Reviews of Beanbender's Shows
From 1997

January 5:
Laura Carmichael and Ned McGowan /
Miya Masaoka /
The Beanbender's Crew, a.k.a. Nancy and Sluggo

Miya Masaoka can play at Beanbender's whenever she wants to! On this occasion, she played a fairly short set: one solo piece (maybe 20 minutes), and a duet with Larry Ochs (maybe 10 minutes). This time around, Miya had herself taped into place and was playing electronically enhanced koto. I don't know how everything worked - Miya referred to the use of samples, but the samples blended so well with the amplified koto that often it sounded like a giant koto. A giant koto tromping down the alleyways of our city in pursuit of evildoers - or maybe a bit evil itself, but comically so. A giant cartoon koto with eight legs, crushing cars and buildings and fighting off the giant wasp, as played by Larry Ochs on sopranino sax. Ochs buzzed around and around, only provoking Masaoka to further stomping and shouting. This is all figurative, of course. Poetic license and all that. Anyway, there was a double-giant hermaphrodite, and it was twanging on a zither which Hermes had given to Apollo: the frame was a shell of a turtle. Also, there were many periods of great delicacy, but that doesn't make for as good writing. So there was a battleship - a battlestar - and a giant sun which exploded and everyone cheered!

Laura Carmichael (clarinet) and Ned McGowan (flute) started their set with a beautiful two-movement piece by Scelsi, in which the two instruments repeatedly twine around one another, come together in unison, separate by step, flutter, come back, mostly within a fairly small range. The McGowan played three solo pieces. Most impressive was an entirely impossible piece by Ferneyhough, most musical was one by Robert Dick. The Ferneyhough jumped from timbre to timbre pitch to pitch blah to blah. Not very interesting, other than as a study in excessive futility. The Dick composition featured a set of sets of pitches and overtones thereon which cycled around beautifull. There was also a piece by an Italian composer featuring lots of tongue-thwaps which I liked. Throughout, McGowan played with incredible grace and assurance - surely he is one of the top new-music flutists around? His technical prowess dwarfs that of almost all of the musicians we usually see in these parts. Next to McGowan - and no doubt due to the ill effects of a very cold performing space - Carmichael's performance of a solo piece by local composer Kurt(?) Rohde was less than entirely successful. Perhaps too it's just not that great a piece. The opening (at least) seemed to be a take-off on Bartok's 5th String Quartet, and the tightness of the Bartok was the unraveling of the Rohde. The duo then played the Scelsi again, and finished with an improvisation with guest John Schott, which I enjoyed for the chamber-music compositional interplay.

Finishing off the evening, the Beanbender's crew (Alan Brightbill, electric guitar; Nancy Clarke, violin; Dan Plonsey, borrowed-clarinet; Doug Carroll, cello, and Bill Hsu, piano) did about 15-20 minutes of improvisation together (unrehearsed). It felt quite successful. The presence of Clarke and Brightbill gave the set a Snowflake flavor: untutored, unpolished, unconventional approach to playing: a scraping and buzzing and bursting. None of that pitch/rhythm crapola for this crew! Hsu interjected statements and questions of sanity, Plonsey spluttered and fumed, and suddenly Clarke was sawing and sawing. The first piece ended with a crackling of Brightbill's malfunctioning amp - or was it purposeful? A second piece followed. Then the quintet was mobbed by adoring fans and my memory gives way to a blackness barren of meaning or substance.

Dan

January 12:
Bob Fuller and friends /
O-Type with Bruce Anderson, Marc Weinstein, Dale Sophia and Jim Hrabetin

I missed this concert - anyone see it who'd like to report?

Dan

January 19:
Eugene Chadbourne /
Offramp

Offramp opened with a fine set in support of an excellent new CD. It's a bit hard to describe what they do, except through imagery of pseudo-science. I like watching Jim Hearon play his computer. It's just like being at work, but instead of building a lot of pointless software, he's manipulating small sounds, putting them here and there while Doug Carroll and Tom Nunn putter about with their experiments. Nunn, playing his own arcane pre-20th century devices (but all the more fascinating for their rods and springs and flower pots and balloons) with little metal implements. Sort of like a dentist, I suppose (and here I pause to contemplate the connection between the stand with it's 32-bar form, broken into 4 8-bar segments, and the mouth with its 32 teeth, composed of 4 sets of 8 in a nicely imperfect symmetry. Could this be the origin of Chadbourne's tune "The Dentist," which he played later that evening?). Carroll is more the classical musician, and he even shakes his head around the way all the best cellists do, sort of like a lion in a zoo, with the four strings on the cello representing the bars on the cage. [Hey, I don't have an editor. Would anyone like to apply?] So Tom Nunn in this context, banging on a bunch of rods, often with delay, presents quite the rhythmic grid in which the other two (Hearon back to electric violin by now, making freaky-squeaky processed sounds) can lay on thich swatches of quite un-strung strings. It's more like a swelling and a tearing. The form is quite like a wooly blanket, and almost as warm. I do like this band!

It's come to my attention that Eugene Chadbourne ought to be a national hero, and my street, which is named "Ludwig" will have to be renamed "Eugene." This has happened in relative quiet (ironic, given the incredible noise made by this man). Historically, when Chadbourne started incorporating elements (and then whole cloths) of C&W into his music, some folks of the "pure-improv" crowd took umbrage; and later, when he turned more and more to his own songs of protest, complaint and celebration; and when those little tapes started to emerge in packaging decorated by his daughters and stuffed with forms and pages from an unpublished book - more folks perhaps decided that the man who brought the Derek Bailey guitar ethic to this continent had perhaps discarded his marbles or worse. I'm speculating that some people who like this so-called creative music are into little more than whatever is fast and loud and bright and hot: they are the moths of music. Meanwhile, Chadbourne is writing insect music for a bunch of bass players, and a twisted post-Ellington music for a European sextet (adapting one piece for solo guitar, with which he opened this particular set), creating tape collages which bring musicians out onto an Amsterdam street into some sort of Utopian celebration of the night and of R&B honkers (available in boxes and bags of cookies consumed by his family - along with most of his output, issued in incredibly small runs while the original changes. That a musician of this stature is operating with all the feverish unstoppable creativity of a cancer cell, to the point where even his most stalwart collectors chose to give up collecting his works entirely (surpassing even Sun Ra's Saturn records in their impenitrable uncategorizable discographical mess) - while much lesser minds acheive success by fastening on one thing which can be theirs, which they can do ad nauseum and market cleverly while pretending to be outside the business... Chadbourne hardly pretends to be outside: he's got daughters to raise; he's not someone for the "naive art" movement to adopt; he listens widely and incorporates everything. And during this set I realized that it was time for me to proclaim (in whatever tiny voice I have) Chadbourne's emergence into a very, very select company of Americian composers: Charles Ives, Sun Ra, Anthony Braxton Morton Feldman, and maybe no others... For their productivity outside the system, eschewing the desire for system (to which Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow among other maverick American's have succumbed). It's a theological distinction: Ives, Ra, and Chadbourne being Emersonian: their music a direct apprehension of the divine, as opposed to those whose God resides in form. Theirs is a creativity which comes too quickly and profusely; never is there time for editing or packaging (or even a sound-check, or in Braxton's case, time to get instruments repaired). Anyway, it was during this set that I recognized certain elements: as in the sudden switch to distortion in the midst of a country tune, almost out of time with the music (not cleanly, that is; not a clean bar or two of distorted solo, but just a sudden reckless switch to a whole other realm of music-making, of chaos) - a switch which might last for seconds or might be forever - the song to be entirely left behind, unfinished. And as in the performance of originals side by side with Ellington, Coltrane, traditional blues; let alone the encore performance (by request) of "Purple Haze" and "Girl From Ipanema": at first cutting from one to the other like switching stations, the distortion going and coming with changes between songs, later making a smoother and more sneaky interpolation of "Girl" as a part of the distorted "Haze."

