ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2012: Q&A with Jeff Gauthier & Ruth Price

This year marks the 5th anniversary of the Angel City Jazz Festival -- no mean feat considering it has specialized in the types of Post-Postmodern jazz that would make your Yia-Yia go, "Meh! Feh!" And yet, through consistent vision, a diverse booking palette and intriguingly unifying themes (last year's World Jazz-centric fest was dubbed "Global Jam"), the Festival has evolved into a tentpole showcase for the vital Left Coast/LoCal jazz and creative music scene. It also still remains proudly nonprofit: The musicians make the money; the promoters and organizers don’t.

This week, the Beast sat down for a quick chat about the festival with its co-organizers, composer/violinist Jeff Gauthier and vocalist/promoter Ruth Price.

 

THE BEAST: Jeff, the ACJF’s original organizer, Rocco Somazzi, brought you on board during its second year. Now that you’ve got a rhythm down, what’s your “Day-After-Last-Day-of-Festival” routine?

JEFF GAUTHIER: Besides being pretty wiped out? [laughter]

Well, how long before you start having to think about the next year?
JG: To tell you the truth I don’t have too much of an opportunity to regroup with my involvement with The Jazz Bakery and every other part of my life. It’s continuous. I have some gigs lined up a few weeks after the festival so I’ll have to start working on that. I’m playing with the L.A. Bach Festival on the 18th, so there’s really no break. Maybe I’ll get a massage and then my wife and I will go have a nice dinner. [laughter]

Ruth, how did this joint collaboration with you and Jeff come together?
RUTH PRICE: Last year, I did a performance at the Musician’s Institute in Hollywood with the guitarist John Abercrombie that was designated as one of the official ACJF performances. At that time, the Board of the Jazz Bakery hadn’t yet gotten to the point where we decided if we needed an Artistic Director. We’d never had one before and we vetted several good people, but Jeff seemed like the perfect fit. It was a natural progress because we are both doing things that complemented with each other -- It wasn’t a "money" thing at all. A lot of the reason why we brought Jeff on board is that there’s just so much more to do!

JG: Next year it’s looking like the Jazz Bakery will be involved again and we’ll be looking to Ruth to take on a bigger role. Also, the collaboration with the Jazz Bakery makes sense because we can introduce their audience to the festival and vice versa. It’s really a win-win for everyone.

RP: If we decide to go ahead and be partners next year, what I and Rocco are very excited about is the concept of basing the festival around that wonderful jazz documentary Icons Among Us: Jazz in the Present Tense. I’m pretty friendly with the producer/director of that, and we’re in discussions.

Ruth, You did sort of a Jazz Bakery Moveable Feast mini-festival last August where Jeff's ensemble The Goatette played. Was that sort of a dress rehearsal for this?
RP: Oh no, that was just a little summer series we do every year, and I knew they would fit perfectly and they're a terrific group of musicians don’t have a lot of chances to play out that often.

How did you center on the theme for this year, “Artists & Legends”?
JG: The idea started at an event at last year’s festival, where Alex Cline presented a piece by Roscoe Mitchell at REDCAT with a large ensemble on the same bill as Roscoe’s trio. The idea of having an artist do an homage to a legendary artist on the same program is a very moving experience, and we saw that Roscoe was quite touched by it as well. So we took that idea and expanded it for the entire festival.

Jeff Gauthier

How did you pair up the acts?
JG: We worked at it from both ends. In some instances it was clear right off the bat and others it developed as we went along. For instance, we knew we wanted to do something with Bobby Bradford…so we immediately thought of Mark Dresser because Mark is someone who cut his teeth with Bobby when Bobby taught at Pomona College [back in the early ‘70s]. He has a fondness and a lot of respect for Bobby and it would be a really interesting situation to put them both in. We could’ve just booked Bobby’s Mo’tet and that would have been great by itself, but the idea of him interacting with Mark seemed like a really exciting prospect for us. With Myra Melford, her choice was her influence Marilyn Crispell. The idea of Marilyn doing some solo piano and then both of them doing “Piano Four Hands,” which is something they’ve done before, followed by Myra’s new band Snowy Egret is really exciting. There’s also some great awards connected to this particular concert: Not only is Myra a 2012 winner of the Herb Alpert Best Musician Award but we also applied for a grant from Chamber Music America for Myra’s performance.

