Nik Bartsch's Ronin, live @ Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

Ever get tired of the same faces in American Jazz? Looking for some good music with a little international flavor? The Latin guys a little to picante for you? I know just the thing. Scandinavian Jazz! They’ve got cute, exotic names like Jan Garbarek and Esbjörn Svensson. They’ve got docile, funny sounding accents in which they express their utter fanaticism for the music. And since the 70’s there’s been some great music coming from that neck of the woods. Just check out at least half of the ECM catalogue. Established Jazz greats like Keith Jarrett and Dave Holland have been known to dip into the Scandinavian scene with great results.
And yet I have yet to hear any. So I know about these guys. I read downbeat magazine. And Wikipedia. That doesn’t mean I’m a fan. But sure, I want to be.
I got my first chance to hear some last night. I saw Nik Bartsch's Ronin. It was…interesting to say the least. Bartsch plays piano and the Rhodes, and had a couple splash cymbals clamped onto his instruments. There was a reeds player who blew into an alto sax, a bass clarinet, and an exotic looking contrabass saxophone, that was literally taller than he was. There was a drummer and a slapping electric six string bass player, and lastly a percussionist who had some funny looking instruments.
Each tune, if I can even call them that, seemed to be at least 15 or so minutes. Bartsch’s approach to music is very minimalist, with a bunch of repeating figures that slowly morphed a la Steve Reich. He would reach his hand into the piano and mute the strings, and play a simple two note rhythmic figure as the bass played some fast repetitive fragment. Then a minor riff would develop, with the sax adding more texture than harmonic or melodic material. All the while the drums laid down a backbeat groove that kept it just under danceable. There were some crazy time things going on too, 5 against god only knows what, I couldn’t count it -- maybe 13 or something. Bartsch called it “stoic funk,” which is a pretty perfect description. The meditation-like grooves would be punctuated by a drum struck run down the un-dampened piano strings, or a banging on a metal spaceship-looking-orb of of a percussion instrument.
The best part though, besides the in between song talks with his wonderful accent (I’m sorry, I can’t help it) was what he was wearing. It was a black robe that looked a little Japanese but mostly like a Jedi that has gone to the dark side. The mood was also enhanced by low, blue lights.
I have to say, I appreciated the music. But I don’t know if I liked it. The rhythmic stuff was interesting, and anyone who is into Jazz always seeks the interesting. The grooves were complex and bouncy. The technical veracity involved was staggering. I just think a little more melodic material would have really enhanced it, perhaps using the interlocking grooves as a bed on which to add some fresh colors. Each song really was just a vamp on about one chord, and I can really only listen to a minor chord played for so long before I want to scream. Especially if it is Phrygian in flavor (think flamenco music.) There was certainly some Asian, Zen aesthetics, and times when everything seemed to be in prefect balance. But with the equally Spartan song titles, which, spanning all his albums, are all simply “Modul 1” or Modul 34,” I just don’t see how this music can be anything more than background stuff for an art gallery or something.
I do need to keep checking out the Scandinavians though, and I hear a lot about EST. Bartsch is just trying to do something really specific that is outside of my taste.

