Before we disappear into this holiday weekend, some unfinished business:
Multiple review of new collaborative CDs from Nels Cline and friends: Acoustic Guitar Trio's Vignes and Red Feast from Cline with Stephen Gauci, Ken Filiano and Mike Pride. Also, a multiple review of several of Myra Melford's recent efforts: Under The Water with Satoko Fujii, Continuation with the Alex Cline Ensemble and Andrew Drury's My Fingers Will Be Your Tears.
Both Nels and Alex made the Avant Music News list of "the albums released so far in 2009 that have garnered the most listens":
Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society – Infernal Machines
Henry Cow – Vol. 1: Beginnings
Nels Cline – Coward
Univers Zero – Relaps: Archives 1984-1986
Quartet Offensive – Carnivore
John Zorn – Filmworks XXII: The Last Supper
John Hébert – Byzantine Monkey
Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey – Winterwood
Land Of Kush – Against the Day
Maurizo Bianchi – A M.B. Lehn Tale
Michaël Attias – Credo
James Blackshaw – The Glass Bead Game
Mary Halvorson and Jessica Pavone – Thin Air
Gerald Cleaver, William Parker, Craig Taborn – Farmers by Nature
Kayo Dot – Blue Lambency Downward
Alex Cline – Continuation
Of interest to all L.A. free jazz geeks, Nessa Records' 2-CD reissue of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, a meeting of minds between L.A. free jazz pioneer Bobby Bradford and a group of British musicians led by the drummer John Stevens. Recorded over a long holiday weekend on July 9, 1971, SME represents a breakthough period of sorts for Bradford's composing and bandleading. "I was still nibbling away at writing some chordal stuff, bop-like stuff, some free pieces, but I didn’t have a handle on the free style yet at first," Bradford told an oral historian in 2000. "I don’t think it hit me until 1971, when I really started to go crazy writing...when I went to in England for the first time. I don’t know what hit me…I was writing stuff on the plane going there….I stayed for awhile and did some recordings with some British musicians…Everything we did was out of new music I’d just written and all of it was free-form. The Spontaneous Music Ensemble was John Stevens' band, but when we played together we played my music.” Bradford also recorded two consecutive live sets from Chat Qui Pêche in Paris with the same band that was reissued in 2003 under the title Love's Dream.
Sunday, June 12, 2009, 2:30-6:30pm. Crypto extended family member Bennie Maupin will be conducting his 24-piece Ikeda Kings Orchestra for "Jazz Explosion III," a fundraiser sfor the California Jazz Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports California jazz musicians in need. The emcees will be K-JAZZ DJ (and host of the Angel City Jazz Festival LeRoy Downs and our pal "Dr." Jeffrey Winston. Joining them will be Ernie Andrews, Llew Matthews, Richard Simon, Roy McCurdy, Bill Cunliffe, Janis Mann, Gerry Gibbs and many more to be announced. At All Saints Episcopal Church, 132 N. Euclid Ave., Pasadena, CA.
July 19, 2009, 8pm. The next week in Eagle Rock, Open Gate Theatre will present a screening of Buster Keaton's classic The General with live-music accompaniment by percussionists Brad Dutz, Joe Berardi and David Shafer, woodwind player Jasper Dutz, oboist Camille Liu and voila player Alec Santamaria. Staycation admission price: $5! A plethora of free parking! At Eagle Rock Center for the Arts, 2225 Colorado Blvd., Eagle Rock, CA (one block east of Eagle Rock Blvd.).
Saturday, July 25, 2009, 7pm. The Society for the Activation of Social Space through Art and Sound (SASSAS) will kick off the 10th anniversary of its sound. concert series with a first time pairing of like-minded West Coast sound explorers: Seattle-based sound manipulators Climax Golden Twins (CGT) and Los Angeles-based experimentalist Steve Roden. For further information visit www.soundnet.org or phone (323) 960-5723.
Nice looooong interview with Tim Berne from The Bad Plus' website. Berne has been a frequent collaborator with The Cline Boys, and will be playing at The Stone at the end of this month with Nels and drummer Jim Black in a trio dubbed "The BBC."
July 30-August 1, 8pm. The next night across the continent, Alex Cline will join visual artist Carol Kim, trumpeter Dan Clucas and Butoh master Oguri for "a hallucinatory mix of live-feed video and layered projections form an immersive installation that refracts the live performances." On the same bill will be the mysterious "all-girl feminist cock rock" ensemble Jennifer The Leopard, who will "stage a multimedia event featuring songs about celebrity sightings and knife fights while it pits an on-stage 'audience' against the real one in a show that is part bitchin' rock concert and part post-studio pep rally." Both are part of the aptly named New Original Works Festival at REDCAT.
Allright, that's it. We're outta here!