Congrats! Is it easier to get grants these days – I mean, easier than it was five years ago?
JG: I think it’s probably more difficult because foundations have less money and more people are knocking on their doors, but it might be easier for us now because we have four festivals under our belt and we have a little bit of a track record that we didn’t have five years ago.

Ruth, you curated one show for the upcoming ACJF with Anthony Wilson, and you were also involved in the festival’s Young Artist Competition.
RP: I have such faith in Anthony, and anything he wants to get together is going to be marvelous. I wanted something to present local for REDCAT and he is so eloquent musically -- and he was available! I was also one of the three judges for the Young Artist Competitions. I hear about the names of the various young players around town because for years the Jazz Bakery was the go-to place for all of the local college bands and the high school bands – not Big Bands, but Jazz Combos – and it was so exciting when we had them play. It would be earlier in the week because we had the bigger names for the weekend…I remember the Ferber Twins, Mark and Alan, who went on to become first-call players in New York; they used to volunteer at the Jazz Bakery from 1992 until 2009 -- a long time. Whenever there was something like that that attracted the young crowd, there was always an electricity in the room. I just loved it.

Ruth Price

[photo by Peak]

One of the pleasant surprises of this year’s festival is that Wilson and organist Larry Goldings are playing with Jim Keltner, who’s not known as jazz drummer per se but a legendary rock and pop session musician.
JG: Yeah, I think the surprise for everybody will be to see what an accomplished jazz drummer Jim is! I’ve heard him on jazz recordings and with this trio and the man kicks ass.

This is the first time you’ve done it without Rocco Somazzi’s actual physical presence in L.A. How involved was/is he despite now being located in Oakland?
JG: Oh he was very involved, especially with the booking decisions and a lot of the logistics. He’s an amazing guy and can juggle many plates at the same time.

RP: I remember meeting him up at that club called Rocco’s that he had up at where Herb Alpert’s Vibrato space is now. I remember really liking him and really appreciating his taste in music.

JG: At the same time, we have another volunteer named Rob Woodworth, who has taken over my old the festival’s executive director and that helped out a lot. Rob is from the Bay Area and ran a nonprofit organization called The Jazz House; he’s also been involved in a number of other festivals in Bakersfield and Berkeley. He’s very involved with this kind of music and has a lot of experience with nonprofits.

Jeff Gauthier & Rocco Somazzi (w/ MC Leroy Downs) at

the 2009 Angel City Jazz Festival

[photo by Myles Regan]

Jeff, this is the second year the festival has run a Kickstarter campaign. What is the goal this year?
JG: It’s to document the Ford Theatre concert on the 7th with Archie Shepp, Bobby and Mark, Ambrose Akinmusire and Peter and Damian Erskine with Vardan Ovsepian. It was originally going to be videotaped by KCET like it was last year but they had to back out because of funding cuts. So we decided we needed to find a way to document this because it can bring this amazing music to a whole lot of people. I should also mention real quickly that the video and recording of last year’s Roscoe Mitchell concert will be available at the festival and for a short time online during the festival.

Cool. How has Kickstarter affected or even changed the way these festivals are put together?
JG: Last year we were fortunate to receive $5000 from Kickstarter to fund the musicians’ expenses as well as recording the concert. We had Nels Cline as a major instigator for the project, but this year we scaled it back a bit to what we needed to do this recording, which is $3000. But as you know, there’s no guarantee….Kickstarter is a really great way to get people involved and make them feel like they’re playing a part in the festival, but it’s definitely not something we can base a festival around. It’s a valuable tool we didn’t have five years ago. We also wrote some grants last year and we were very fortunate to receive funding from the Herb Alpert Foundation, Chamber Music America, the Doris Duke Foundation and the L.A. County Arts Commission, which allowed us to expand on our idea of what the festival should be.

Ruth, any news on the new Frank Gehry-designed Jazz Bakery space you want to get off your chest?
RP: My way of explaining it is “the shovel is ready to go into the ground” in terms of the design and the lot that was given us. We have to raise a lot more money. We’re about to go into a major campaign for the real funding, because even though we had a substantial funding [$2 million] from the Annenburg Foundation, which to me is the moon but in terms of building a building it’s a whole different ball game. It gets into true fundraising and that’s no small thing even though you have many important ducks in a row. So hopefully the paperwork could be finalized by the New Year, by January, which puts us in a position to really jump in and get it done right.

