Hearts & Minds @ Uncanned Music Over/Out Series, Bar DeVille: 11/19/2013

Apparently the band name Hearts & Minds is not necessarily a reference to the Oscar winning Vietnam War documentary. And I forgot to ask the group members (bass clarinetist Jason Stein, keyboardist Paul Giallorenzo, and drummer Frank Rosaly) what their name might be referencing. A safe, if somewhat reductionist, guess might be that it refers loosely to the combination of freely improvised periods (“heart?”) vs. the written/composed sections (“mind?”) that make up the group’s repertoire. Considering their general intensity and occasional ferocity, the group could almost as appropriately be named Blood & Guts. Almost…

Giallorenzo and Stein wrote all the tunes played last Tuesday (11/19). As challenging and inaccessible as the band’s improvisations can get, the written material tends toward the groovy. Quirky (catchy even) melodies that approach time and space in a playful way are written into relatively compact forms. The more challenging, ornate stuff comes through the band’s improvisations. Although it often might seem like the groove is thrown out with the bathwater, it’s often still there amidst the chaos; obliquely implied, deeply camouflaged – an undetected gravitational pull keeping the planet just within orbit. As a comparison, my best shot would be Medeski, Martin, & Wood meets The Clusone Trio meets John Zorn's Masada. And just like the three aforementioned groups, Hearts & Minds never comes close to strictly derivative.

Bass clarinet, relatively unusual to see at gigs, is one of my favorite sounds. So I was near ecstatic to hear Stein play it all night. That deep and rich reedy buzz is one of the most distinctive in all instrumentdom. Yeah, that’s right: instrumentdom. But from what I heard on this night, Stein is a very textural, searching player concerned more with non-traditional techniques and energy than the expected traditional sounds from the clarinet. Benny Goodman he is not - and thankfully so. Stein’s long split tones can evoke Tuvan throat singers guttural trance states. There were also occasional clarinet versions of what approached Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” where flurries of notes, honks and overtones mixed together flying off the instrument into the cool backroom air. In a trio who’s instrumentation might lead one to assume that the clarinetist would be ever the melodist, Stein broke with convention. He just said no. He is the Nancy Reagan of clarinetists. What?

While the “weight,” or roll, of all three musicians was equal to the music, keyboardist Giallorenzo seemed to play a somewhat more supportive character on Tuesday; but in the way a bassist’s role is felt as supportive in most traditional jazz contexts, when it is often, in fact, more important than it is perceived to be by the listener/audience. Also adding to this “supportive” nature was the subtle tonal palette of his instruments. Warm, deep toned left hand bass lines from Giallorenzo’s Moog formed the initial drive and pulse for much of the music. And his other keyboard (Wurlitzer/Rhodes type sounds from…?) produced mainly smooth, warm tones as well; never anything too bright and often functioning more as a colorist. Nevertheless, his function in the collective improvisations was deceptively strong and his more subtle tone in this context played an effective balance to the other two more brightly attacked contributions.

Hearts and Minds’s drummer is the wild card – the “unstable molecule” (yes, Chicago music scene pun/reference intended): Yet a paradoxically controlled, selective and intended instability; that swinging, driving clatter coming from all directions, often with no discernable starting point; this undefined, non-localized, deconstructionist/reconstructionist force moving ever forward searching for more, more. What is this force called? Yeah, it’s Rosaly. At times, there’s so much happening in his drumming that you sense an oncoming system overload; yet it never arrives. Some fitting, idiosyncratic musical balance is always achieved. It just works itself out. Like in some of Cecil Taylor’s solo piano work when it’s hard to believe all that music is coming from one person. But it is. 