Bill Frisell at Yoshi's in SF, with Tony Sheer and Joey Baron

Anyone familiar with Bill Frisell would be able to pick him out of a hundred other jazz guitar players. While this may sound like a very bold statement, his distinct use of restraint, his affinity for effects, and the country/bluesy elements he puts into all his music make up a sound that is distinctly his. However, I have always felt that these great elements of his playing can be lost on his recordings, particularly his trio albums. Sometimes his use of space and his distinct motifs verge on a vague sense of monotony. Don’t get me wrong. From his work in Paul Motian’s trio to his spacy solo records to his noisy experimental work with John Zorn, Frisell’s personal sound is definitely capable of interacting with many different settings. However, with a lot of his solo work, which should showcase his core genius, I find it hard to get through a whole album. So I have always wondered if his live shows might offer a better glimpse into what Bill Frisell is about, and what he can truly do. I was definitely not disappointed by this show. It was a great night of fun and yet refined music that really lifted my spirits.
He opened with a song from his most recent album, a trio record with Paul Motion on drums and Ron Carter on bass. It was his rendition of the traditional folk classic “You Are My Sunshine.” One thing I love about Frisell is his use of the American country idiom, so I am always glad to hear him do a song like this. He was playing a beautiful baby blue, semi hollow Fender Telecaster, which had a great dry tone. Add to the mix a healthy dose of reverb, and his treating everything he plays with vibrato, hammer ons and bends, (the staple elements of blues guitar) and this all yields a distinctly American sound. His playing stood out beautifully against the backdrop of the sparing acoustic bass playing by Tony Sheer and the tasty drumming of Joey Baron. In this first tune, Frisell played the melody using plenty of octaves and large, resonating chords. These chords he manages to sustain with some fingers while he plays melodic material with his others. Frisell accompanies himself really well like this, using all the tricks in the guitar repertoire to create the illusion at times that there are two guitars playing at once. The song dipped down in energy with a bass solo, gritty and full of bends, which built back up with increasingly intense drum fills to a wonderful climax.
The next tune was a Monk composition called “Raise Four-” also off his latest album. It was a perfect second tune because in contrast with the earthy, folk sounding first tune it really showed what Frisell could do with the more straight ahead Jazz style. The rhythm section provided a vivacious, up-tempo bounce. Frisell went through the tune with a more unrestrained approach to his playing. Starting with some open sounding, colorful chordal work, he would transition back and forth into short, and then longer bursts of fast and perfectly articulated bop lines. If one ever grows weary of Frisell’s “slow” approach to Jazz, this is the perfect song to hear what else he is capable of.
After this the music began to get a bit spacy. The trio played a vague minor motif in free time, which eventually became so ambiguous that the harmony slowly turned into a sort of harmonic white noise. Frisell really made clear his love for effects. He played with among other things the popular Line 6 boomerang petal, which he used to record and then loop certain phrases. He would then chop these up and play them backwards, adding texture to the already outer space sounding landscape of the music. The trio kept this up until no recognizable time or harmony could be found. The drummer got increasingly excited, doing some fills that were very Tony-Williams sounding –appropriately so because this music recalled the early Miles Davis electric work that was very much indebted to the drumming and influence of young Tony.
Just when my ears were about to give up on trying to make sense of this little experimental jam, Frisell killed all the looping guitars and went directly into the soulful melody of Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” with the rhythm section following suite and diving into a laid back, 6/8 shuffle. Now I absolutely love this song, so I was so giddy as hell when I recognized it. Frisell’s playing was just big and juicy, using fat bluesy licks and beautiful, smooth chordal playing to communicate the melody with the perfect amount of soul that a Sam Cooke song requires. Besides the spacy section they dragged on earlier in the set, I was having a great time so far. The rhythm section was very on point, keeping things interesting in the accompaniment, and Frisell was really wailing on a lot of these tunes, a lot less pensive and a lot more playful than on his albums. It did help too that he chose the Cooke song that I’ve been playing nonstop on my Ipod the past few weeks.
Next he played one of his own compositions, called “Baba Coor.” This one had a rock’n’roll sounding minor melody, played over a chugging eighth note groove. He played some great counterpoint on his guitar, alternating octaves with the main melody and playing staggered melodies intercut with sustaining, reverby chords. He would harmonize certain notes of the otherwise smooth and catchy sounding melody with notes that didn’t really fit, notes that were a second or a minor fifth apart, creating a jarring dissonance that allowed the melody to still be recognizable, but a lot more interesting and open ended. He used this musical motif to punctuate his licks, demanding attention and signifying a climactic moment in his playing. His improvisation built to a great degree, as he started using loops that he would chop up with his petal and play over. His tone got dirtier as his playing got more intense, and built with the drums into a thick exploding wall of gee-tar sound. His use of effects here was perfectly balanced, and the big sound of this last tune was exhilarating, especially coming from just three musicians.
He closed with what sounded like a Marvin Gaye tune, which grooved in a real soulful way. He wailed on his guitar with a big, distorted sound. It built and built until it became anthemic and huge. The tune was full of energy and was a great closer.
All the things I love about Frisell’s music really came through and were expanded upon at this show. The minimal rhythm section provided just enough background, but more importantly provided the right amount of space for his uniquely personal style of playing to really shine. The room was full of colorful, captivating music from one of today’s most accomplished and recognizable guitar players.