Can you tease us with a one-word description of the design?
RP: What can I say? It’s Frank Gehry! We’re going to use it as our big thrust, to put the design out there to the public when we start campaigning and fundraising.

On Saturday, the festival is having its first Symposium, called “Honoring and Breaking with Lineage.” Where’d that idea come from?
JG: It was something Rocco and I had wanted to do for a couple of year but we couldn’t quite figure out a way to do it. We were talking with Greg Burk about and he seemed interested in the idea and I think he’ll make a great moderator. It was an idea whose time has come and the idea of doing it at REDCAT before the Jazz Bakery event and include people like Ruth, Steve Isoardi, Bobby Bradford, Ambrose Akinmusire seemed like a perfect fit.

Jeff, since you were trained as a classical musician, how do you approach the “Honoring and Breaking with Lineage” subject in the realm of jazz and creative music?
JG: At this point in my artistic development, I basically have to trust that all of my influences and lineages have been fully assimilated into what I do. Back in the day when I was studying at Cal Arts and had more time to think about it, guys like Bill Evans, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Keith Jarrett had a great influence on me. Once in awhile I listen to my old stuff and think, “Oh, I must have been listening to Ralph Towner in those days.” [laughter] But now it’s all part of the mix.

Ruth?
RP: I’m more with the “honoring” than I am with the “breaking” in the sense I don’t think you need to break something in order to continue. What choice do you have? What would you have been building on?

Jim Black, Tim Berne & Nels Cline at the 2010 ACJF

Jeff, this is also the first time you haven’t played at the festival. Who would be your legend-of-choice
if you did?
JG: Well, in a way, Ruth Price is a legend in her own right, a legendary jazz singer and legendary producer, club owner and artistic director here in L.A.

RP: I haven’t lived long enough to be a legend! [laughs]

JG: I think I’d choose [woodwind player] Bennie Maupin. I've been a fan of his music since I was in high school when he played in Herbie Hancock's Mwandishi band and his landmark album The Jewel in the Lotus. In 2004 I put a band together to cover two of the Mwandishi albums [Crossings and Mwandishi] and Bennie was in the audience. That was the beginning of a fruitful working relationship during which I was able to help with the production of two of his recordings. I've learned a tremendous amount from him about music and life.

RP: Because I’m a singer, I think in terms of piano players and rhythm sections. Robert Glasper! Yes, I loooove Robert Glasper. Because I haven’t been singing in so long, people forget that I’m open to adventure. I mean, some of the first gigs I had on the road were with Charles Mingus and Jackie McLean! But Robert is so free. One of my favorite things I produced for the Jazz Bakery last year was Robert’s trio with Derrick Hodge on bass and Chris Dave on drums, and they did and entirely improvised night, from first note to last. I was in the dressing room listening to it. It was amazing, incredible, brilliant and I’ll never forget it.

THE ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2012: ARTISTS & LEGENDS debuts tonight at LACMA and features this year's Young Artist Competition winners The Anthony Lucca Quintet (6pm) followed by the Phil Ranelin Jazz Ensemble (7pm).



Bloom (UPDATED**)

[Photo coutesy of Wil Cohen]

While The Beast is still catching our breath from the departure of alt-jazz promoter Rocco Somazzi to the Bay Area to oversee his new restaurant Duende, now we have to say goodbye all over again to his staggeringly talented betrothed/muse, pianist/sound sculptress Motoko Honda. Sigh.