Rosaly is occasionally like a dancer following after the cues from his body. His drums happen to be there and function as extensions of his limbs and movements. Part of what creates this dance is his searching through his trove of instruments, in media res, for the right sound at the right moment. Occasionally he used two sticks in one hand; a technique I had never seen used on a drum kit before - only on vibes or marimba. It reminded me of when I was a line cook and a chef taught me to use two knives in one hand for prep. I could chop twice as much. It was a very smart, simple solution: Two knives, more food. Two sticks, more sound. Rosaly is simply smart. He just gets more done that way. But it’s a unique technique that undoubtedly took a good deal of practice before being able to incorporate into performance. Cool stuff… 

As creative, reactive, and free as Rosaly’s playing can get, he can also lay down a groove that lifts the room and simply makes the space feel good. But more than half of the evening’s music was quite “outside.” His approach in these more unpredictable contexts often seems to create an abstracted shadow of a concrete object. Or he can seem to be using a sort of Completion Principal or “Beat” style “cut-up” poetry technique: like writing sentences/paragraphs, then taking out randm words or ltters. Lke   ths mayb  o     lie his. Bt ith     msic   and with ore  textcon than this   ampleex is gving.

It’s not unusual for groups who play free to move back and forth between pulse/groove and rubato/free. The trick is making those moves feel organic or somehow “right.” Hearts and Mind’s transitions from one to the other is crazy seamless and borders on telepathic. Some of their more extended, free-ish sections were like intentional studies in awkward. When these collectively awkward sections gradually worked their way back to a groove, it was like watching, in slow motion reverse, a car speeding down the highway getting into an accident where it flips and rolls and rolls and flips for a long stretch. Like a slow motion falling up. Together, when they’re really getting to it, Hearts and Minds are conjurers. It’s semi-scripted magic.

Excerpts:

Charles Rumback, Nick Mazzarella, Tomeka Reid, & Jeff Swanson: Uncanned Music Over/Out Series @ Bar DeVille, Nov, 12th, 2013

Nov. 12^th, 2013: The first real cold snap of the fall/winter season in town… and Bar Deville’s heat goes out. The great 2013 Bar DeVille chillout! The musicians – Charles Rumback, Nick Mazzarella, Tomeka Reid, and Jeff Swanson - weathered the conditions with hats, candles, and other assorted extended, extra-musical warming techniques. As in the previous week, before the live music an appropriate vibe was set for the space from the DJ booth on stage. This Tuesday it was Joe Darling, one of the organizers of the series, spinning the swinging, spiritual big band sounds of Detroit Jazz Composers LTD and other relatively under the radar jazz vinyl.

The band’s first piece set the general tone and trajectory: a warm, slow-ish rubato, floating guitar/sax unison melody lines over sparse and abstract modern harmonies, cymbal washes and mallet rolls, and a contemplatively searching 5-6 minutes of composed material before the 1^st solo of the night. I was immediately reminded of some of my very favorite music: Paul Motian Trio/Electric Bebop Band, Chris Cheek, Bill McHenry. It was like being transported to the Village Vanguard for the evening. Most of the music in the first set was written by drummer (and bandleader for the evening) Rumback. His melodies and forms combine more modern techniques with the occasional folksy, almost hymn-like simplicity. And his playing combines staccato attacks with relaxed round flourishes. He’s one of those drummers who creates warm, yet quite ornate and reactive backdrops for soloists to play over in which virtually anything played against them sounds “right.”

Altoist Mazzarella, the only member of the quartet to brave the cool, unheated indoor evening without a hat for warmth, was perhaps the chief interpreter of the tunes’ melodies and forms. Quicksilver in his phrasing and overall approach, his command of the instrument and the language apparently has no weak spots. In the 2^nd tune of the 2^nd set, he really began pushing/straining against the harmony and structure of the tune. Mazzarella’s stretching in and out of the piece’s harmony and form somehow illuminated the tune; as if outlining it with some musical version of creating a photographic negative. Or as placing a deep red next to a deep blue somehow makes both colors pop more through the contrast.