Chadbourne's use of his homemade amplified "Plunger" also reflects Sun Ra's out-of-scale electric keyboard solos which went well outside the realms of Earthly beauty into the space worlds, where wholly other musical laws apply: the music being almost (or entirely) intolerably loud, noisy, and pointless: elemental chaos; presented with a straight, unimpassioned expression (distinguishing the music from that of the "energy-music" folks who insist it's all about emotion), hands washing back and forth over an upturned keyboard, not even looking, perhaps playing behind the back... Chadbourne's take is a bit different: he fusses with the plunger as if it's something else: a toy, an animal, an experiment, a piece of equipment belong to the world of transportation or manufacturing perhaps; certainly not a music instrument for self-expression. All the while it's emitting a horrible crackling, terrifying the owner of the amplifier he's borrowed; the performance containing the elements of comedy: clowning, mugging, and on a higher level, taunting the audience for its expectations that a musician will present music, and that it will make sense. Does he like these sounds? Are they privileged? Are all sounds Cagily equal? Maybe, but only sometimes. Chadbourne's esthetic, like Sun Ra's, is complicated by their clear appreciation for the classical beauty of Ellington, and for their ability to write beautiful songs with tender and touching lyrics. And both are cursed by that subset of their audience who imagine that everything they do is funny; who don't know when the clown makeup is on or off (I was annoyed by people laughing throughout the set, including during "I Dreamed I was Young Again").

In the interest of reporting what actually happened, I'd like to mention that Chadbourne's banjo playing has definitely picked up (so to speak); it's closer to idiomatic bluegrass playing, less like a guitarist playing a banjo. But make no mistake: no one plays banjo like this! His cover of a Captain Beefheart tune (from "Trout Mask Replica") makes me want to examine his CD of covers of Beefheart: he was criticized for ignoring the music, but really what he's done is stick pretty close to the melody sung by Beefheart, and then create an accompaniment which is entirely new, and on banjo, sounding like something some dada bluegrass musician would've come up with - if there were such players! I'd be satisfied if this was his only contribution to music. But of course there's lots more...

Dan

January 26:
William Parker /
Marco Eneidi's American Jungle Orchestra, with Parker, Jackson Krall and Eugene Chadbourne

William Parker started the concert off with a set of solo bass music. His first piece was so over-the-top, over-the-bottom, all over the bass - that I lost the ability to concentrate on the music. There was a beautiful shimmery piece of harmonics, and finally a great little story about boys stealing from musicians, but being stopped in their tracks as they run away by the sound of the music. But alas, I can give no further details other than that William Parker is one monster of a player!

Eneidi's Orchestra played one long piece. The group consisted of about seven saxes and clarinets, a chorus of five or six people, perhaps five bass players, two drummers, and Parker on tuba. The music consisted of about ten musical fragments for the orchestra, and perhaps as many textural fragments for the chorus. Simple as these were, Eneidi wove them together with dexterity, keeping things moving, making contrasts, queing soloists (Elliot Levine, visiting from Philadelphia, impressed many with the ferocity of his tenor playing - which was unfortunately balanced by some pretty lame poetry which he occasionally interpolated). A powerful, loud set of blocks of bright colors, big unisons, shrieking solos. An eminently enjoyable evening out!

Dan

February 2:
Water Shed 5tet /
Bonnie Barnett Band, featuring Barnett (vocals), Richard Wood Hannes Giger (bass), Graham Connah (piano), and Spirit (percussion)

Bonnie's bands are always great. There's a sort of burbling dada quality to the interaction. This time, Richard Wood was compelled to go running offstage with his strapless alto sax every time he had to make with the louder shrieks. Bonnie's amused commentary was totally on the mark due to its wordlessness. Hannes and Graham filled in the spaces with low and high bleeps and bloops respectively, Graham's electronics answering to Spirit's muted shouts. Totally incomprehensible and totally fine. I had a grand time.

Water Shed 5tet is from Pittsburgh PA, where perhaps there aren't as many different venues or musicians or bands into the free-ish stuff. What that means (I imagine) is that musicians with fairly diverse aesthetics may wind up in the same band - and also that a good musician can't afford to be narrow-minded. Water Shed 5tet incorporates some very diverse influences: Sun Ra, Zappa, Braxton are all apparent. Not that these aren't all elements of leader Ben Opie's fevered brain, but I can't help but wonder whether this group isn't actually two groups, one of which (in a more musician-laden locale) would be doing odd post-progressive rock, while the other did thorny new music/jazz. Not that that would be better: hybrids keep the world hopping! Anyway, they did some nice tunes, but the only soloist who seemed really comfortable was Opie, whose sax and clarinet playing is solid and exciting. I would have liked to hear more from the cellist (yikes - gotta look up her name), but she didn't find much space to stretch out.

After three or four originals, Graham Connah (keyboards), Gino Robair (thermin and marimba) and Dan Plonsey (me) (tenor and baritone sax) were invited up to play a set of Sun Ra arrangements. These were received with great enthusiasm. Opie's arrangements were quite close to the original, and the band added segments of free improv between tunes. Connah, Robair and Plonsey were suffiently inspired to begin plans for a Sun Ra cover band... Thank you Ben Opie and Water Shed 5tet!

Dan

February 9:
Malcolm Goldstein (violin), Jaap Blonk (voice), Lisle Ellis (bass) and Miya Masaoka (koto)

This music was extremely and completely satisfying just as sound and performance, disconnected from "normal" music by a layer of illusion (I suppose). For instance, Blonk giving a cogent lecture at the piano, complete with many little examples - the subject being perhaps musicology or music theory or the piano itself - in a wordless, but clearly intoned precise manner. Or Goldstein strolling about like a Gypsy violinist, but just playing the envelopes of phrases: the rough sounds which might surround a non-existent melody; or Lisle Ellis finding himself playing solo piano - after which each of the other three was obligated to play piano in turn. Or again Blonk, seeing the other three sawing away at some sort of tragic evening-end post-Schonbergian ode, taking apart his microphone stand in order to join the others, using the arm of the stand to "bow" the shaft while singing like a cross between a well-bred dog and one less well-bred. Or Lisle reading a poem off the wall of the gallery while holding his bass upside-down and backwards against himself: a living bass reciting nonsense. Or later? earlier? playing a sort of blues bass line upon which Goldstein and Blonk placed phrase after perfect phrase of scrapes and moans. (Note: Goldstein's violin playing is a sort of afterimage of music, analagous to riding a bus through the downtown in mid-morning, bright sun reflecting back and forth between shop windows and the grimy bus windows, a sort of kaleidescopic effect occurs, especially in the instants just after you close your eyes against the glare, and in the sudden cool behind the eyelids you see only disconnected fragments of the surfaces of the city). Or what? The questions abound, chief of which being: why does this become music? When would it lose itself so far from music as to be something else? For somehow, remote as it could get, it maintained the strongest of ties to performance of some sort of ur-music: the music which sits beneath jazz, classical, blues, folk. The gestures were familiar and full of meaning - most obviously in Blonk's hand and facial movements: commonplace to the point of being everyday, to being, as it all is, in addition to everything else - about absolutely nothing, as encapsulated in the finest of all human gestures (one that even the youngest will make): the shrug.