{**UPDATE #1: Luckily, Motoko will still be playing shows in Los Angeles. ("Both Rocco and I will continue to involve with L.A. music scene," Motoko told the Beast. "I mean, how can we leave all the great musicians here ??") } Tomorrow night (Thursday, May 3) as a part of the L.A. Bloom Festival at the Aratani/Japan Theatre (244 S. San Pedro St., Little Tokyo 90012). Honda will be on the bill with the equally adventuresome laptop-folkie Mia Doi Todd, who will play the first set with percussionist Andres Renteria. (Mo goes on at 10pm if you are concened about traffic.) She will be premiering her newest....uhhh, jazz composition? multi-disciplinary exploration? holistic auditory wackiness?...called "Dreams of a Flower," part of Honda's massive Sound E/Scape Project. Following "a mysterious story" of a single flower (shades of another pianist's The Secret Life of Plants), the piece features an expansive world of acoustic sounds colored with electronics, visual projections featuring a Spectral GL (a visual instrument that employs an interactive software system to generate real-time 3D animation in response to live or recorded sound) invented by visual artist Jesse Gilbert and live dancing by Roxanne Steinberg.

Of particular interest to music alt-jazz fans is the stellar combo Motoko Honda has assembled for the evening: multi-percussionist Alex Cline,  trumpeter Daniel Rosenboom, violinist Jeff Gauthier and his wife cellist Maggie Parkins and electric bassist Steuart Liebig. Honda has collaborated with all of these players in the past, so the psychic connections should be flying fast and free. Don't miss it, ffolkes!

{**UPDATE #2: Go here to read a review of Thursday night's show. }

ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2011: The Edge of Song

How is one supposed to write "reviews" of music that does not conform to any of the normal aural signposts of melody, structure, even harmony? It is music like this -- it's footprints splattered all over the first few shows of this year's world jazz-themed Angel City Jazz Festival -- that reveals to a music writer how ultimately pointless what we do is. The words will never be able to catch up to the music because the vocabulary of music moves ahead so fast into uncharted waters that it exists beyond them. So we close the notebook, cap the pen, and order some appetizers while simply becoming a listener again. Ah, there you are.

Not that these realizations stopped us from pulling every 10-cent adjectives out of liquid-nitrogen storage when we attended a few choice shows for the ACJF's fourth year:

THE NECKS

(The Blue Whale, 9/22/11)

[Photo courtesy of Myles Regan]

For some reason, we expected a group with a name like "The Necks" to be one of those punky, post-modern bands like Kneebody or Gutpuppet who skronk with a harDCcore heart. Head-slamming improvisors, right? El Wrongo. Granted, we knew next to nothing about this Australian trio, and we didn't want to know; we wanted to walk in to this -- the opening night performance of the ACJF -- like we've been walking into movies lately: no advance hype, no trailer/scene-hunting on YouTube, no spoilers. And the Necks completely befuddled us from the first note: an unsettling subterranean drone that breathed, then weakened, then breathed again. Bassist Lloyd Swanson barely touched his strings, preferring to itch or tickle them at the neck (ahh, now we get the name). They sustained this eerie single note for the entire 45-minute set like this was a Terrence Malick film, creating -- depending on what head space you were in -- either an unbearable tension without any release or a release unburdened by any tension whatsoever. There was eve a stretch where the band created a vibratiing sensation that sounded like when you leave one window in your car open and its creates that thumping suction sound that nearly causes you to drive off the road. Not entirely pleasant, not entirely not. The most startling effect of the set was Chris Abrahams' piano, whose hammers sounded like they had been altered with carpet tacks, giving off a jangling, metallic sound as if a saloon pianist was attempting this very dense and sophisticated music.

SHUTZ VTET / LARRY KARUSH QUINTET

(LACMA, 9/23/11)

Read Tom Meek's L.A. Weekly review of the show here.

[Photo courtesy of Myles Regan]

BURKINA ELECTRIC & LUKAS LIGETI with DJ SPOOKY
(The Echoplex, 9/24/11)

Greg Burk reviews the show here. Read Andrea Raymond's interview with ACJF organizer Jeff Gauthier about the Burkina/Spooky show here.

