14th April 2010
Humcrush + Leverton Fox
@ Hare and Hounds
£8 adv
http://www.theticketsellers.co.uk

The combined curatorial powers of Capsule and Birmingham Jazz bring you this exciting show – featuring members of Food and Supersilent, Humcrush are a dizzying force combining jazz, electronica and free sounds.

This was an amazing gig bringing together the energy and anarchy of the punk rock band The Ex with the drive of Brass Unbound, a brass section with Ken Vandermark and Mats Gustafsson on baritone and tenor sax, Roy Paci on trumpet and Wolter Wierbos on trombone.  The sheer volume of sound and the swirling rhythms created a stunning degree of excitement.  Basically it was led by The Ex with weird but wonderful vocals and an excellent drummer.  I am often critical of the limitations of rock drummers, but this one (sadly I didn’t get her name) really drove the band in a very interesting way totally different from what jazz drummers do.  Brass Unbound essentially added riffs that blended very effectively and excitingly with the The Ex rhythms.

I have one fairly major reservation.  As the gig progressed, I began to want Brass Unbound to vary their role more and to have rather more freedom.  There were some solos: a particular good one from Ken, one of Mats’ almost trademark screaming solos, and punchy contributions from Paci and Wierbos, but more would have been nice.

This was, however, another good example of rock and jazz mixing naturally and successfully.  It wasn’t jazz rock as that term has become associated with a certain style that emerged in the 1960s and 70s.  Here it was a rock gig incorporating strong elements of free jazz , but in a very structured way.  And it certainly wasn’t jazz drawing on rock.  We will have to start thinking of new names to capture this important and exciting music.

Review by Tony Dudley Evans of Birmingham Jazz
Photos by Jenny Moore

The Variety of Free Jazz and Improvised Music Today

I spent a lot of the Christmas period listening to Keith Jarrett, the solo albums, the trio especially the Inside Out album recorded live in London and Jarrett’s American Quartet with Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian Listening to these various recordings made me realise what a range of music now contains free improvisation and what a broad term ‘free jazz’ now is. Jarrett says on the album sleeve, free playing is ‘an amazingly important part of true jazz history’. He goes on to say:

We need to be even more in tune with each other to play this way, without material; and even more attentive. Every possibility is available if you take away the tunes, but only some are valid under the circumstances. It is only our sensitivity to the flux that determines whether the music succeeds or fails.
(Inside Out Album Sleeve ECM Records).

The term free jazz began to be used in relation to Ornette Coleman’s groups of the late 1950s, and the totally improvised album called Free Jazz for two pianoless quartets may well have established this term.
It is in Europe that the free jazz has developed its greatest freedom and improvisers such as Evan Parker, Peter Brotzmann, Alex Schlippenbach, Albert Mangelsdorff and many others have established playing styles that have moved away totally from the conventions of American jazz. It was instructive to listen to two albums (also over the Christmas period!) produced as a result of Birmingham Jazz initiatives. Opus de Life with the Profound Sound Trio (Paul Dunmall, Henry Grimes and Andrew Cyrille) strikes me as free jazz that comes naturally from the jazz tradition. There are no tunes and everything is totally improvised, but the styles of playing of all three players seem to me to derive from a jazz approach.

Of course free jazz is not always energy music and both CDs referred to above contain passages of great gentleness and beauty and this is a constant feature of the best of free jazz. But this energy of free jazz does have an affinity with certain kinds of rock music. In recent years there have been a lot of collaborations between free jazz players and less mainstream rock or punk artists. Evan Parker has, for example, played with Jah Wobble and a number of ‘noise’ players; Paul Dunmall has played with Chris Corsano, Bjork’s drummer who also played a totally improvised duo set with Mick Flower on keys at The Supersonic Festival in 2009 and members of The Guillemots run their own free jazz group The Gannets. One of my favourite albums of 2009 was Sunn O>>>’s Dimensions and Extensions which put together Sunn O>>>’s drone metal guitar work with jazzers Julian Priester and Cuong Vu. Then a number of jazz groups such as The Thing, Peter Wareham’s Acoustic Ladyland and, even more, Pete’s The Final Terror and Led Bib are deliberately incorporating a strong rock and ‘in-your-face’ punk element into their approach.

It’s all a sign of how interesting the alternative music scene is at the moment and how barriers and boundaries are being broken down. One very interesting concrete piece of evidence of all this is the fact that a group called brass unbound is touring in late January and early February with the punk band The Ex and it seems that they will be playing together. Brass unbound consists of Mats Gustafsson of The Thing, Ken Vandermark, both on saxophones , Roy Paci on trumpet and Dutch trombonist Wolter Wierbos.

Tony Dudley Evans

For full article go to http://www.birminghamjazz.co.uk

Monday, 1st February 2010
The Ex & Brass Unbound
Zun Zun Egui
@Hare and Hounds, Birmingham
Doors 8pm
Advanced Tickets: http://www.theticketsellers.co.uk

Last time Bobby Previte visited Birmingham, he brought together his acclaimed Constellation Ensemble; a jazz orchestra formed of trumpets, keyboards, sax, clarinet, harp, piano and additional drums to compliment the ones of Previte, renowned as much as a jazz drummer as a composer. That concert, commissioned by the City of Birmingham was celebrated in February 2004 at CBSO, 7 other cities in the UK and Teatro Nationale in Milan, Italy in May of 2005.

Previte played what is considered his masterpiece, The 23 Constellations of Joan Miró, a multimedia performance including texts and slide projections, based on the abstract work of the Spanish painter, which stunned Previte as he visited one of the three opportunities in history to see the full collection of 23 paintings together at the New York MOMA, in 1993.

The wide range of musical influences embraced by Previte allows him to travel from free-jazz together with the Constellations Orchestra, to urban funk, interpreted together with two of New York’s most outstanding musicians, Charlie Hunter playing his eight string guitar and DJ Logic at turntables for Previte’s composition Blasticity. Other influences are massively mixed in his music, from Piazzola tango to Latin jazz, through to John Zorn, with whom he has worked in several projects. Some of the musical labels that have been associated to Previte’s music are free-jazz, psychedelia or doom jazz. The plastic arts and visual influence is still present at Previte’s recordings and live performances.

He will be performing at Supersonic, together with VJ Benton-C Bainbridge, an audio-visual performance in which Bobby will trigger his drums in a full direct set, no loops, no overdub, over Benton-C’s light brushstrokes, at their only tour date in the UK, in partnership with Birmingham Jazz.

By Nicolás Gómez

Tickets – Weekend tickets – £70 / Friday Ticket – £15 / Saturday Ticket – £35 /Sunday Ticket – £35

available from: www.theticketsellers.co.uk
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Also available from
Polar Bear + Swordfish – Birmingham
Rough Trade East – London
Plugd Records – Cork