Exploding Star Orchestra - 07/04/2007@Kunstcentrum BELGIE, Hasselt

Rob Mazurek - cnt (myspace)
Nicole Mitchell - fl, piccolo
Ken Vandermark - bs, bcl
Matt Bauder - ts, bcl
Jeb Bishop - tb (blog)
Corey Wilkes - tp, flh
Josh Berman - cnt
Jim Baker - p
Jason Adasiewicz - vib
Jason Ajemian - b
John Herndon - d
Mike Reed - d

My recent concert-going had been rather unadventurous, but this concert rectified the balance all by itself. The line-up was pretty amazing, which explains why its European tour included only two stops, I guess, this one and the Parisian Balieues Bleues festival.

The concert started before the audience was aware of it: Rob Mazurek's laptop had been generating soundscapes for over an hour when the crowd were allowed into the room. Then, a pre-recorded French text played, mentioning something about "the rendez-vous of electric eels" and ending with "a new life of galaxies," which triggered an appropriate Big Bang of loud collective improvisation. What about the eels, you wonder? Well, Mazurek explained to me later that the electronic tearing sounds and drones we had heard at times were field recordings of Amazonian electric eel discharges (Mazurek's Brazilian wife is a biologist).



If the abrupt replacement of the chaos with a powerul double-drum groove and funky 6/4 baritone saxophone riff was somewhat predictable, little else afterwards was. The music fit into the tradition of mid-size ensembles - Mingus's The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady and Don Cherry's Symphony For Improvisors are possible reference points (especially given Nicole Mitchell's use of piccolo) - that make creative use of the composition/improvisation dialectic in all of its possible permutations of instrumental combinations and uses, direction and non-direction, etc. Mazurek also drew upon Sun Ra, which explain the pan-stylistic voraciousness and titles such as "Cosmic Tones For Sleepwalking Lovers."

Whether it was Corey Wilkes riding a full-band groove, Ken Vandermark duetting with John Herndon or multiple soloists going at it at once, almost everything during the long, multi-movement "Stingray And The Beginning Of Time" was big, powerful and aggressive. Up until the last section, that is, when things slowed down to mid-tempo "swing," allowing for Jason Adasiewicz's spacey, spastic vibraphone to come through and Mitchell to develop a sweet line, which was particularly bizarre in this context, in a good way.



While the aforementioned groove seemed to recur regularly throughout the concert in various guises, the stylistic palette was very broad, but also carefully integrated. So, a furious, stop-and-go theme that opened up to collective improv could naturally be followed by a happy, Brotherhood of Breath-ish riff. Mazurek-directed bursts of improvisation easily gathered into clean Booker Little/Grachan Moncur-style avant-bop, allowing Matt Bauder to spin slippery lines and Josh Berman to burst into agitated expletives. Jim Baker provided perhaps the loveliest moment, with a solo piano piece entitled "Black Sun," during which his touch remained cristalline, whether he was playing vicious flurries or arpeggio-driven rhapsodising.

I bought the album, We Are All From Somewhere Else, along with Matt Bauder's Memorize The Sky and Jason Ajemian's large ensemble Who Cares How Long You Sink's Folk Forms Evaporate Big Sky (Chicago seems fixated on celestial themes right now) for an amazingly affordable 10 euros each. The Exploding Star Orchestra album seems okay, even if some of the power and lively messiness is missing. What I've heard of Memorize The Sky, however, is radically different: it's sound installation-y, one-slowly-developing-or-static-process-per-track. Ajemian's record kind of sounds like a collection of slow-moving orchestral preludes, very soothing, even when it gets raucous.

Fred Anderson Trio ft. Ernest Dawkins / Sticks & Stones - 09/04/2005, Hasselt

Sticks & Stones
Matana Roberts - as, cl
Josh Abrams - b
Chad Taylor - d

Fred Anderson Trio
Fred Anderson - ts
Harrison Bankhead - b
Chad Taylor - d
Ernest Dawkins - as, ts, stuff

The last time I had been to this Arts Centre in the east Belgium town of Hasselt, it had been to see the Peter Brötzmann Tentet. The Centre is a horrible concrete cube at the end of a covered driveway that gives the impression of walking into a mechanic's. The place's cubeness does nothing for its acoustics: music and noise reverberated and clashed noisily in my ears, a masochistic blend of pleasure and pain. This time, a trio and a quartet performed, so wild over-amplification was brought in to obtain the same effect. Still, as my main live contact with the Chicago scene had been through Ken Vandermark, I was happy to see another side of it.