[Photo courtesy of Myles Regan]

THEO BLECKMANN / TODD SICKAFOOSE and TINY RESISTORS

(REDCAT, 9/25/11)

[Photo courtesy of Steve Gunther]

You have to respect the stones of anyone who walks unannounced onstage at a tres-hip jazz festival without any instruments and immediately launches a cappella into song called "Duet For One." Then, when they do pull out instruments to play, they turn into Carrot Top: a tiny bear doll with a screen for a face and a creepy recorded voice ("Let's plaaaaaay!"), a neon-pink plastic toy horn or the rubber-nippled end of a toilet plunger. All assisted by a couple of effects pedals and a voice sampler, the German-born Theo Bleckmann [pictured above] took the bemused audience on a surreal blimp-ride through the human voice and all the different ways it van be perverted, mangled and morphed through technology, whimsy and sheer force of will. He covered Meredith Monk's "Wa-Lie-Oh" and the old cabaret standard "Lillie Marleen" (using afrementioned toy horn) and turned the jazz standard "I Remember You" into a fever dream from David Lynch's nursery. He made unutterable noise -- a pepper grinder filled with gravel? bullfrog love-calls in pea soup? a sped-up recording of two Korean men arguing sports? -- and then made music out of that. Funny thing: This sometimes veered into self-conscious cleverness, but rarely into self-indulgence.

[Photo courtesy of Steve Gunther]

Bassist Todd Sickafoose and his nonet were already standing onstage after the intermission, patiently waiting for the audience to file back in so they could proceed to lively it up with an eight-song set brimming with groove-based post-fusion. There was a constant albeit good-natured tension between the Alpha players of the ensemble (electric guitar, bass, trumpet, drums) and the Omegas (strings, piano). Of the Alphas, the standouts included the startlingly inventive trumpet of Ara Anderson, who yawped like Louis Armstrong at his sassiest on the N'awlins-flavored slo-drag "Paper Trombones" and then ached and breathed like Mark Isham on the lyrical "Whistle." Steve Cardenas' gorgeously evocative guitar playing sampled the crystal-clear treble of Bill Frisell on the opener "Future Flora," then did a 180 and mimicked Joe Zawinul's electric piano on "Bye Bye Bees." Hyper drummer Ted Poor kept up an aggressive, meth-addict skiffle that caught most of the "Who's that guy?" attention. Sickafoose himself exhibited his ability to helm a large band without letting on he's doing so -- he's more of an instigator than a leader. He repeatedly let his presence known with his rubberband pizzicato, smacking and popping his strings, treating the instrument like it was one of Tex Avery's cartoons.

[Photo courtesy of Steve Gunther]

As for the Omegas, they swam and spun around the Alphas, finding their pockets in little gestures and deft seasonings. Sickafoose paid tribute to violinist Jeff Gauthier [pictured below, at left] -- not only one of the co-organizers of the festival but also the label owner who released Tiny Resistors' 2008 self-titled debut -- by showcasing Gauthier's deft intergration of classical, jazz and Appalachian styles on three seperate instrumentals. Pianist Adam Benjamin seemed marooned at stage left behind the strings, but he chose to keep his low profile by crumpling pieces of paper into his miked piano bed and prodding its strings with drumsticks and rings of keys. At one point, not satisfied with the sounds he was getting by hitting a percussion bell, he simply switched to his metal music-sheet stand and found the tone he was looking for. Creativity -- in the moment and hot out of the oven!

[Photo courtesy of Steve Gunther]

Meanwhile, outside on 3rd Street, the filming of The Dark Knight Rises rolled relentlessly on...

ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2010: Demokratic Vistas

After a two-day break, the Angel City Jazz Festival returned for its second leg on Thursday night with an emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration—mainly between music and the visual arts. A bit of this was hinted at the Royal/T Café last week with the dinner/music/dance/video combo of the memorable “Cookin’ It Up” show, but both Thursday and Friday nights really drove home the interaction between  images and how artists respond to them. At the helm of the musical side of things were two L.A. composers whom I have been thinking about in the same breath a lot lately for their similarities: the festival’s keynote guitarist Nels Cline and the festival’s unofficial first lady, pianist Motoko Honda. Both conjure whole orchestras out of their respective instruments; both are musically omnivorous; both don’t hide behind their gadgets but utilize them improvisational devices in the bigger mix; both aggregate punk-rock energy with studious avant-garde discipline; and both have no limits to their talent.