Bilal and the Robert Glasper Trio at Yoshi's, November 26th, 2007

I’ve been dying to see Bilal live for about two years now. I tried to see him maybe a year ago at this club in Oakland. I went with my girlfriend at the time, Natalie, but it turned out that we didn’t meet the dress code, both of us being white suburban kids with jeans and converse or flip flops or something. So we had to drive home without hearing any of the soulful wailings and phat-ass beats that we were dying to hear.
Last night I finally got to see him play, and it certainly was a different side of Bilal than I expected to see. It was his first time playing at Yoshi’s, and as his back up band he had an incarnation of the Robert Glasper trio, with Alan Hampton on bass and Chris Dave on drums.
My friend Brian and I walked in in the middle of the first tune, and somehow landed seats five feet away from the performers. We were elated. It was just the trio at this point, and they were playing a tune called F.T.P. of Glasper’s latest record, “In My Element.” They transitioned this into a monk tune that I wasn’t familiar with, which they imbued with, as Glasper described, some more modern grooves a la De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and the ever-cited late J-Dilla. This intro set the tone for the rest of the night, with Glasper’s deeply gospel influenced piano style, complex rhythmic interplay, and dense chords over Chris Dave’s changing hip-hop grooves and polyrhythmic hi-hat work.
Glasper then introduced Bilal, and the man that walked on stage was a far cry from the man that appears on the cover of his album, 1st Born Second. Rather than long dreads, heavily tattoed arms, and a tight fitting white tank top, Bilal was wearing faded grey jeans, a grey crew-neck sweatshirt with a grey collared shirt underneath. His hair was cut short, and he was wearing dark framed glasses and a neatly trimmed goatee. He told the audience that we would be seeing a different side of him, and emphasized that he met Glasper at New School, where they both studied Jazz.
They then went into a particularly nasty rendition of Autumn Leaves, with Bilal chopping up and stuttering the melody and lyrics as he gesticulated animatedly. After a simple but solid scat section, Glasper did something really cool with his solo. He had a fender Rhodes right next to the baby grand he was playing, and he played unison lines on both keyboards, with the acoustic piano just barely coming after the Rhodes, creating an ill-sounding natural sort of delay.
After this the group played what sounded like Wayne Shorter’s Barracuda. It was an up-tempo, swinging number with Bilal singing the melody with a lazy but controlled sounding falsetto. Hampton had a nice bass solo, over a stripped down bass and kick only hip hop beat. This tune transitioned into a rendition of Miles Davis’ Blue in Green, with Bilal singing some heartfelt lyrics as Glasper channeled Bill Evans through his funky fingers with some dense, cascading block chords. It was a very beautiful ballad moment, the perfect mixture of jazz and modern grooves, and ended with the crowd clapping along. While Bilal was singing the head, a beautiful woman who may have worked for Yoshi’s, or may have come with Bilal, walked on stage and brought him a martini, which prompted him to laugh exaggeratedly and toast the crowd in a mock James Bond, classy sort of way. He said “I know you’re not supposed to clap your hands at a jazz club, but hey it feels good.”
The next tune Bilal dedicated to the late J-Dilla, a legendary and influential producer that worked with Bilal on a lot of projects. Bilal was in the Soulquarians, Dilla’s production team that was responsible for such classic hip hop and neo-soul albums as Common’s “Like Water for Chocolate” and Eryka Badu’s “Mama’s Gun.” One thing I love about Bilal’s album are the sick beats that he sings over, always with a bass or drum or guitar part that is almost too slow and yet right on. There was no lack of phat beats at this show though, even with a piano trio as his only backup. He went into Reminisce, a number off his album 1st Born Second. Chris Dave, who I’ve been wanting to see live for a while now, provided beat after beat, always super funky and always super interesting, with snare rolls and complex hi hat rhythms that emulated a drum machine, but with that irreplaceable human element that only a drummer of Dave’s caliber can bring. There was a back up vocal part that they obviously couldn’t reproduce, Bilal being the only singer, but somehow some vocally gifted members of the crowd sang it anyways, perfectly on time and harmonized so that it honestly sounded rehearsed. There is something you don’t get everyday. I felt like I was in church.
The highlight of the set though were the last two tunes they played. Throughout the show the crowd kept yelling out “Sometimes!” which is my favorite Bilal tune by far. So they acquiesced, but not before playing a slower number of his, Queen of Sanity. Sometimes was everything I wanted it to be, with all the proper builds, and Bilal wailing in his signature soulful-as-fuck falsetto. The man is so damn fun to watch on stage, even in a setting like this. He waves his arms like a monkey, and seems lazy and a little wasted at all times, yet ever in control and musically on-point.
Not that he needed to, but Bilal definitely showed us that night that he has chops beyond just hip hop and neo-soul. He has the knowledge and grace of a trained jazz musician, and yet this was far from a straight jazz show. It brought together some of the best elements of black music in the past 40 years and filtered it through Bilal and Robert Glasper’s unique styles that they have very clearly developed alongside each other in years past. A killer band and a great performance from start to finish.