Dan

February 16:
Dan Seamans, Carla Kihlstedt, Elliot Kavee Trio /
Hear (Erich Fischer & Hannes Giger) /
Aaron Bennett, Charles Sharp, John Finkbeiner

Bennett, Sharp & Finkbeiner opened with a set which was spirited, varied, often raucous, never precious. They had a few tunes/structures which revealed perhaps more about their theoretic backgrounds than about themselves - or perhaps it was the other way around - somewhere near the break-even point. That is, the impact of post-WWII structuralism, with post-modernism, post-AACM "little instruments," dada, etc. A good band, if a little rough around the edges. Sharp and Bennett blow those saxophones with the force and precision of a gale wind (i.e., more force than precision); Finkbeiner presents a contrasting style, approaching his guitar with a care and reserve which flesh out his "young pharmacist" image. Already dramatic, I would look to this band to develop perhaps along the lines of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, or perhaps into a full-fledged touring ensemble of gypsy actors and horse-traders. It could go either way.

Hear present a musical persona which is much more developed, more finely shaded, and yet maybe weirder than the openers. I was familiar with some of their material: the pounding Nels-Cline-ian piece, the one where Hannes uses 3 or 4 bows simultaneously, and another which I've forgotten now (sorry, it's mid-March now). The duo are obviously very comfortable with one another as friends and musicians (able to put their instruments down and stage a mock-conference at great length right in the middle of one piece). Clowning is an important aspect of their music, but it's a very musical clowning (remember the strange German clown in that Jim Jarmusch movie "Night on Earth" who proves that he's a clown by playing music). And as compliment to the humor, they play pieces with beautiful bowed chords, very melancholy. A great little band!

Dan Seamons presented a long suite of compositions; during some of which he actually sang songs (whose words I didn't quite get; I had the impression that they related to a sort of personal soul-searching). His bass playing was thick, meaty and very bassy. A great sound! Kihlstedt didn't so much solo as provide a counterpoint to the bass and flesh out the harmonies. The texture varied in subtle ways from piece to piece; I want to hear it all again. There was an aura of confidence and maturity to this music which escapes my powers of description; I can't quite get the flavor across. No, wait: it was like a rich, dark, vegetable stew in which the individual ingredients have given way. A very impressive sound.

Dan

February 23:
Gianni Gebbia /
Phil Gelb, Dana Reason, Matt Sperry /
Jack Wright

Gianni Gebbia was in town for over a week of performances, and blew everyone away. His saxophone solos at Beanbender's easily puts him in the ranks of the great post-Parker saxophonists, incredible range of colors and always musical results, sometimes tempered with references to world music. That same packed evening also had sensitive and thoughtful sets by Phil Gelb, Dana Reason and Matthew Sperry, and another raucous and wonderful solo set by Jack Wright, footstomping and all.

Bill

I count myself as one who was especially blown away by Gebbia! Gelb and Reason played a couple beautiful, sparse, quiet duets (Reason playing on a single note, damping the string with her hand). Jack Wright worked on the ongoing exploration of consciousness as the subject and substance of music/musical performance. Gebbia played longish (10 minute) circular-breathed compositions. Obviously worked out quite carefully, his pieces each had a different focus and character. One dwelt primarily with a single low note: at first held by itself (Gebbia's breathing supremely smooth and seamless), then with a hummed second note a fourth above, resolving to a third; then as part of a pattern: as the bottom drone voice in some Sicilian polyphonic evocation of the volcano. Other pieces recalled Italian folk music (accordion, pipes, the three-tubed launnedas of Sardinia). All pieces were presented with a masterful patience and exquisite timing. Jack Wright worked from an opposing end: brief, fractured phrases, gasps, yelps; thoughts in bits and pieces, nothing whole, everything an interruption and intrusion upon itself and upon silence. Stomping, kicking shoes off, taking over the whole stage: an enormous struggle. Not at all about harmony, melody, or any perceivable musical values so much as about 1) the nature of pure thought, 2) the nature of the mouth, the saxophone, the air, the stage, feet, fingers, hands, the head, wispy hair, breath, blowing, moving, living, being on stage, being in front of people on stage at Beanbender's February 23, 1997. Curious to hear Jack Wright after Gebbia... There are some interesting contradictions inherent in Wright's work, and the big crux is the question of what is music here: which of the traditional musical values do we feel least comfortable about watching Jack jettison? The contradictions: if all musical thought is open to question at all times, then how can there be dialogue and counterpoint?

Meanwhile, Sperry joined Gelb and Reason (and later, Gebbia and Wright too) for some music which I liked very much; enough so that I don't feel like writing about it.

Dan

February 28:
Wadada Leo Smith & John Tchicai Quartet /
Wadada Leo Smith & Oluyemi Thomas Duet

When I got there to setup, there were a bunch of high school kids congregated around the stage playing some horrible music on a boombox, getting ready to perform some high school production. One of the ongoing dialectics here in the Beanbender's world is the musicians we present (e.g., Frith, Evan Parker, Leo Smith) are placed on an equal footing with local high school kids. Strange. So because the space was double-booked, we (Wadada Leo Smith, John Tchicai, Spirit, Oluyemi Thomas, and a livid Damon Smith) were wandering lost in the desert in some sort of exile while chipper youth pranced about gaily. Finally, our very generous and idealistic (if occasionally forgetful) sponsor, Bonnie Hughes, made her new Berkeley Store Gallery space available to us for the concert.

I heard about three notes before I had to leave. Anyone want to e-mail me a review?

Dan

March 2:
Vinny Golia & Marilyn Lerner Duet /
Acid Karaoke: Carl Stone & Min Xiao-Fen /
The Scott Fields Ensemble with Donald Robinson and Matt Turner

Y'all should have been there for the marvelous duets of Vinny Golia (reeds) and Marilyn Lerner (piano) as well, the next week. Alternately driving and energetic, and lyrical and subtle.

Bill

The Lerner / Golia duet was lush and thorny: kind of a Debussy meets Godzilla situation. And who amongst us could be anything but enthralled by that scenario?! Golia was ferocious and even lyrical on bass clarinet, baritone sax and a few other woodwinds, while Lerner held her own at the piano: her style has elements of modal jazz, Satie, Debussy & Ravel, and maybe a bit of Don Pullen. Very enjoyable.

March 9:
Jay Rozen, with guests Ron Heglin, Tom Heasely, and Dan Plonsey /
Flex Plan Delta (Marilyn Lerner, Harold Carr, Andrew Voigt, Peter Valsamis, Flavia Cervino-Wood)

Jay Rozen is an old friend, so perhaps I'm a bit biased, but I like his playing! He did a couple pieces for solo tuba and electronics, varying the texture through use of saxophone moutpieces, delay, replacing tuning slides with party horns, etc. His solo music is very rhythmic and bassy: the extension of the bass line into the upper realms, occupying the entire sound space. Rozen invited fellow-tubists Heasley and Heglin to join him, and the resulting piece was quite rewarding. Rozen was clearly in the role of leader: moving the trio through a series of different textural settings before laying down a bass-line over which Heasley blooted and Heglin blatted, neither quite at Rozen's level of clarity on the muddy and moody instrument. Rozen's final piece was a duet with old friend Dan Plonsey (me) on baritone sax, and this was, if I may say so myself, quite a successful bit of music; veering from one subject to the next with incredible ease (I find Rozen's musical thought to be as agile as any person I've played with, or perhaps moreso when one considers the legacy of "unwieldiness" that tuba players must overcome). At one point the James Bond theme song began, entirely out of the blue, only to be followed by a lot of bird-like squawking and carrying-on. It could have gone on much longer. I wish we had this one on tape!