Thursday night was the second buzz-worthy event since Henry Grimes on opening night: The LACMA-sanctioned premiere of DIRTY BABY, the picture/poetry/music “triologue” between L.A. badass painter Ed Ruscha, San Francisco-based producer/poet David Breskin and Mr. Cline. (A bethumbed review copy of the $125 coffee-sized tome with attendant “DIRTY NELS” CD sat like a giant doorstop in the museum bookstore.) Before beginning his readings, Mr. Breskin, a suitably intense and prickly gentleman with a lethal-looking shaved head who took very loud and elongated pulls on his bottled water, commented about how the boxes of fresh copies of the DIRTY BABY book were seized at U.S. Customs after being shipped in from its Italian printers; apparently, the book’s title scrawled all over the boxes convinced authorities they had hit the motherlode of confiscated child pornography. Oh Ed, still throwing people for a loop after 50 years!

David Breskin makes cellphone owners fear for their lives

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

The show was split into two parts, the first of which was a less successful melding of the involved art forms than the second. Mr. Breskin began – after acknowledging the evening as being the 55th anniversary of the reading of Allen Ginsburg’s Howl – with nearly a half hour hour of continuous short readings of his tart, ironic ghazals (sort of like Arabic haiku with refrain). In the book they are combined with 66 prints of Ruscha’s little-seen “dumb block” paintings from the 1980s and 1990s: dreamy, murky silhouettes with those punk-rocky black-censorship bars over where text would normally be.

The DIRTY band, first set (from left): Wayne Peet, Jeremy Drake, Danny Frankel, Glenn Taylor, Scott Amendola, Todd Sickafoose, Nels Cline, Bill Barrett

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Cline followed with no less than, in Breskin’s words, “a time-lapse history of 6,000 years of Western Civilization.” His dream nonet of Left Coast players (whom Breskin dubbed "The People of the West") rose to the challenge with the stunningly epic and ambitious 42-minute title cut, which split itself into at least five different mini-suites that ranged from white squalls of noise to sweeping lyrical expanses that recalled composers like Virgil Thomson and Aaron Copeland. (It was Cline’s own personal There Will Be Blood soundtrack—the title of which is even repeated in one of Breskin’s ghazals.) The standout instrument of the first set was the prairie-ghost whisper of Bill Barnett’s chromatic harmonica. This, taken with Glenn Taylor's delicate pedal-steel shadings, framed the suite as some sort of strange and fragmented Western opera.

Maestro!

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

In the second set, Breskin’s terse readings turned bragging and hostile (“You Will Eat Hot Lead,” “I Thought I Told You That We Won’t Stop” “You Talk You Get Killed”) as he tackled the cracked mirror of America’s wars in the Middle East. These were interwoven more organically with Cline’s short bursts of bliss and vinegar. Besides electric guitar, Cline used what appeared to be a series of smaller and smaller acoustic guitars, including one that looked and sounded like a Cuban armónico, that lent the score a waft of Middle Eastern incense.

Lady about to attack her piano: Motoko Honda

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Friday night’s marriage of imagery and music was no less epic, despite the fact that there was only one musician onstage instead of fourteen. Pianist and sound sculptress Motoko Honda preluded the premiere of Steven Elkins’ frequently poetic documentary The Reach of Resonance (think Fast, Cheap and Out of Control with musical mavericks) by stating her confusion at being asked to compose a piece inspired by the film. “I am mostly an improviser,” she said almost apologetically before sitting down for a furious and anarchic 20-minute tour de force in which she practically crawled inside the instrument. Mixing lyrical, almost George Winston-like etudes with a prepared technique I can only describe as “flossing" -- slipping a fishing line around the piano strings and moving them back and forth rapidly to create a sound not unlike a methed-out bee swarm  -- she beautifully refracted the film’s mind-bending investigations into the outer reaches of musical inspiration, or what composer Jon Rose, one of the film’s four subjects, tellingly labels “sonic terrorism." Mmm, not a bad buzzword for the ACJ festival as a whole.

THE REACH OF RESONANCE SNEAK PEEK:

Our apologies to Mr. John Abercrombie, who closed out the festival Saturday night with his Quartet. The Beast took ill and couldn't swing it, but here are some lovely and candid shots of the master at work:

From left: John Abercrombie, Joey Baron, Thomas Morgan, Mark Feldman

(all photos courtesy of Myles Regan)

ANGEL CITY JAZZ FESTIVAL 2010: The First Leg

Ahh opening night. The electric-shaver buzz in the air! The expectant crowds milling about! The familiar faces! The parking fees! Welcome to the Angel City Jazz Festival Year Three. And for some reason – maybe momentum, maybe a perverse urge towards a Viking-style funeral – this year's bill was the most radical one yet. After getting a toehold with the first two years, what the hell were festival organizers Jeff Gauthier and Rocco Somazzi thinking?

