." The Elvin Jones swagger of "Too Many Outs" sparked the impressionistic "Runner-Runner," while the repetitive groove "Bribes and Ultimatums" inspired the minimalist "Royal Beatings." The track "Conversing with Stillness" begins with the full trio, muting Weiss's drums midway to end with a spacious meditation. Weiss's trust in his collaborators' creative impulses is amply rewarded by the depth of expression in their responses.
Add Dan Weiss to the short list of outstanding composing drummers, alongside the young Tony Williams, DeJohnette, Motian, and Sorey, in addition to his musical ancestors here acknowledged. And one can't help wonder what a Weiss-Breskin co-production on Weiss's large ensemble would sound like.
Winding up a great week of live music at my favorite hometown spot, just up the street from mi casa. Jonathan Horne and Joshua Thomson were performing music from their new cassette release Clandestine Flower -- recorded in an industrial tank in Lockhart -- in public for the first time. They couldn't have picked a better venue than the Grackle Art Gallery, a 1920s house with a pier and beam foundation and hardwood floors that make it very acoustically live.
While the previous night at Oak Cliff's The Wild Detectives with Stefan Gonzalez on drums had been a free jazz exorcism, this was a more contemplative occasion, although still relying on improvisation and achieving peaks of intensity. On alto, Detroit native Thomson brought a broad expressive palate and eclectic influences to the city of Ornette and Julius Hemphill. The themes underlying the music on Clandestine Flower have to do with connections between people, compassion, and the ongoing alienation many feel as a result of the pandemic. In his introduction to "Bombarded," Thomson said the piece had been composed on the day Israel invaded Gaza -- in 2021, a reminder that today's catastrophes have recent precursors.
Horne demonstrated that an electric guitarist can project powerfully without relying on excessive loudness; the volume of his Fender Princeton was well modulated to the needs of the room, and provided great clarity and definition, even when using multiple effects and extended techniques. Horne was able to dig in more on his new Fender Bass VI than he had the previous night, and the concluding piece had him playing a mutant bluegrass breakdown on his signature Mosrite. He'll be back in the area on March 27, augmenting Stefan Gonzalez's new band Trio Glossia at Rubber Gloves.
Opening set featured Grackle favorite Darrin Kobetich along with his RageOut Arkestra bandmate Eddie Dunlap and his Yucca Men co-conspirator Mark Hyde, digging deep into their Near Eastern bag. After starting the set on cumbus, Kobetich had to step out briefly to address some tuning issues with his oud, leaving Hyde to carry the melodic load on his homemade electric baglama. The volume differential between the baglama and oud (the latter played through a cardiod mic) made it hard to hear Kobetich for much of the set. Dunlap is the most subtle and tasteful of percussionists on hand drums, and he applied some of those techniques to his trap set. I would love to hear this ensemble completely unplugged, with Eddie on hand drums. The musicians involved are all smart, sharp players who aren't reliant on electronics for their impact, and the Grackle's room acoustics would support it.
Leap Night at The Wild Detectives. After last night at Rubber Gloves, I wasn't sure I'd be up for another night out, but how often do I get a chance to hear Jonathan Horne play guitar two nights in a row? The realization that there's more "weird music" I dig on the boards in North Texas than at any time since Caravan of Dreams (whose heyday I missed due to military service and having small kids) folded the tent is not something I take for granted. And as my wife says, "It's okay to come to the surface."
On this night, Jonathan was performing as part of the recently recorded trio Atlas Maior: Palindrome with saxophonist Joshua Thomson and drummer Stefan Gonzalez. Thomson's work with Atlas Maior -- an expandable ensemble built around himself and oudist Josh Peters -- draws heavily on Arabic, African, and Brazilian influences. Gonzalez (Trio Glossia) has played with Horne in the transcontinental jazz/rock/hip-hop juggernaut the Young Mothers, as well as less formal aggregations like the Texas Butt Biters. Their set at TWD was a free jazz exorcism the likes of which I haven't seen since Charles Moffett's sons walked into the Recovery Room on Lemmon Avenue during the band's break on a hot summer night in 1978 and blew the roof off the place with a blast of '60s style energy music.
Speaking of energy, Horne -- clad in characteristically colorful mismatched prints -- played with restless animation, stomping on pedals with both feet, switching between his new Fender Bass VI and his trusty Mosrite, attacking his strings with vigor and churning up a whirlwind of sound. His obvious exemplar is Sonny Sharrock, but Horne's advanced ideas and use of extended techniques -- bowing the guitar, hammering on strings with his pick hand, playing a kalimba against the strings -- coupled with his arsenal of effects, takes him into a realm that's entirely other. He played ostinatos of rapid fire runs and when Thomson cued him to play unaccompanied, Horne careened off into Albert Ayler territory. When Thomson responded with his baritone sax (rather than his usual alto), Horne grabbed the Bass VI.
Thomson had a biting tone on alto, and when he bent his knees and leaned into the horn, he conjured the spirit of the testifying saxophonists from Holiness churches. When he picked up an Andean flute, clad as he was in a poncho, he reminded me of the trio of similarly attired flutists I once heard playing in NYC's Times Square. Gonzalez kept up a steady commentary, backhanding the edges of his cymbals, responding to phrases the tonal instruments played, alternately steering and following the conversation.
Tonight, Horne and Thomson will be at the Grackle Art Gallery in Fort Worth, performing music from their recently released Clandestine Flower cassette.
