February 5, 1997
By Derk Richardson MORE THAN two dozen musicians -- saxophonists, singers, drummers, and bassists -- were spread across and spilling off either side of the stage. Four upright-bass players were generating a dense rumble of tumbling notes and patterns. New York avant-garde bassist William Parker, who earlier had played solo, was now on the tuba, pumping out oom-pah-pahs from Mars. North Carolina improvising-guitar legend Eugene Chadbourne plinked, plunked, and scraped away at his banjo. In front of the stage, saxophonist Marco Eneidi was conducting this semiorganized cacophony that he calls his American Jungle Orchestra and Chorus. This was more than just another night at Beanbender's, the Sunday evening improvised-music showcase that takes place in the Berkeley Store Gallery on Shattuck Avenue. Instead of the usual core audience of 25 or 30, more than 100 people showed up for this star-studded event. If larger than usual, the gathering nonetheless typified what has been coming to a head in the Bay Area's music scene. The golden ageDuring the past three years something of a golden age has dawned for improvised music -- music related to such diverse influences as the "outside" forms of African American jazz, as represented by Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, or the Art Ensemble of Chicago; the "free" playing of such English and European musicians as Evan Parker and Derek Bailey (see "Improvising a Revolution," left); the indeterminate or "chance" music of John Cage; the punk rock of the Minutemen and Saccharine Trust; and the "downtown" New York hybrids of John Zorn, Elliott Sharp, and others. In addition to the tenacious bookings of Koncepts Cultural Gallery (which include this month's three-weekend Double Up '97 festival of improvised duets) and the expansion of the Asian American jazz movement, the Bay Area has seen the rise (and in some cases fall) of such venues as Merchant's, the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, the Stork Club, Radio Valencia, the Hotel Utah's Dark Circle Lounge, Beanbender's, Coffeehead, and Venue Nine. At the same time, scores of new names have appeared in the concert listings. The roll call of musicians, once dominated by such veterans as Rova Saxophone Quartet, Glenn Spearman, Greg Goodman, Rotodoti, Henry Kaiser, Bruce Anderson, and Splatter Trio (some of whom have been on the scene for more than two decades), has grown to include Lisle Ellis, Ben Goldberg, Miya Masaoka, Dana Reason, Ralph Carney, Joel Harrison, Oluyemi and Ijeoma Thomas, Dan Plonsey, Beth Custer, Damon Smith, Francis Wong, Carla Kihlstedt, Graham Connah, Phillip Greenlief, and dozens of other names in various stable and ephemeral alignments. They use keyboards, horns, strings, percussion, voice, and homemade instruments to spontaneously generate new musical forms, textures, and colors, usually far removed from the familiar musical reference points of commercial radio or the concert hall. More than most popular music (or even most semipopular jazz and classical forms), improvised music demands a certain ingenuity on the part the audience member. As improviser, composer, and professor of music George Lewis has recently written (see "Context Is Key," page 39), "It seems clear that the listener also improvises, posing alternative paths, experiencing immediacy as part of the listening experience." The Finger PalaceThe night after the big Beanbender's blowout a handful of musicians gathered in the living room of improvising pianist Greg Goodman. Also known as Woody Woodman's Finger Palace -- founded in 1978 as a performance space for irregularly scheduled events of irregular music and theater -- the small West Berkeley house is equipped with a theatrical lighting rig and, for ticketed shows (the tickets are bananas), risers with 25 or so chairs are set up at one end of the room opposite the grand piano. On this night, I was a privately invited audience of one for the regular Monday Night Band (known in public as the Duck Tape Boulders) improv session. Pianist Woody Woodman, drummers Joseph Sabella and Deborah Craig, and guitarist Terry Rolleri were joined by saxophonist-flutist Andrew Voigt (an original member of Rova). Sabella blew deep, quiet, oceanic tones from a tuba; Craig skittered around her drums and cymbals with a set of brushes; Woodman reached inside the piano and plucked the strings; Rolleri jammed a stick into his electric guitar's strings and strummed weird, barely audible hums and moans; Voigt injected melodic fragments on flute and sax. The sounds gelled into rippling, strangely cohesive patterns and gathered into intermittent roars of four-handed drumming, cascading piano notes, and collectively generated tonal clusters. I noticed that a spotlight had created a splash of orange on the wall behind the piano -- sunrise over Baldwin. The room was a cubist maze of shapes: the curved brass of the tuba reflecting glints of colored light, cymbals hovering like flying saucers in the air, a guitar neck slanting against the black camel-hump of the piano lid. The music itself may not have been magical or terribly wild, but the process of musicmaking had embraced me and left me in the end feeling freshly scrubbed and a bit disoriented. Scenic visionImprovised music may strike you as abstract, but it is not necessarily free of historical precedent and personal association. As George Lewis has noted in explicating the "Afrological" perspective in contemporary improvisation, "the development of the improvisor" encompasses "the harmonization of one's musical personality with social environments." Whether rooted in the African American experience or the transcultural position of such Asian American artists as Jon Jang or Vijay Iyer, the improvisational process of "creating and discovering form" can derive from and give rise to individual and cultural narratives; it can indeed tell a story. But just as improvisation does not necessarily begin with the launching of notes into the air, neither does it always end with the creation of musical meaning in the mind of the listener. The history of improvised