Sticks & Stones opened, playing an attractive kind of modern jazz, one that mixed deconstruction with hard-blowing free jazz, some groove and occasionally reached back to something more old-fashioned. For example, the first piece opened with little noises, leading to a drum solo accompanied by Abrams on one of those latin double cowbells and Roberts adding another layer of rhythm with a pair of drumsticks used as a clave. Over a loose vamp, Roberts's clarinet wails were reminiscent of "Rhapsody in Blue" and old Spirituals. The next piece was a head-scratching arrangement of Monk's "Skippy." Roberts switched to alto (which she would keep the rest of the night) and regularly built up to furious late Coltrane/Ayler screams, only to pause to inject some rough-voiced melody, or muse in a more Greg Osby/Steve Coleman-playing-standards vein. It was at this point that I noticed the huge white flower perched over her right ear. Combined with her huge, flowing green-gold gown, she looked like a strange mix of Billie Holiday and Lester Young. After the show, she kept the flower, but changed into a black jacket with a portrait of Angela Davis on the back and a red fluffy skirt.

After a more restive (though occasionally agitated) take on Billy Strayhorn's ballad "Ishafan," Abrams and Taylor launched into a stormy accompaniment that Roberts rode with a langourous long-note melody. Abrams played a driving and involving solo before a tumultous drum solo led to an Elvin and Coltrane-type moment, with Roberts playing strident long notes and starchy trills, before ending the set gently.

At 76, Fred Anderson is so hunched that his tenor almost touches the ground, and yet his playing continues to retain the toughness and fleetness of a Johnny Griffin. This set was all about celebration: the 40th anniversary of the AACM, the joyousness and uplifting spirit of the unruly intertwining of two lines supported by a parade two-beat, Dawkins choosing a whistle or horn amongst his tableful of miscellaneous noise-making implements.

Between three long pieces, a short one celebrated the anniversary with Dawkins singing "A-A-C-M / 40 years!" and devolving into funny noises as the rest of the band powered on. Bankhead liked to dedicate his solos. The first, whose middle-eastern nature was reinforced by the bassist's muezzin-like vocalising, was dedicated to the Pope, while the second, a swinging, walking, slapping, sometimes running or hopping romp, was given over to "the spirit of Chicago, the big tenor sound." As Anderson played ferociously, Dawkins became a one man horn section, blowing both horns in a riffing exhortation. As an encore, a six note invocation was repeated over and over, before Dawkins took a solo full of bluesy smears.

Pain, glory, mishaps and tarmac

Friday and saturday, I paid two (relatively) long-distance visits to the eastern part of the country.

Friday I went to the Liège Jazz Festival, of which I had happily attended both days last year. This year was a near-total disappointment: never have I seen so much poor music in one day. It's a good thing I got in for free. It started with the Christophe Astolfi Swingtet, a gypsy jazz band, but with drums in place of a third guitar. Later on, I snatched a glimpse of Birelli Lagrène's Gypsy Project and, pleasant as it was, I wondered why the descendants of Django seemed so trapped within their heritage. Lagrène is an exception, as he used to play with Miles Davis and jazz-rockers, but otherwise, it seems a very culturally- and stylistically- closed scene.

After Astolfi, I checked out French singer Anne Ducros. A fine alto voice and likeable stage demeanour, but a heavily overwrought singing style and completely incomprehensible diction on faster tunes. The last one I heard suffered from the same problem, even though it was a slow blues-rock, as Ducros combined superfluous embellishments and pointlessly speedy phrasing. When guitarist Olivier Louvel took a ponderous, rhythm-less solo and the keyboardist started adding some harsh 80s synth sounds, I decided it was time to leave (there were 6 different stages and concerts often overlapped).

Next stop: Olivier Colette, a Belgian pianist whose two albums I don't like, so I knew what to expect going in. The quality of his music depends entirely on his compositions rather than the improvisors. Unfortunately, Colette's writing is too often syrupy. There was a good tango-based piece, though.

