Things we like: Max Kutner

I've written before that Max Kutner is my pick for the current working guitarist most deserving of wider recognition. I first heard him with the Grandmothers of Invention on the tour when they played the One Size Fits All album. Due to some kind of beef between drummer Chris Garcia and Napoleon Murphy Brock, their Kessler Theatre set that I witnessed was lacking my favorite track from that album, "Inca Roads," but that was hardly Max's fault. Between that tour and the release of his albums I've reviewed with Android Trio, High Flavors Quintet, and Partial Custody (whom I'm looking forward to hearing in person when they visit Texas in August), Kutner toured with the 21st century reunion edition of Captain Beefheart's Magic Band (show information and links to YouTube vids here). He also released a number of recordings with different ensembles that we'll be considering today.

Predating Kutner's involvement with the Grandmothers, The Royal Us had a unique take on "weird folk": acoustic instruments, playing traditional-ish arrangements, run through a synthesizer and laptop. (Imagine if Brian Eno had joined Steeleye Span instead of Roxy Music out of art school and you'll have some idea what's going on here.) Frontwoman Heather Lockie is an appealing song stylist and violist, Steven Van Betten is second guitarist and vocalist, and Brian Saia provides the electronic treatments. I have a pre-release CD-R of their 2013 release And You..., which remains digitally available via Bandcamp. Their take on the Child ballad "House Carpenter" (aka "The Daemon Lover") is truly surreal. 

The band Bubbeleh -- which included members of an earlier Afrobeat ensemble, The Sogo Takeover -- combined Eastern European Jewish folk music with jazz (from New Orleans to '70s Miles!), progressive rock, surf music, and whatever else the principals (Kutner and keyboardist Philip "Simcha" Rankin) felt like adding to the mix. The results are in keeping with Don Byron's more-or-less straight takes on the Mickey Katz songbook, John Zorn's mashup (under the rubric Masada) of Ornette Coleman and klezmer, and Ohioans Golems of the Red Planet's reworking of the Masada catalog as surf-rock-cum-VU. Don't let the goof-Yiddish song titles ("Schmutzy Glasses," "Grepse," "Simcha Boytchik Hintele") fool you into thinking this is a joke band; these meshuggahs play their tuchuses off, clarinetist Andrew Conrad, trumpeter Greg Zilboorg, and drummer Colin Woodford especially. And some of Kutner's echo-drenched excursions take him into Marc Ribot-doing-Jarmusch-soundtrack territory. Bubbeleh's self-titled 2014 CD remains digitally Bandcamp-available.

Of greatest interest here, because it's the closest thing to a direct precursor to Kutner's current outfit Partial Custody, is Evil Genius, a trio that teams Kutner's guitar with Stefan Kac's tuba and Mike Lockwood's drums. The result sounds like an agreeable collision of the Magic Band, Arthur Blythe's "tuba band" with Bob Stewart, and John Abercrombie's Gateway Trio. On their 2015 debut, Bitter Human, we hear the sound of expert musicians with fierce chops and a fair amount of humor, having fun playing off each other and comfortable enough to do so with abandon. Kutner penned seven of the album's ten tunes; my favorites are "Juke Prompt," which has an Afrobeat feel (shads of Sogo Takeover!) with an extended "out" section in the middle, and "(Share In A) Regional Meat Vision," which wends its way through several tempo changes and episodes of intense shredding.

Material for the second Evil Genius album, 2018's Experiments on Human Subjects, was largely composed on the road during the band's first national tour, and the music has a harsher, more rock-directed sound. Kac contributed seven of the 11 pieces, Kutner three, and Lockwood one. They kick the door open with Kac's Crimsonoid "Skateboarders Versus Security Guards: Double Agents in a Proxy War Between the Forces of Good and Evil" and follow it with the mutant funk of Kutner's "Tour de Stadt" (with the composer on bass, including a fuzzy solo). Other standout tracks include "Arctic Circle," which features a spiky Kutner solo, replete with extended techniques and ringing harmonics, and "Colonel Karl Marx and Keenan McCardell," a tour de force for Kac, with Kutner and Lockwood rocking ferociously alongside him. Now back to my digital copy of Partial Custody, which you owe it to yourself to hear if any of the above sounds interesting to you.