Dan

March 16:
Randy Porter's Pleasure Music Ensemble with Dave Slusser, Garth Powell, Tom Nunn and Richard Saunders /
024c (not to foresee): James Livingston, Tom Swafford, Greg Pitter

Once again, I'm catching up on old reviews... If anyone out there has a better memory for these concerts, or just a different opinion, please send me email!

024c (James Livingston (alto sax, voice, piano, perc.), Tom Swafford(violin, piano, perc.), Greg Pitter (trombone, viola, piano)) played a relatively short set, utilizing violins and trombones and things, along with voice and pretty decent poetry. In fact, my favorite piece involved two violins and poetry-voice. The level of interaction was quite high, with players listening to each others moves on a micro and macro level. Good endings, to-the-point sort of improv, left us wanting more, no complaints. To move to the next level they may cultivate their attitude further in any of several directions: more contrast/chaos, or become more cohesive/unified (difficult) - or who knows? More stories/poetry? They pulled it off better than many more polished and/or well-known ensembles. The instrumental facility is already there; they will certainly acquire more character and presence in the coming years.

Randy Porter's group played music which was indeed quite pleasurable. These guys (most especially Randy) are friends, so perhaps I'm both a little too critical and a little too un-critical. I will say that I like the Manufacturing of Humidifiers' version of "Dyeapota" (sp?) better, but (1) the PM ensemble only got to rehearse it once and (2) I play in the Manufacturing of Humidifiers! I must admit, though, that Tom Nunn's percussion added quite a bit to this rendition. For you trivia buffs, this is the second piece which the Manofhu have recorded that has been later performed by a different ensemble with Dave Slusser playing my part! Anyone able to name the other tune? Back to business... I would say that the ensemble could have played with a bit more fierceness, or less politeness - these guys can all burn and wail and set fire to things and put rods through their guitars, but on this occasion, a tastefulness prevailed. Highlights included a guitar-with-rod feature, and a great Garth Powell poem-rant in which he compressed about a years's worth of musical experience into one five(?) minute piece. More words from Mr. Powell, please!

Dan

March 23:
Steve Lew Quartet, with Dan Plonsey, Tom Yoder, and Gino Robair /
Roberto DeHaven group

Well, I say that Steve Lew is both madman and genius! This set of music featured yours truly struggling on clarinets for the most part, though I had to admit: the sound of clarinet and trombone together is worth the sweat and fear. Another attraction of playing this music is that Lew's instructions for improvisation are perhaps more megalomaniacal than Stockhausen's in _Aus den Sieben Tagen_. Like Erik Satie's parenthetical notes to the pianist, these instructions are obscured from the audience. What does Lew's music sound like? A little like Frank Zappa, Eskimo (that great band in which Lew plays bass), or some European cartoon-prog-rock band: constructivist, repeated cells; tonality stretched through odd substitutions of dissonant notes; intricate bass lines. A short set, leaving the hungry audience clamoring for more!

Dan

March 30:
Bobby Driscoll memorial: with the Beanbender's crew (Alan Brightbill, Doug Carroll, Nancy Clarke, Bill Hsu & Dan Plonsey), Myles Boisen, Dave Slusser

Man, I played on this one too! Myles, Doug and I each did some solo stuff, then Slusser played a duet with Hsu; then the Beanbender's Crew played an inimitable set of strangeness. I have to say that I liked it all. I had a very enjoyable time.

Dan

April 6:
Luc Houtkamp /
Phillip Greenlief with Wadada Leo Smith, Trevor Dunn, Scott Amendola

I heard parts of Houtkamp's solo set, unfortunately interrupted by the business of running the place which kept taking me out. What I heard I liked: a sense of composition, structure, development; use of extremes of the saxophone and modern techniques, etc. There are too many good solo players these days; they all know how to think and to compose! Some of them (Houtkamp, Gebbia, Butcher, Kuntz) even seem to have time to practice, and when they get out there, they're prepared. What's a saxophonist to do? What's the next step?

I heard about the first 10 minutes of Greenlief's set, before, once again I was taken away. Greenlief said that the music was dedicated to the notion of ghosts, and it seemed to be purely improvised. Greenlief and Wadada entered and exited; it all seemed a little tentative (as a fabric, not coming together - though Wadada's trumpet sound was very live and brassy). Perhaps someone who stayed for the whole set could let us know what happened next - I heard from one anonymous source that "it was all like the first 10 minutes," but I'd like to hear more. Wadada is such an imaginative composer; I feel like it's a failing of Beanbender's that while we've had him play three times now, we have not gone the extra mile to produce one of his Rastafarian operas, or large-scale creative music compositions. Stay tuned.

Dan

April 13:
Bobby Bradford with Ben Goldberg, Bill Douglas and Don Preston

This was an enjoyable concert! Music of all sorts, styles, ideas, by Bobby Bradford. Some reminiscent of various colleagues (especially Ornette and John Carter), a blues, and other things well beyong category, but quite accessable and hummable. The absence of a drummer was most welcome (as several concert-goers commented happily, hearing intact), and the presence of the very varied imaginations of Preston of Goldberg made for an especially broad sort of musical tapestry. Preston doesn't sound particularly like anyone - his comping and soloing have a crude un-pianistic sense (and I mean this as the highest compliment). In one piece I was startled by a long series of banging chords, just-slightly irregular quarter-notes, intrusive like a homemade fence with huge posts stretching across a field and through any building standing in its path. Goldberg - I have promised myself that I will write an essay about Goldberg's current period of clarinet work - is likewise uncompromisingly un-pretty and unrelenting (though without Preston's humor). The clarinet is wielded savagely, like an axe, very very loud. Squeaks and the appearance of splitting, splintering, not exactly splattering, driven by a mind simultaneously fevered and restrained. Not always easy to listen to. Gone are scale, arpeggio, and by-and-large sequence, though at times one can follow Goldberg through a winding path in which the tessitura gradually shifts from low to middle to upper to middle register, inexorably, without any apparent goal other than a long-term struggle with a very difficult muse, a strange and restless beauty. Not even likable sometimes, nor exactly memorable in detail, these solos extend the clarinet (and bass clarinet and contra-alto clarinet) with each breath into realms which are dark and hot, and which, over the course of each, and most certainly over the course of an evening's collection, become very familiar, compelling, and entirely distinct from all other music. Next to Goldberg, Bradford was an easier pleasure. Though no less deep, Bradford was willing to indulge in some of the fulfilling cliches of his instrument, and thus the two made a great pair. I was happy.

Dan

April 20:
India Cooke Red-Handed, with Lisle Ellis, Donald Robinson, Larry Ochs, a (woman) trumpet player whose name I've forgotten, and Lee

Very enjoyable, especially for the interplay between Cooke and the audience, which was very much hers, from well before the first note was played: they knew her as a friend, teacher, colleague, and some perhaps remembered her work with the Sun Ra Arkestra or more recently with Pauline Oliveros. I want to write about this but somehow I can't - so while I recover my wits, I will say that everyone was very good; Cooke is without a doubt the swiftest boxer of a violinist I've ever heard, and you should do as many many members of the audience did: buy her CD, India Cooke Red-Handed, on Music & Arts.

Dan

April 27:
Alvin Curran /
Dave Slusser, Len Patterson, Graham Connah

Curran ran through an array of samples of all sorts of stuff. It was like watching Earth-television from outer space. Sometimes I heard John Cage's voice, in a sense he was speaking against sense and in that sense made sense in this sense, which is fine by me: that is, after all, art. Dave Slusser, Len Patterson and Graham Connah also made music which was a bit on the side of information-overload. I liked that Connah could actually put something pianistic into the particular aglommeration of fact (that is, the expression of a series of voltages considered for their numeric content). I enjoyed myself, but wished that there had been more large-scale, slow-changing big vast enormous quiet omnipresent background to both sets. That's what I missed.

