Friday, June 10th, 2005 ... 3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. ... KZSU, 90.1 FM

Just got back from Chicago. Didn't have much time for fun, but I did get to squeeze in a trip to the Velvet Lounge, the South Side hole-in-the-wall jazz club run by saxophonist Fred Anderson. Wonderful place -- not plush, certainly, but they bring in some fantastic local musicians.

The Velvet Lounge is trying to raise funds to move the club, as their building is slated for demolition (and most of the surrounding block has been torn down already). Check out the Web site (link above) for details.

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)

Fred Anderson Quartet -- "Look Out!" -- Volume Two (Asian Improv, 2000)

Really nice 2-CD set that teams up Fred with Jeff Parker (guitar), Tatsu Aoki (bass), and Chad Taylor (drums). Great improvising in an energetic jazz vein, including some more relaxed tracks featuring Parker.

Tribute to Albert Ayler, putting the saxophonist's songs into a trumpet-led voice. Ben, a fellow KZSU DJ, notes that this gives the listener a closer and cleaner look at the composing, making for a great Ayler introduction to those who might be turned off by sax overblowing.

Of course the band adds plenty of "out there" touches -- I mean, look who they are: Ribot (guitar), Henry Grimes (bass), Chad Taylor (drums (again!)), and Roy Campbell (trumpet). The folks at Pi are recording some fantastic modern jazz and really deserve a bigger audience.

Decided to get cute and follow this up with ...

The real thing, released recently by the reborn ESP-Disk label.

A relatively slow/relaxed track on this great modern-bop album. But any calm mood gets blown away by a Tim Berne sax solo that builds to wonderful ferocity. I've been saying it a lot lately: This is a fantastic disk.

Cool local band that writes jazzy, artsy tunes led by guitar and male vocals.

* Kris Tiner/Mike Bagetta -- "A Delicate Touch" -- There, Just As You Look for It (pfMentum, 2005)

Improvised duets of trumpet and prepared acoustic guitar. This one starts with a nice rolling percussion sound (drumsticks being tapped on the guitar strings, maybe?) and a clarion-call trumpet.

* Kneebody -- "The Comedian/Wide Eyed" -- Kneebody (Greenleaf, 2005)

* Anthony Braxton/Matt Bauder -- "Composition No. 324b" -- 2 + 2 Compositions (482 Music, 2005)

Nicely sparse but active. These are quartet recordings: Bauder and Braxton on sax/clarinets, with bass and drums. Very different from Braxton's "Ghost Trance" music, which has the feel of a march. These tracks are explorations with more "white space."

Nice instrumentals, calm, with guitar, cello, drums. Discovered this one at a listening station at the late lamented DCCD in Washington, maybe early in 2001. Great compositions based on slow figures, sometimes with odd time signatures.

Solo piano (or, on a few tracks, synthesizer). Baker has backed up plenty of great Chicago combos, including a few Ken Vandermark one-offs such as Caffeine and Steam. Here he gets to ramble on his own, dishing out knotty and rapid cascades that spin a warm, welcoming feel. Like avant-jazz fireside music. Very good, although the centerpiece is a 20-minute track that doesn't seem to stand out enough to be worth 20 minutes. Maybe I'll have to play it on-air someday while giving it a good listen.

Big fun, a rollicking swingy track led by a catchy bass-sax riff. Guilbeault is a Canadian bassist who's put out a couple of Mingus homage CDs, this being the latest. Nicely faithful readings of Mingus tunes -- and some originals in the same vein -- with a good powerful punch.

* SavoirFaire -- "Room for More" -- Running out of Time (Delmark, 2005)

Nice mainstream session led by Samuel "SavoirFaire" Williams, a jazz violinist out of Chicago. Plenty of fleet violin solos on here. And he's apparently played the Velvet Lounge, because his picture is one of several on the wall, amid past fliers, reviews, and posters.

* Sun Ra -- "Heliocentric Worlds" -- Heliocentric Worlds Vol. 3 (ESP-Disk, 2005; recorded 1965)

Another in a series of Sun Ra outtakes. This disk includes a 20-minute jam session that's quite a treat; this track is a lower-key jazz stroll. Sun Ra's piano has a nice trad-jazz swing to it. He is well known for the mystical/Saturn stuff but if you haven't heard his solo piano albums ... well, you should.

If you know your surrealism, the title will tell you these were improvisations created by layering each musician's input atop the others, with each one hearing only one slice of what was being recorded. This track sounds particularly fun -- each player played against a backwards-recorded track. In the mixdown, they flipped a coin to see which direction they would run the final piece, and "backwards" seems to have won out.

This isn't a release by a band, per se -- it's a gathering of musicians who know one another and who got a grant to record at New York's P.S. 122 studio. Kinda cool. Released by a label in Santa Fe.

From Zorn's modern-classical side, a dramatic performance for voice (Heather Gardner, here) and 10 instruments. The CD notes also include staging suggestions (candles, esoteric text images, a live owl that "might somehow play a part" -- the usual).

Part of a larger piece, "Maintaining the Web under Less Than Obvious Circumstances," which ws recorded, then cut into pieces and arranged arbitrarily for the CD. That "Exquisite Corpses" bit, above, kind of reminded me of this project. Plus, this allowed me to put in a plug for this weekend's performances of "The Mirror World," a (unrelated) large-scale piece by Larry Ochs of ROVA, inspired by filmmaker Stan Brakhage.

By the way, if these kinds of improv games capture your imagination, there's a really fun CD called Le Magasin De Tissu by Jean Derome, on the Ambiances Magnetiques record label. Derome recorded lots of 90-second improvs, put them on three CDs along with some silent tracks, and played the three simultaneously in Shuffle mode! The result is an unpredictable set of solos, duets, and trios depending on where the silences arrive.

* = Item in KZSU rotation
! = Pop anomaly
? = Item not in KZSU library

-- Go back to Memory Select playlists.
-- Bay Area free/improv music calendar: http://www.bayimproviser.com.