I would be the wrong person to ask that question. My urge towards the fringier fringes of Out There music is not a good indicator of my judgment of a festival roster’s bankability. The esteemed music critic Greg Burk (who also reviewed the festival) asked me Monday night over dinner what I thought of this year’s lineup of artists and I froze with mouthful of cured tuna hearts. “I think it’s great!” was all I could muster. Burk was coming at me from the Long View of things: in order for this music and for the only annual festival to celebrate it to survive, it needs to embrace both the Out and the In. (To whit: last year’s sandwiching of the relatively straight-ahead B3 organisms of Larry Goldings between guitar freek-a-leek Nels Cline and the prepared piano of Motoko Honda.) I was coming at it from the blissfully oblivious punk-rock stance of, “the more extreme the better!” Which is why I don’t run a record label. I like Viking funerals.

This year, the extreme was exhibited in the majority of acts over the first few days having absolutely no set list. There were exceptions -- Kneebody and Ravi Coltrane on Sunday and the Trible/Beasley duo on Saturday – but the main feature was inventing a journey for the ears that wasn’t always “fun” in the classic sense. Like a good novel the music contained all emotions, from anxiety to abandon, from confusion to rapture. Hell, there was boredom in there a few times too, and the task of both performers and audience alike to wrest free of it.

Saturday was the much-ballyhooed return to L.A. of Mr. Henry Grimes, the bassist who has become as celebrated for the Hollywood-worthy tale of his rediscovery and rehabilitation as his pioneering work with the godheads of free jazz (Ayler, Taylor, Shepp, Sanders, Coltrane, Coleman). In fact, Grimes’ “story” has been told twice and Social Network-style in two opposing accounts in the last two months: first by scholar Steven Isoardi (“The Return of Henry Grimes: A Memoir” -- emphasis on that last word) and then a month later in the new literary quarterly Slake by journalist Hank Cherry (“The Resurrection of Henry Grimes”). It's a story, underscored by Mr. Gauthier’s opening remarks, that encompasses “hope, creativity and not giving up in the face of dire circumstances” and “very much an L.A. story.” We won’t get into all that here – in fact, we shudder at the thought of Grimes' story making to the big screen and becoming another The Soloist, complete with Kanye West or Sean Combs bobbing for Oscar cred by playing the troubled bassist. Suffice to say, all the crackling anticipation in the REDCAT theatre precluded that Mr. Grimes would be received rapturously if he simply stood onstage and did nothing but scratch his ear. He did stand onstage, but nothing the man did was simple.

Mr. Grimes’ set was preceded by the duo of vocalist Dwight Trible and pianist John Beasley, who took their own sweet time setting a subtle, churchified mood for their short set. They began with an improvised duet and moving into more structured material like “Autumn Leaves” and a bracing medley of “The Spirit of Love” with the more dire standard “Strange Fruit,” with Trible creating cubistic psalms over Beasley’s soft tide pools and mathematical chimes. They even paid tribute to current economic woes (which, as indie jazz musicians, they must feel quite acutely) with the closer, “Backlash Blues.” Four bars in, someone yelled from the audience: “I like it already!!”

Henry Grimes, with Olive Oil

The auditorium was dead quiet when Grimey & Co. shuffled out of the wings like gunfighting pilgrims. Grimes, dressed in baggy black pants, rumpled Hawaiian shirt and canary-yellow headband (his rotating headgear is like the jazz world’s version of the Bears' Jim McMahon), bent over the green-painted bass named “Olive Oil” (a gift from N.Y. loft vet William Parker) and started his knotty boxer’s hands dancing over the strings. This was the first of at least three improvisations that ranged from hellacious cacophony to near-silent meditation. The drama was heightened by the musicians (with minimal rehearsal and minimal direction) struggling across the tightrope together. It was 15 minutes before any kind of noticeable rhythm started and in that time Grimes switched from arco to pizzicato and then over to violin, while pianist Ben Rosenboom switched from the keyboard to the inner strings of the piano, Vinny Golia switched from baritone sax to clarinet to bass clarinet, Alex Cline switched from wire brushes to mallets to whatever else he had up his sleeve, and poor Dwight Trible (a last minute addition) switched from standing up to sitting down, as it appeared he was having difficulty fitting his vocals into the cracks of the ensemble’s intensity. But for intensity, one needed to look no further than the MVP of the evening Alex Cline, who towards the end of the set shattered the almost-quaint egalitarianism of the band by launching into a chest-rumbling and heavily caffeinated tribal beat that drew the rest of the players – even the maestro himself, who appeared not to once notice he had any bandmates – into its let’s-go-out-on-a-high-note sway.