Dan

May 4:
John Schott Diglossia Ensemble, with Steve Adams, Dan Seamans, Greg Sinabaldi,Joe Karten and Jason Lewis /
Mark Zaki

A very beautiful show. Although John was worried about the lack of rehearsal, the performance was superb; Indeed, one felt that the hectic, uncertain quality in the air added to the experience, when thrown randomly against John's meticulous composing, which (like Braxton) always involves a historical argument as well as the-arrangement-of-notes. The concept of "Diglossia" proved itself to be flexible enough to contain all these relationships, as well as some others I could mention or make up.

But you are wondering about the music. It started with John playing solo and singing (!) the old bluegrass tune "Satisfied Mind." This was NOT intended ironically. The singing was very expressive: A cantatorial John Lee Hooker, maybe. Then the band cut the tune to ribbons. Then Steve Adams made a great deal or noise in a short space of time. I think the riff to Satisfied Mind came back towards the end. It sounded great. I felt able to sell many of my Zorn and Frisell records, their limitations having been cruelly exposed.

I can't remember all the other tunes, and I seem to have misplaced John's splendidly unhelpful program notes. But what I do remember is that each piece was different, but the impact of the set was very far from a facile postmodernism, a merely "ironic" cataloging of sounds or styles. Even though the leaders own guitar was not generously featured, his intelligence was everywhere in the music: It made the set possible, which is not true as often as it should be. Each tune was clearly a part of Schott's continuing investigation of "our music," and the conclusions that appeared in their own time were serious and detailed enough that they didn't fear humor. Or pathos.

Hi-Lites: "poland," which set Joe Karten loose in the hedge maze that is Chopin. (He had it beat.) and the setting of Blake's "Sick Rose," which John sang as if gargling gravel. The old man would have been proud .

In sum, I feel that anyone interested in the more "radical" sounds in Jazz today should purchase any and all commodities featuring Mr. Schott. He always gives good value, and is a "cool" guy with his own "far-out" sound. Follow him on his "musical journey!"

Paul

May 11:
Drew Gardner Group /
Sean Meehan

Missed this one too. Was it a Mother's Day extravaganza? Let me know!

Dan

May 14:
Hans Reichel

what a concert last night!!!!

I am glad to be out here!

phil gelb

Hans Reichel played two sets of unaccompanied solo guitar and daxophone last Wednesday at Beanbenders, here in Berkeley. The music was beautiful, as i expected. The guitar work was quite reminiscent of Coco Bolo Nights, the daxophone stuff was similar to what goes on in the duets with Tom Cora. Oddly enough, it wasn't the music that surprised me the most.

I've often wondered about how he gets those sounds out of his instruments and always assumed that when I finally see him, I would be able to make sense of what he does, but i found the concert to be utterly unilluminating as far as that goes. This is what was the most shocking about the concert.

It's probably for the better. It is difficult to meet your heros and come away with your illusions intact, but to me Hans Reichel still is the elf koenig, able to coax extraordinary sounds out of his instruments by channeling wood spirits -- an ability i've always assumed he developed through some druid version of Robert Johnson's encounter at the crossroads. Thus, i was able to experience the best of both worlds -- seeing him live, but still in awe.

-sekhar

May 18:
Experimental Tokyo Yasuhiro Ohtani, Yuko Nexus6, and Satoru Wono. / Ron Heglin

I missed the first bit of Ron's solo set, hearing only the solo tuba and voice parts. I was quite impressed with Ron's tuba playing: long low tones, growls, like didgeridoo at times only not at all boring. Very thoughtful and subterranean. I've recently heard Ron's vocals a couple times, and I feel like I'm getting to be familiar with his style; there was nothing essentially surprising to it - but that's not really what it's about anyway. He likes to speak in a not-quite language which sounds a bit like Greek, with little dynamic inflection, staying on or near a single pitch. Soothing, and sometimes dream-inducing; I begin to imagine that I understand what he's saying. Usually it's a low-key account of a massive slaying of giants. Very brutal, but in Ron's account the violence is minimized; somehow it all worked out, if not for the best, at least it was interesting, and it didn't happen to anyone we know; it was a long ways off.

Experimental Tokyo played four set-lets: each played solo, then they played together. Yuko Nexus6 started it off by playing a sort of Bo Diddley thing on the guitar which began to trigger other sounds from her computer. Then she asked members of the audience to supply short sounds for manipulation. She got a couple warbles and from Kattt: "You suck!" (It must be mentioned that Kattt actually seemed to be enjoying Nexus6's music). "You suck!" happened to have a nice dominant-to-tonic relationship, and was pleasant to hear repeatedly, forwards and backwards and fragmented. Fun and inventive.

I missed most of the next solo set, but it was everyone's favorite, and what I heard sounded great but can't define. Next was a turntable performance which I liked very much: corny records and much scratching = a good time. The trios were a little tentative perhaps, but very interactive; I appreciated how much body-English (body-Japanese) the trio put into their work - watching most electronic musicians is more-or-less like being at my day job, walking into the computer room (i.e., nothing could be more boring). One of my favorite parts was when Nexus6 utilized a toy that recorded short voice samples, speaking into it, and then wandering through the audience, playing it back for people. An enjoyable set.

Dan

May 25:
Moe Staiano's Moekestra /

Intuit (Tom Heasley (tuba), Dale Meyer (vibes), Katrina Wreede (viola)) opened. Though I liked some of the sounds (Heasley's got a beautifully round tuba sound in all registers), and I appreciated the Feldman-esque-itude of the music (sparse, simple (e.g., one person playing a scale while the others sit quietly)), I couldn't concentrate, so I went into the kitchen and read magazines. I know, I know; "You should be so boring." But sometimes one just isn't in the mood for flaccidity.

The contrast between ensembles could not be more extreme. Moe's orchestra of about 20 musicians: Tom Scandura and Peter Valsamis, percussion; Morgan Guberman, George Cremaschi and two other bassists; Ron Anderson and two other guitarists; Nancy Clarke, violin; a viola; Jason Berry and two other clarinets; Dan Plonsey, sax; and Moe, piano. The piece was structured as three movements. The first, consisted of loud blocks of unisons, first in the strings, moving back and forth from A to F, then other instruments entered; there were some wild solos on top (really, inside of) this huge roar; then a series of conducted notes: up to G, down to C, up to A, up again, etc., all in unison. Very, very effective; simply enormous sound of great complexity (people veering off occasionally, then back together). Second movement began with everyone blowing their noses, then before long a series of sub-ensembles playing in various styles on cue, e.g., "punk," "metal," "jazz;" then combinations of genres, like "lounge-punk." Throughout this section the enrgy was very high, Moe was running around with cardboard signs, throwing discarded ones about; musicians were jumping on and off stage. In the final movement, musicians ran through the audience and Moe attacked the piano with two axes. It took perhaps ten minutes to destroy the piano. A wonderful, wonderful symphony!

Dan

June 1:
Opeye Quartet /
Thornhill Elementary School Band and String Orchestra /
Randy Porter, Dan Plonsey, Ward Spangler, Dave Slusser, Tom Nunn

Opeye were poorly served by St. Johns' boomy, muddy sound. I forget why people play here. It was still a pretty good set, nothing out of the ordinary for an Opeye fan, just plenty of good plucking, bowing and blowing. I noticed that the strings (John Kuntz and Brian Godcheaux) were actually playing what almost amounted to grooves together at times, but free-blowing by Hnery Kuntz and/or Esten Lindgren established wholly other rhythmic strata - not to mention the use of two small curtains! The audience - almost entirely Thornhill students and parents or guardians - seemed a bit perplexed, but interested. Sadly, the Opeye CD was not yet available. We must salivate a bit longer.