I was looking forward to Sarah Morrow and the American All-Stars in Paris, especially as drummer John Betsch (a regular accompanist to Steve Lacy and Mal Waldron) was taking part. Unfortunately, Betsch was replaced by one of the dullest drummers I have ever seen. Morrow is a good trombonist, but the rhythm section seemed to wilfully ignore the progression of her solos, remaining tepid even as she was trying to build up some hardbopping steam. Only for organist Rhoda Scott's solos did the bass and drums heat up a bit. Alngside Morrow was the 85-year old saxophonist Hal Singer. With all due respect to his past accomplishments, he's way, way past his prime...

French pianist Jean-Michel Pilc had left behind his usual trio and teamed up with two interlopers that he visibly had to drag along behind him (musically speaking). It was my first time seeing Pilc and I was surprised, if not wholly satisfied. He was much less athletic and virtuosic than I expected as he chopped Ellington's "Satin Doll" to bits, mashed standards together, played Coltrane's "Mr. PC" as a bolero (and couldn't resist quoting Ravel's "Bolero"), whistled and, at one point, got up and tapped some percussion on the side of Thomas Brameries's bass, as the latter was taking a solo.

The only really fun moment came with the unknown Domguè, an electro-jazz saxophone and machines duo. As the machine-man triggered house, rave and jungle beats, the saxophone-man played spiky funk and soul-jazz riffs, "sang" nonsensical slogans with added electronic effects and danced around. It was often very kitsch, but it was great. One girl got up and danced, an act of true bravery in the midst of those disciplining rows of chairs.

An unlikely match was that of alto saxophonist Fabrizio Cassol, pianist Fred Van Hove and drummer Pierre Favre. The latter two are european improvised music veterans, while Cassol is best known for leading the flagship AKA Moon trio. Indeed, Cassol and Van Hove seemed to often play parallel to each other, as Cassol remained firmly entrenched in tonality, clear lines and vibrato, while Van Hove limp-wristed his way around the keyboard. Favre formed a bridge between the two, metronomically pounding around his kit. At times, though, a weird unity emerged and an indescribable, twinkling music appeared.

My night ended with Belgian saxophonist Steve Houben's quartet + Lee Konitz as guest, in a tribute to Jacques Pelzer. Houben played first, a flub-ridden "Windows" (Chick Corea) on flute and a nice "Minority" (Gigi Gryce (why don't people play more Gryce tunes?)) on alto. Houben left and Konitz came out. It took him a long time to warm up (indeed, he still wasn't fully at ease when I left), but every phrase that came out unmarred by some mishap or other was truly beautiful. When Houben came back out, the two altoists attempted to play a unisson theme on a standard, which led to the biggest crash I've ever witnessed. I was laughing and I'm surprised more people weren't. The two have such different conceptions of rhythm and intonation (and probably little, if any, time to rehearse) that the attempt was rather pitiful. Despite a clever Houben-to-Konitz segue leading to a relatively slow "Cherokee," I decided 1 AM was more than late enough to leave, as I had some (hopefully) much better music to hear and another long drive to face the next evening.

So saturday, I headed to Beringen to see the Peter Brötzmann Chicago Tentet. I arrive at the PCM Casino and think "Wow, this is a really nice place! Look at all those people streaming in! Mothers, families! Wait a minute, something's not quite right here." Indeed, I found a flyer and discovered that the concert was taking place in Hasselt. Thankfully, Hasselt wasn't too far away and in any case, they started over an hour after the stated time. When I arrived at a venue situated at the back of a grubby garage, I knew I was the right place.

Despite being called the Chicago Tentet, a fair number of the musicians weren't even American: Toshinori Kondo (Japan), Roland Ramanan (UK, I think), Paal Nilssen-Love (Norway) and Herr Brötzmann himself, of course.

I'd never heard any of the Tentet's music before and was suitably blown away. I won't describe it too much as I intend to write a full article soon, but the sheer power of Zerang's and Nilssen-Love's (who's becoming something of the European Hamid Drake, don't you think?) drumming when both really let loose was awe-inspiring. Easily better than everything I'd seen at Liège the day before and, I'm quite sure, anything taking place on the second day of the festival.