music in the Bay Area over the past 20 years is a story of entrepreneurial improvisation as well. In the late 1970s the Finger Palace, the Mission District's Blue Dolphin, Bernal Heights' Pangaea, and Sabella's ballroom-size Metropolitan Art Center near Geary and Van Ness all played host to the region's musical avant-garde. A relatively fallow decade followed. Koncepts Cultural Gallery, a multicultural volunteer organization initially housed in Oakland's Jenny Lind Hall, stepped into the breech in 1984 and became especially valuable for booking such out-of-town, nonmainstream jazz performers as John Carter, the Sun Ra Arkestra, Oliver Lake, Horace Tapscott, Cassandra Wilson, and others. But beyond Koncepts, which moved to downtown Oakland in 1987 and has been homeless since 1992, bookings of improvised music were few and far between. The current renaissance -- documented monthly in the Transbay Improvised Music Calendar -- was seeded in August 1989, when a group of improvisers and fans of the music staged the first three-day Improvised Music Festival at Koncepts. Momentum picked up at a China Basin restaurant called Olive Oil's, where Rick Reis cultivated a nascent "improvcore" scene with established units like Rova and such newcomers as the rock-rooted Molecules. In July 1991 Lexa Walsh and Luke Wesson began putting together similar bills for the Heinz Afterworld Lounge in Oakland. By the end of 1992 Don Allen had begun booking avant-garde musicians into regular Sunday-night slots at his San Francisco cafÈ, Radio Valencia. Since the spring of 1993, when Lorrie Murray leaped into the booking fray, first at Merchant's in Oakland and later at the Stork Club, where she remained until last August, there have always been at least three and sometimes more venues offering a rotating menu of improvised music throughout the week. Splatter Trio percussionist Gino Robair booked the Dark Circle Lounge from January 1994 until January 1997. Dan Plonsey, Bill Hsu, and Seth Katz started up Beanbender's in March 1995 after clarinetist Ben Goldberg had curated series across the street at the original Berkeley Store Gallery. Something for everyoneBassist Damon Smith jumped on the booking merry-go-round a year ago at Coffeehead in Oakland, later moving to Venue Nine (which is now booked by Kathy Ketman) and more recently putting together his Something Else Presents shows at Bindlestiff Studio, Bottom of the Hill, Beanbender's, and the Pour House. "For me," said the 24-year-old Smith, who came to improv through the rock window opened by the likes of Mike Watt and Joe Baiza, "the motivation [for booking shows] came from being a musician and getting tired of getting the run-around all the time. I found it was easier to deal with the hassles of booking than dealing with the hassles of getting gigs. I also wanted to bring out a lot of the older musicians who I thought didn't get enough play, like Oluyemi [Thomas] and Marco [Eneidi] and George [Cremaschi]. I wanted to get a chance to play and I had a certain thing that I wanted to be hearing." The story was similar for 38-year-old saxophonist Dan Plonsey, who came to improvised music through the music of Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble, and his studies with Roscoe Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, and Wadada Leo Smith at the Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, N.Y. "When I first came to Berkeley and started playing improvised music around 1984, it was pretty much impossible to find a gig. But we'd go to Koncepts and see a hundred people, or see John Zorn attracting hundreds to the Great American Music Hall or Slim's and think, well, potentially all these people should be interested in what we're doing," Plonsey said. Over the course of two years, through a combination of its intriguing bookings and its casual, nonelitist setting, Beanbender's has gradually nurtured a genuine community out of "all these people." Plonsey argues that despite improvised music's reputation as difficult listening, the audience can expand to include "anyone whose interest in art goes really deep. People who would go to foreign films at the Pacific Film Archive and be willing sit still for two hours and experience something that's almost incomprehensible, it seems to me they should like our music." Larry Ochs, the "O" of Rova Saxophone Quartet, has been around long enough to have experienced the ups of audience appreciation and the downs of obscurity. In the not so distant past, the saxophonists of Rova performed fairly infrequently in the Bay Area, mostly at self-promoted gigs. Now, Steve Adams, Bruce Ackley, and Jon Raskin can be heard often around town, and Ochs has a virtually ubiquitous presence on the scene in such groups as Room, What We Live, and the Glenn Spearman Double Trio. Whereas bands like Rova have long counted on being better known in Europe than at home, the currently thriving improv scene has helped rectify the balance of trade. "It has provided venues, so that the international players like [Fred] Frith and Zorn can come through on a more regular basis," Ochs said. "All these places may eventually cycle out," he noted with a bracing dash of realism, "either because the organizers don't have the energy anymore or the economic realities don't allow them to continue." But for now the unpredictable sounds known as improvised music keep springing forth with stunning regularity, allowing its participants -- musicians and listeners -- to grow in both number and creativity, and making the Bay Area a vital capital on the global circuit.
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The Bay Area's improv record labels
IN RECENT YEARS,
three Bay Area-based independent labels have become significant players in the
international marketplace of improvised music. The following are representative
recent releases from these bastions of the improvising spirit:
Music & Arts
India Cooke, RedHanded
Asian Improv Records
Anthony Brown, Family
Rastascan Records
Eugene Chadbourne, Volume 2; Solo Acoustic Guitar (& More)
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