The kids were incredible; their entrance singing Sun Ra's "We travel the spaceways," led by percussion, piano, and a fine trombone section, was beautiful and emotional - I wish Sun Ra could have seen it. Later, they did a fine job (a bit out-of-tune, and possibly polychordally in the wrong place at the end?) with David Slusser's arrangement of Ra's "Love in Outer Space." In between, they played many choruses of blues, and the strings played an Ornette tune. Ornette has been less ragged, perhaps, but there were wonderful solos. Then Randy Porter, Dan Plonsey, Ward Spangler, Dave Slusser and Tom Nunn played for about ten minutes - covering Porter's "Pleasure Music" and Plonsey's "Dipthong" in the process, weaving in solos and group improvisation. Very tight, I thought. The kids came back in three groups: woodwinds, brass and strings - to play with the quintet. Each piece had its own sneaky character, and the off-intonation somehow worked. Happy music! Pleasure, pleasure!

Dan

June 8:
Rent Romus, Mantra Ben-Ya'akova (narrator), Doug Carroll, Jim Hearon, Dan Plonsey, Dave Mihaly, Bill N. /
Zen Flesh Collective

Zen Flesh Collective turned out to be these two guys who played a rather minimal sort of ambient music, using a bicycle wheel, a guitar and bass, and some electronics. Pleasant, but memories no longer linger to be shared with you, my faithful reader; you who thirst for a strange sort of knowledge. Thirst no longer: it just doesn't matter. I've seen pottery that I liked better than much music: go to the pottery, my friends!

I was pleased with how well the Poe set went. Rent provided just the right amount of material for a group of decent (modesty) improvisors to work from: a sketch for a march-intro, and a tune written by Danish keyboardist Jonas Muller. The rest was about responding to - or ignoring - stories by Edgar Allan Poe, read with great flair, darkness and just a touch of cornball drama by Mantra Ben-Ya'akova.

Dan

June 15, 1997
Sheldon Brown & Rick Myers /
Out by Five: Bill Horvitz, George Cremaschi, Garth Powell

Missed it. Any reviews from one or more of you low-lifes, please???

Dan

June 22, 1997
John Butcher /
The Great Circle Saxophone Quartet: Steve Norton, Chris Jonas, Randy McKean and Dan Plonsey

John Butcher is able to keep my attention quite ably through the manipulation of other parameters than mere pitch and rhythm. He is skillful at the art of multiphonic-making, and he gets other odd sounds which don't have names, like the one where you rapidly inhale/exhale, puffing your cheeks like a bellows, in order to coerce the soprano sax into emitting a breathy "fuffff" sort of sound. There is also his ability to tongue in a variety of excellent ways, most favorable to this listener being fast and quiet. But I neglect the music: the blocks; the logic of one thing following another, linked by only the most fragile Virginia Woolf consciousness (here's where you Woolf/creative music fans should listen for Mrs. Dalloway, if you can't find a paperback!); the use of color; of quiet; the attention to endings; the use of sustained, un-wavering, un-inflected pure sound-blocks; the larger-than-life attention to the subtle shading of breath.

The Great Circle Saxophone Quartet felt that with this tour they hit some new group highs - but that this particular concert was a bit strange... We played all of our longest, most stretchable tunes, and during the middle of the set I had one of those moments when I wonder why I'm doing this music at all, especially the improvisational part of it. This group functions best (I think, in a remarkable reversal) on those pieces which are almost entirely notated. And here, we played "Now What?" quite well - with great ferocity and passion, and even precision and sloppiness, both in the right places. But during "Snake tectonics" (a framework for improvisation) or "Ache" (another, but quiet mostly), I felt the sand slip through my fingers. And then about 40 hours later, upon the beach in Laguna, I again felt the sand again, and it was real sand, and much nicer than metaphorical sand, and it was warm and the ocean was warm too.

Dan

June 29, 1997
Project W: Wally Shoup /
KLiP

Another great set. I saw this as an effort to take apart the classic piano trio (Evans, etc.) and reassemble it without blueprints, so all the belts and gears were immediately visible. Garth Powell pounds a mean pot and pummels a powerful pan, he sure does, and he can even play the traps! Cymbals included!! Where does Beanbenders find all this talent? And he world-premiered his candlelit recitation, "Gaston" which would make no sense to a non-Berkeley audience, but which was miles better than Charles Gayle ranting about abortion. Elliot Kallen's piano was speedy and genuinely unpredictable-I think all 88 keys played some role. His synths were great too-dark and foreboding, without the layer of cheese which Sun Ra couldn't resist. You probably had to be there, but if you weren't you totally missed out. But John Lauffenberger's bass tone was so huge and woody, so post- Ray Brown, so (what the hell) groovy, that it's probably still echoing down Shattuck Ave. weeks later. Listen carefully.

paul

I missed KLiP, but was there for almost all of Project W's enjoyable set. I liked the variety of tone that Wally Shoup gets on the alto sax - everything from blues to bleats. The cellist functioned largely as a sort of Greek chorus, or accompanist in Indian classical music: shadowing Shoup, following his movements up and down, inside and out. He provided lots of nice harmonies, but not so much in the way of contrast; his work was about a very close kind of counterpoint. Garth Powell, substituting for Project W's drummer, was his usual creative and reactive self, playing some nice saw and getting in quite a few good beats; knowing when to pick up the jazz gauntlet and when to leave it alone.

Dan

July 6, 1997
Michael Moore, with Jody Gilbert, Mary Oliver, Ben Goldberg, Richard Saunders

I liked this concert very much, but fell short of loving it. I liked the smeariness Moore brought to a couple clarinet duets (which were, I believe, folk tunes from ?).

Dan

July 13, 1997
Herd of the Ether Space /
Matthew Sperry, Carla Kihlstedt and Gino Robair

Some disagreement about the Herd: good or bad? I enjoyed segments of their show, especially those in which keyboardist Robert Silverman used (entirely digital) psychedelic effects, like slow panning of a filter - much as Sun Ra did in the late-70's/early 80's, as a sort of anchor above which there was skronking from 2 guitarists, one drummer and a multi-instrumentalist named Mark (who had a daughter who led the audience in an unplanned "Hooray for Daddy!" bit which was of course a highlight). At times I was reminded of the shifting kaleidoscopic guitar-based jams by Pluto, though not as rhythmically compelling: the Herd's drummer was a bit weak; he never seemed to get into the swing of things. Also, I suppose I can admit to being disappointed by the two full-time guitarists (at one point Robert and Mark picked up guitars for a 4-guitar jam which I would have liked with either more assertive drums or none at all). They seemed, like the drummer, to be a little uncertain of where they were at times. Nonetheless, the group managed to make some odd polyphonic music with feet firmly planted all over the place, and I liked that. I also liked Mark's naive(?) saxophone honkings which cut through the thick layer of smog over their second piece.

The Sperry/Kihlstedt/Robair trio could stand among any musicians involved in this music. Stand and do what, I don't know, but there's no doubt that they could stand, and stand well, upon the musical feet which are theirs to do with as they may, whether we're talking about music, dance, or gardening. I particularly liked those moments in which Kihlstedt would step out from a backdrop of abstraction and play some flourishy fiddle. Also, I liked that Sperry (at the insistance of Beanbender's money-hungry capitalist management sell-out goons) sang a commercial for the baked goods which were for sale at the refreshment table (which included some brownies which are in fact quite delicious; you ought to buy some next time!).