Guitarist Jeff Swanson and cellist Tomeka Reid created a modern, mini string section. Occasionally locking in together to play unison lines, they formed a muscular bond. Reid mainly projected a warm, punchy sound from the cello, occasionally bowing and creating firm ground for the tunes. In one part of a particularly creative and fiery solo, she seemed to throw off a barrage of bowed artificial harmonics combining in the air simultaneously conjuring a sort of small, string/bow-induced electrical storm cutting through and hovering over the tune. Exciting stuff. Swanson stood out on his own composition, not least due to the writing itself. His sense of harmony (consonant and dissonant) and pensively mindful right hand picking technique on the same tune was another highlight of the set.

At times, the group would ride the cusp between playing the form and playing free. But there was always some anchor disallowing such a disengagement: time/pulse, harmony, etc…  You could feel the strain but there was never a complete break away. And as Bob Avakian or Sunsara Taylor might say, “You cannot break all the chains, except one.” But playing totally free was not the intent here, nor should it have been. The chains in this group’s music do not shackle, but form an unbroken circle.

Here are some excerpts from the night's music:

Brian Labycz & Colin Peters @ Myopic Books Experimental Music Series: Nov. 11th, 2013

A few days ago I showed a co-worker some of my footage from a previous Myopic Books Experimental Music Series performance. His reaction, which undoubtedly would’ve been the same for this week’s Labycz/Peters performance, is exactly how I imagine the uninitiated majority’s initial response to this sort of performance: “What’s going on? Have they started yet? Wait… I don’t understand. Is this music?”

Plumbing the depths of improvised music’s subconscious this week were organizer Brian Labycz on his modular synthesizer and Colin Peters on assorted electronics and Casio. Peters’s small sized Casio keyboard, beautifully childlike old school sounds and all, was used to create some very simple intervals and harmonies that looped and looped. These were used as backdrop landscapes for his countless effected and distorted sounds/noises (pedals, mics, & drum machine in tow…) and Labycz’s occasional busy outbursts, but mainly cool modular synthesizer contemplations through most of their continuous hour-long set. It made for an effective dualism of man and machine; sometimes coming off as more man vs. machine - at times feeling like an extended struggle. While listening, I recalled Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, imagining that this music was a lost section of the film’s original score used for the scene where supercomputer Hal 9000 is dismantled by Dave: “Just what do you think you’re doing, Dave? Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” All the sputtering, whirring clatter of the ramping ups and winding downs of Hal’s “mind” coming to an end. The piece reached a sort of apotheosis of horrors and meditations about three quarters through the hour; then trailed off somewhat by rote.

While sonically the most unconventional Monday night I’ve attended so far, to my ear there was still a detectable conversation occurring. Though, truth be told, sometimes it’s hard to know whether the logic of the conversation is internal to the performance or an intellectual construct from without. In any case, this show wouldn’t disappoint anyone in search of aural adventure and weirdness, or some kind of post-art, meta-performance anti-art.

That being said, this type of sound/noise construction is, of course, not at all unprecedented. Even in the Pop music world, relatively extreme experimentation with what are mainly considered to be “non-musical” sounds/forms have been dealt with on occasion: consider Pink Floyd’s “Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together in a Cave and Grooving with a Pict” or The Beatles’ (John Lennon’s?) “Revolution 9” for instance. However, if we’re to believe much of the written and aural history, Floyd and Lennon were on some pretty heavy acid. The trip at Myopic was different. Sure, it was a “long strange trip.” But from what I could glean, Labycz and Peters simply seem to love all manner of sounds and a strong cup of coffee.

   

Justin Walter @ Bar DeVille; Uncanned Music Series

Justin Walter at Bar DeVille last Tuesday, November 5^th, 2013: Awesome! Two thumbs up! 4 ½ stars! Fresh Tomato! And I will share more deep thoughts on his music/performance shortly. But first things first: I don’t get out much. Not for the last… ohhhhh… 15 years or so. For a few years after college I still had what people would call “a life.” Since then, I seem to have settled into what I’ll generously refer to as my nerdy/stay-at-home period. IE: I don’t get around much anymore; pretty much never. This, of course, includes bars. So when I walked into Bar DeVille this past Tuesday to continue my new search for good music to experience in Chicago, I feared that I would feel awkward. Out of place. Old and in the way… So I walked in through the front door of the joint and what happens? The dude sitting at the end of the bar nearest the entrance looks me over and says, “ID please.” Cue the sun.