Kneebody and Happy Apple at the Great American Music Hall, November 7, 2007

I discovered Kneebody a few years ago when they played at Ameoba Records in LA. I remember walking in and first seeing the sax player, who was on his knees fumbling with some effects and making some mean noise. The bass and Rhodes were nice and distorted, and while it was clear there was a lot of complexity going on, these guys were rocking it. Hard.
Seeing them last week, about three years later, there are certainly some differences. They played a show at the Great American Music Hall, a venue usually geared towards rock and pop acts. While Kneebody certainly has not gone soft, or pop, they seem to have eschewed the “younger,” more thrashy sound of their earlier days for some more song oriented, almost brainy material.
After a floaty, ephemeral intro, the band went into a pulsing, rhythmic piece that was focused on more composition rather than improvisation. The five members all seemed to have their own rhythmic agenda, with melodies and chords dancing around each other in a way that seemed to echo Steve Reich’s compositions.
Most of the set was geared in such a direction. Each tune was an unpredictable series of grooves that to me echoed the dark soundscapes of Radiohead only with Kneebody’s signiture harmonic and rhythmic complexity. For example, the second to last tune, which was perhaps the most exciting, started with Endsley, trumpet, playing a lyrical, fanfare like passage with some Arabic flavors. After a melodic cue, Wood started in with some cymbal concentrated drumming, laying down the first in a long series of morphing grooves while the horns played some close melodies, creating some sweet sounding dissonances. The rhythm section played at times like Metallica trying to play like funk, or maybe like The Family Stone trying to play metal. Wendel’s solo was frantic, calculated, and interesting, as he seemed to be playing phrases that were unique but almost intentionally unsatisfying.
It’s hard to tell how much of a Kneebody tune is improvised and how much is composed. They are known for using a series of pre-planned musical cues to go from one groove to the next, to change tempos, modulate, or to tell certain members to drop out or come in. This lends itself to a fascinating, albeit sometimes enigmatic sort of group improvisation that creates the impression that the song is playing itself. For example, the tune Coat Rack, which I knew best out of everything they played, had an unfamiliar, extended solo section, in which Benjamin growled franticly on his distorted Rhodes over a bed of distorted bass and break-beat drums. When they went back into the head, it was twice as fast, and over a galloping, ping-pongy groove that seemed to come out of nowhere.
However, the Kneebody I used to see a couple years ago, and that lots of LA musicians I know talk about, used to use these cues a lot more, taking the songs to looser, more stretched out and freeform realms where the solos were more exhilarating and the songs were less distinct as individual compositions. Perhaps it was the crowd and the nature of the event, being a sit down, Jazz festival shindig rather than a small, local venue, that made them tailor their music into a series of easy to digest songs that showed off their group sound more than their unpredictable energy.
Kneebody was, as always, enthralling. Because of my own personal taste, I would have liked to see some more daring improvisation from the group and the soloists alike, but it was still very satisfying to hear a band with such a unique approach to instrumental, improvised music that ties the spirit of what came before with the influences my generation was raised on.



My first impression of The Happy Apple, a trio consisting of David King, drummer for The Bad Plus, plus Michael Lewis on sax and Erik Fratzke on bass, was that they would fit in more so at the Warped Tour than the SF Jazz festival. Fratzke had on a trucker hat and a patchy beard and Lewis had long hair, and wore tight jeans and converse. But after hearing them play, I realized not only do these guys have the chops to set them apart from any straight up punk outfit, but they have a frenetic and free approach to improvised music that sets them apart from other jazz outfits too. To my ears, they sound as though they were trying to channel the spirit of Ornette Coleman, but filtered through their frenzied, punk aesthetic.
The first tune they played was a melodic, major key vamp that was pleasant, but didn’t really go anywhere. The next tune, however, is where they really started to show off their sound. It started with a lumbering, mathy head that rose and fell freely, and seemingly impulsively. After this complex section, Lewis searched the range of his horn with an extreme urgency, belting his runs out like some sort of punk singer, and moving about the stage like one too. After the solo sections, in which Fratzke showed off his lightning fast chops and King his impressive control of time and rhythm, a key aspect of Happy Apple’s sound came through to me. All three players seemed to be playing their own thing, and yet it all seemed to be contributing loosely to the overall idea of the song. It was less like a melody and more like a patched together groove, which requires all three voices to form the totality of the head.
The next tune really brought Ornette’s sound to my mind. Entitled “Me and Mateo vs. You and Celequo,” it started with the bass and sax playing the melody in unison. This was a technique common in Ornette’s music in the 60’s and 70’s, giving the band only a melody to interpret for soloing purposes. The bass really filled in a lot of space as Lewis Soloed, while King kept loose, blazing rhythms which tied the groove together.
Some moments were better than others, however.. Some of Fratzke’s solos ventured into the territory of a wankfest, with him showing off his shredding ability on his instrument with little direction. Lewis had a tiny, toy looking keyboard next to him, which for some reason he never played. It would have been nice to hear a little sonic variety, especially from a group that uses their multi-instrumental talent on their albums.
Overall, the show was fun, with a few almost gimmicky ideas keeping the mood light. King played with different toys throughout the next few tunes, which he supposedly borrowed from his kids. He started one song with a music box type thing, which played a garbled, major melody that served as a foundation for the band to improvise loosely over. One tune had the King playing some Latin grooves while Fratzke and Lewis played an unwieldy, almost clumsy contrasting groove. King described it best as “Vikings trying to play Cuban music.” There was no lack of variety in color, as the band moved in and out of free sections, drum and bass grooves, and thrasher parts which got the trio headbanging like the best of them. A great performance from a band I’d like to hear more from, with the energy and attitude that will hit home for anyone looking for some improvised music played with a little more edge.