Dan

July 20, 1997
Tom Guralnick Trio: Guralnick (saxes), Steve Feld (trombone), and Jefferson Voorhees (drums) /
Myles Boisen Guitar Orchestra, with John Schott, Will Bernard, Randy Porter, Karen ?, Gino Robair, John Finkbeiner, Mark Schifferli, Len Paterson, ?, ?, John Shiurba, and Myles Boisen.

In some ways, Guralnick's trio reminded me of Vinny Golia with Mike Vlatkovich and Billy Mintz - the same generation playing similarly hard-working post-bop, post-free (but maybe not post-free-bop) music with some roots in Braxton - but Guralnick is more Ornette-y, playing melodic but twisted solos which give way to screams and squeals, whereas Golia's lines are less blues-y, restricted to unbent uninflected sounds, but more free in up-and-down direction, and slower-building. Guralnick's ensemble is quite strong and coherent, Feld and Guralnick knowing how to accompany one another in dialogue, how to back away to give one another solo space.

The guitar ensemble was quite cool! They need to get those micro-miniature guitars, but otherwise they were well-equipped with a large array of instruments and effects. They played five compositions and one improvisation, all of which had things to like. Mostly it appeared that the composers (Schifferli, Shiurba, Plonsey, Boisen and Schott) had considered strategies to avoid the possibility of a blowout - no earplugs were necessary at any time! Also, the pieces were seemingly divided into timbral sections, which were cued by number by Boisen. Among my favorite bits were the part in Shiurba's piece in which loud low rumbles alternated with high "pings!" cued by Boisen pointing up and out, like Sun Ra; a teeny bit of my piece, which consisted entirely of slidey shapes, up and down, three guitars grouped together - though it went on way too long and the harmonies weren't at all clear - at best, it sounded like unstrung Hawaian guitarists out on the ocean in lifeboats; and then I liked just about all of Boisen's piece, particularly the beautiful closing solo by Schott, which consisted of a couple phrases which repeated into silence over a watercolor wash of sound. I would like to hear the whole set after a few rehearsals - due to the usual bullshit of life the group was limited to about two hours of rehearsal time! Let's hope they do some more conccerts soon! And next time, perhaps a few power chord outlets!

Dan

July 27
Backbone, featuring David Tohir's feedback trombone /
Positive Knowledge, featuring Oluyemi Thomas, Ijeomi Thomas and Spirit

This was the first show I ever saw at Beanbender's, and I only saw about ten minutes. I was walking by with some friends, and we heard noises like a building is coming apart. Upon investigation I found myself in a concert of improvised music, just like the good old undergraduate days before I moved to this placid and excrably new age varment district of yuppie bliss: Berkeley, California. The weather is crap, you can't get a decent pizza, but what the hell, at least there's some music happening! Unfortunately, my worthless friends have no taste in music whatsoever so I got dragged away fast. My impressions: Oluyemi Thomas has a monster sound! Why haven't I ever heard of him? Also, they got pretty decent cookies at Beanbender's. Last week I found this web-site and I wasted much time reading it. To get even, I figure I'll review a few concerts, since everyone else is too lazy to do it. What's wrong with you people? As if I have to ask: I'm in California now, and everything is totally cool, and so indistinguishable from this to that, and no one really cares about anything because it's all equally wonderful. "Can you not perceive that all music is good because it means something to someone, so keep your negative vibes to yourself!" Well, ahem, I've been to several concerts since at Beanbender's, and I'm here to tell you that alot of the music out here is complete crap! Some of these guys have not had a single original thought in their lives! But Oluyemi Thomas, at least he's got a Sound! I will come back to see what his ideas are like. Later.

- Holtzman

August 3
Peter van Bergen with Gino Robair, John Shiurba and Myles Boisen /
Tom Djll with Chris Brown and Gino Robair

August 10
Michael Vatcher with Ben Goldberg, Sheldon Brown, Richard Saunders /
Phil Gelb with Dana Reason and Gino Robair, and guests Ben Goldberg, and Dan Plonsey

August 17
Tenth Planet, featuring Malcolm Mooney with Bruce Anderson, Marc Weinstein and others /
Wadada Leo Smith n'da Orchestra, including Aaron Bennett, Phillip Greenlief, Oluyemi Thomas, Dan Plonsey (reeds); Henry Kaiser (guitar); ? (violin); Ashley Adams and Damon Smith (basses); Tom Heasley (tuba); Gino Robair and Donald Robinson (drums)

September 7
Ned MacGowan solo, and with Laura Carmichael, and cellist ??? /
Joel Harrison Octet, consisting of Sheldon Brown, Eric Crystal, and Paul Hanson reeds; Marty Wehner, trombone; Dred Scott, piano; Dan Seamans, bass; Elliot Kavee, percussion

September 14
Dave Slusser with Graham Connah, Tom Nunn, Randy Porter, Ralph Carney, Rubber City and Partial Parrot

September 21
Wolfgang Fuchs solo /
Adam Rudolph's Moving Pictures, with Hamid Drake, Ralph Jones, and butoh master Oguri

September 28
Tom Nunn's Edgewater Experimental Instruments Consort

October 5
John Oswald's Distant Acquaintances, with Henry Kuntz, John Schott, Danielle DeGruttola, Miguel frasconi and David Gans Dan Plonsey's Close Personal Friends, with John Schott, Joe Karten, Greg Sinibaldi, Tom Yoder, Steve Lew, Jenya Chernoff and Matt Lebofsky

Okay, so it's me, Holtzman, reviewing again. A gracious "Sorry!" to all my "California" detractors, but I happen to like to type, and I just got one of them fancy shedangle California ergonomic keyboards so I can type even more reviews faster! And without endangering my precious wrists or my chakras or anything too!

I usually don't like even going to concerts because being around people who are "into" a given sort of music makes me extremely queasy, and then I have to use the bathroom a lot. And I should mention here that the ramp which leads to the bathroom creaks, and then all these ridiculous glaring faces get turned towards the perpetrator of sacriledge like he or she is some kind of subhuman because they still have some sympathy for their own bladder. And if it weren't for how serious everyone is there I think I would like to urinate even more often, and then nothing else would bother me, because when I'm in the stall everything is fine! Even the most bloated dinosaur "Free Jasss."