Nels tears the Ford a new one

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

If Saturday night was the feather tickling, Sunday evening at the Ford Amphitheatre was the motherlode of weirdness, the anti-Hollywood Bowl. The bicoastal quintet Kneebody played like a bunch of young punks who just came from a show at The Smell. Vinny Golia returned for some funkified cold fusion with a youthful ensemble culled from his CalArts students. (Did we actually catch Golia dancing a little onstage?!). Nels Cline practically stomped a hole in the stage floor as he and saxist Tim Berne and three-armed drummer Jim Black went for the apocalyptic orgasm in an entirely improvised set that included Berne’s siren-like wails that he muted by sticking an empty Arrowhead water bottle into the bell of his horn.

Wadada

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

Wadada Leo Smith, who also backed Mr. Grimes on Saturday and who likes to stand at the edge of his bands like a character in the margins of an old MAD magazine, led his Golden Quartet in a groove-tinged set with some powerful players, including hot keyboardist Vijay Iyer (whose own current Solos CD is getting rapturous buzz) and the bewitching John Lindberg, who ran his bass through a pedal and created an otherworldly and elongated sound I can only regrettably call “bowelly.” (This made the L.A. Times jazz critic Chris Barton laugh -- although thank god he didn't mention it in his review of the show.) With their serpentine interplay and clean, well-lighted songs, the quintet led by saxophonist Ravi Coltrane (second son of John and Alice) and trumpeter Ralph Alessi tucked us into bed and kissed us on the cheek.

Ravi Coltrane/Ralph Alessi Quartet

(photo courtesy of Myles Regan)

The next night at Culver City's Royal/T Cafe was more of a cozy, family affair that mixed musical improvisation with multimedia flash and culinary wizardry courtesy of visiting chefs Paul Canales and Kelsey Bergstrom. (Indeed, Carol Kim's live video feeds of musicians and kitchen staff heightened the similarities between food and music—and further proved to me that chefs are the new DJs.) There was a metal tub packed with ice and stacked with bottles of Rahsaan Roland Kirk Dark Lager. There were silver multi-storied dishes of farmer’s market green beans and grissini dip. There were tablecloths, for god’s sake. All accompanied by the strangest dinner music we’ve ever heard, a true ebbing-and-flowing blast of West Coast airs anchored by the leadership of bassist Mark Dresser and pianist Myra Melford, who played a white mini-grand besmirched with subway graffiti, and brought to the brink by the butoh dance master Oguri, who squeezed himself between the banquet tables like that Tooms guy from The X Files. The Brothers Cline took a brief duo interlude during Dresser's "Rasa" that made one marvel at the talented womb they both were sprung from—and how ageless both seem when they are playing together. (Nels' recent collaborator and bride-to-be Yuka Honda was almost invisible behind Melford's piano, hunched over a tiny keyboard-sized piece of electronics called a Tenori-on.) The second set veered almost shockingly into verboten blues territory, with violinist Jeff Gauthier and Mark Dresser chasing each other in mad-stringed brotherhood. (I’m not sure of this, but some loud female voice kept yelling out “Mark Dresser! Yeah! Play it! Wooo!” during his solo, and I swear to God it might have been Ms. Melford, whom I’ve heard utter few words in person.) At the end of this wonderful evening, both Rocco and Jeff were spent but smiling. What do they know that we don’t?

Drawing by Deborah Drooz on my notebook

while I was in the Men's Room at the Royal/T



Check out the Ford performances on YouTube's Angel City Jazz TV page.