Ok… I’m not saying the guy actually thought I was under age. It’s 27 years past my bedtime for cryin’ out loud and I’m sure he knew the score. But he played it straight when he easily could’ve let me walk by knowing that I was safely “of age.” This simple act of being carded put me immediately at ease, had me laughing out loud, and made me feel like I was in the right place at the right time doing the right thing. And for that, Bar DeVille is currently my favorite bar of all-time. But maybe I should just get out more.    

More importantly, seeing and hearing Justin Walter’s performance was like watching worlds collide; a thoughtful and combustible synergy of old school and new school; analog boy in a digital world; Graham Bell meets the iPhone. Walter is a kind of composite DJ/trumpeter where there’s a seemingly organic mix between 1) being an actual instrumentalist in the traditional sense: playing an instrument yourself and generating melodies and sounds live through that instrument; and 2) using computers/machines to trigger and mix pre-recorded sounds, tunes, beats, loops, etc… (which is, of course, now an art unto itself…). There’s a balance in his music where these two elements have become equal partners; a marriage of Machine and Man.

Walter’s main axe is the Electronic Valve Instrument. It’s a handheld synthesizer developed in the 1970s that has three valve triggers like a trumpet and some sort of round pitch controller at its “bell.” If it’s to be compared to the sound of a brass instrument, it was closer to the richer, more suffusive sound of the French horn. In Walter’s hands, it mostly emitted warm, round tones bringing to my mind some of the purer tones from, say, the classic Moog synthesizer or some Weather Report period Joe Zawinul. Treated occasionally with a light distortion or gain, it also had a slight crunchy edge when the vibe was needed.

Set up as a backdrop to play improvisations against, Walter’s 1^st loop of the evening was an extended, repeating I-IV landscape. A meditative, monastic never-ending plagal cadence, this space was set up for Walter to explore and ruminate over. Like virtually all the pieces, it was simple and in the pocket harmonically, but conceptually rich and soulfully performed. Awash in deep electronic bass tones and synthy, punchy electronic sounds, Walter’s deliberate, creative and mindful delivery made for some of the most inviting music in this writer’s recent memory. That room on that night was the place to be. Often (always?) rather cinematic or theatrical, Walter consistently conjured moody, languorous landscapes in the listener’s mind, all tending toward a subdued and darker low-range end of the spectrum: music to accompany an underwater, nighttime planetarium show.

From electro afro-pop grooves, to static ambient soundscapes, there’s no shortage of hybrid terms one could come up with to describe Walter’s music: Ambient EDM; Minimalist chill out improv; Creative New Age. Aphex Twin as an improvising, instrumentalist loop artist. Occasionally, there were so many sounds/loops happening that it was difficult to decipher what Walter was doing in real time, and the music would subtly blur into some type of gorgeous, post-ambient, improvised noisescape.  

Performing on a slightly risen floor from behind a table where most of his electronics and assorted devices (multiple stompbox-like devices, tablet/iPad looking thingies, multiple flashing lights and screens w/ cryptic programs, etc…) were shielded from view, Walter, often wearing headphones to mix himself in media res, appeared as some sort of half-exposed, musician Wizard of Oz. It reminded me of how the great Steve Morse once described why people enjoy watching guitar players. He explained that people innately want to know how things work; how things are done. When people watch a guitarist, they can see the fingers pressing down on the strings. They can physically see when a string is bent or when a finger creates vibrato and it’s easy to associate what you’re seeing with the sound you’re hearing. It just makes sense. And I agree with Morse. But Walter is fascinating to watch for just the opposite reason. At Bar DeVille, he was like The Wizard partially behind the scrim. Half the time you had no idea how he was making everything work. And if you’re willing to let go, the mystery of his production only adds to the beauty.

Some excerpts from the performance: 

"Dream Weaving" from Walter's Lullabies & Nightmares, out on kranky.