Someone told me I had to go and see John Oswald, but they didn't tell me that it would mean that I would also have the experience of David Gans, live and in person. Those of you who are so lucky as not to be in the Bay Area may not know who David Gans is, unless you live in Fresno, which is also a sight blighted by the air of KPFA radio, a Pacifica station, which for some cynical reason or diabolical necessity (you have your pick) broadcasts an hour of Grateful Dead music once a week, even though, as everyone knows, everyone who likes the Grateful Dead already own every single tape of every single concert that that heinous band ever performed. Obviously it's about money. Now how did David Gans and John Oswald get hooked up? What's the story behind that "plunderphonics" album "Grey-Folding?" The five minutes I heard of it sounded like any five minutes of Grateful Dead I ever heard except perhaps even worse. Because here's the deal: the Dead always meander pointlessly so a collage of them is the same as the original. It's entirely random. I could prove that mathematically. It is because they are robotic constructs, but their "brains" were made in days before folks like George Lewis came along with fairly hip algorithms for improvisation. Dead jams are just a randomly produced collection of licks. So after - well, now I suppose I have to describe the whole concert. First Oswald plays with John Schott, Danielle DeGruttola and Henry Kuntz. Not all at the same time at first. He makes a big deal, from the beginning, of how spontaneous it all is (the word "Wow!" comes to mind, as in "Big wow!" which we used to say in elementary school when we were asked to entertain some sort of pretentious bullshit High Concept by a typically condescending "adult"). So there are some duos and trios, and some are cool enough. Schott and DeGruttola sounded fine, and Kuntz and Oswald did one duet that had a couple sparks. So far, so good. Then after not too long they leave the stage and Dan Plonsey's group plays. I don't want to say too much about this music because I don't quite get what it's about. It was about half written - they improvise for five minutes, then read for five - and it was like band music from some other country where they don't have many CDs so they have some weird ideas. I liked it okay, but it seemed like maybe they wanted another rehearsal or two - it was a bit disorganized, and on one piece there were two different tempos for a while, which was sort of cool, but I think unintentional. I'll wait for the CD and then I can tear it to shreds. Anyway, after about 40 minutes of Plonsey, Oswald's back and now he's got Miguel Frasconi playing electronics and the ultra-smarmy David Gans playing guitar. After one piece, John Schott says "I'm outa here!" and I should have been too, but my feet were rooted to the spot, because Gans began playing Jerry Garcia type licks, and my feet turned to stone like in a really bad dream. It sucked so bad I could hardly keep from laughing and screaming! It all petered out after a while - everyone got thoroughly sick of playing with one another, and then Oswald did some sort of strange silent dance, and that was definitely the best part by far.

- Holtzman

October 12
Tonguego: Morgan Guberman, John Shiurba, Andy Borger, Matt Ingalls and Chris Davis /
Snorkel: Ben Goldberg, John Schott, Trevor Dunn and Scott Amendola

I didn't get the point of "Tonguego," but I like their name. Was it atonal pseudo-post-war serialism, or was it free jazz? No one was dancing. I was frustrated. They're good players. They were caught unprepared.

I like Snorkel okay. Actually, I liked this set alot. The compositions were smart, and just when I'd decided they had no sense of humor, they pulled out a finger-pickin' blues, (and stuck something unintelligible over the top of it, which was not strictly necessary - but since unnecessary is the other mother to invention, so whatchya gonna do). Also, some amazing clarinet playing, which did alot for my head condition. I'd like to hear them with a free drummer.

- Holtzman

October 19
Eugene Chadbourne solo and with the Insect and Western Ensemble: Dan Plonsey, Gino Robair, Ashley Adams and Tom Heasley

October 26
The Shaking Ray Levis /
Graham Connah Septet with BenGoldberg, Marty Wehner, Rob Sudduth, Trevor Dunn, Elliot Kavee, and Jewlia Eisenberg

November 2
Matt Ingalls, solo clarinet and electronics /
Carl Stone

November 9
What We Live: Larry Ochs, Lisle Ellis, and Donald Robinson /
The Bran (Another plight of medics...: Pos, solo electronics (Jake Rodriguez)

I ended up enjoying The Bran (Another Plight of Medics) Pos more than I expected -- and not just because he gave out free cookies before the show.

On the radio, electronic music never sounded to me like it would be interesting live. I just assumed the performer would hit the "Play" button and walk away for 5 or 20 or 90 minutes, and that would be the performance. The Bran was nothing like that, though. Part of the fascination came from watching how he formed his sounds -- most were distortions of his own voice, howling or screaming into the mike. Then, you could watch him mess with the signal, twiddling knobs to generate effects, nudging pedals up or down for volume control. By watching The Bran's moves, you could see that the performance really did have a rhythm, the ebbs and flows that make long musical pieces rewarding. And his work does have a good rhythm to it; he has a good sense of when to push, when to ease up. Very loud, very enjoyable.

On a different note -- The Bran's setup was sparse, just him kneeling on the stage with boxes and gear surrounding him, and I couldn't help but picture him as a kid kneeling on his bedroom floor in a suburban two-story, practicing his electronic music. Man, his parents must have hated it!

-Craig Matsumoto

November 16
Molly Barker's Secret Language, music by Ben Goldberg (with John Schott and Trevor Dunn) /
Steve Horowitz's Mousetrap, with Laura Carmichael, Matt Brubeck, Dan Plonsey, and Dave Revelli

Molly Barker's Secret Language turned out to be a book of drawings, each with a little caption. Taken in sequence, they told a series of short stories, kind of impressionistic. For the performance, Barker projected slides of the drawings, and read the captions through a microphone, while Ben Goldberg's trio played music that sounded half-written, half-open (though not simply: there were periods where one or another part was semi(?)-improvised, while others were all(?)-composed. The drawings were dark overall, composed of many small, relatively thick jabby lines. The style was consistent throughout the series. Ben's music was a well-suited companion: he too favors dark lines; his vision is often revealed over a lengthy course of interconnected and seemingly overlapping phrases, often short, but less uniformly so than in Molly's work. Looked at on a microscopic level there are again similarities in the grain of both Molly and Ben's art: the clarinet sound is rough, sometimes to the point of breaking, very thick, and certain; the chipping of a sculpter's chisel moving slowly over his figure. One might appreciate the work of either as the ultimate shape of the figure painstakingly revealed, or as a set of many beautiful, similar, pointed dark shapes, like thick blades of grass at dusk. This art is purposeful, and difficult: it is both a struggle with material and method - one senses Ben thinking and feeling as a sculpter and Barker as a musician - while at the same time there is a sense of celebration and liberation (cautious and even surreptitious as it might be) in the very feel of unshaped materials. The tiny slabs of black (ink? lead?) are very nearly the first untrained jabs of an infant; the breaking clarinet sound is both a giving-way of the clarinet to the idea, but also it's a return to the first moments of playing, with all the excitement and promise.

Dan

November 23
Evelyn Mann, flute; Michelle Sargent, voice; Sean Feit, violin and piano /
Billy Mintz and Dave Scott

November 30
Dan Plonsey and Chris Jonas /
Paul Plimley, piano; Miya Masaoka, koto; Mark Izu, bass; Scott Amendola, drums; DJ Mariko; Henry Kaiser, guitar

Again, reviewing my own work, although this time having seen a videotape of the performance I can be more objective and say: this was good! The idea is Chris Jonas's: the two of us were to play and paint a picture (actually, colored "lecturer's chalk" was used), sometimes both playing, sometimes one painting while the other played, sometimes both painting. Surprisingly, the non-playing segments didn't feel at all empty (as John Cage would have told us), as there was always the scratch of the chalk, a baby (Cleveland Plonsey) talking, coffee pouring, and all the other sounds of downtown Berkeley filtering in. The canvas we used was very large (11' x 7.5'), much larger than either of us had ever employed, and this was only our second attempt at creating a coherent artwork together (rehearsal the previous day had been encouraging artistically, although it took us over 4 hours to finish the piece to our satisfaction). While I'm entirely willing to toss adjectives at other Beanbender's events, this one I will leave alone, save to say that it had drama, cooperation, conflict, movement, and that I found the experience of watching it to be engrossing. I hope we'll have the opportunity to do this again soon! And many thanks to Ray Buffalo for his meticulous craftsmanship in designing and building a giant easel for the project: strong, mobile, easy to set up and tear down.

The Plimley et al ensemble had apparently made an ordered list of sub-ensembles in advance, as each of their improvisations featured different groupings. Some worked well, others not. My favorite was Plimley by himself at the very end of the set. The rest of the set was very post-modern: Kaiser in Derek Bailey mode, Amendola as jazz/rock dynamo, DJ Mariko injecting urban noise, while Mark Izu on bass and Japanese(?) multireed instrument and Miya Masaoka on koto were a polycultural orchestra from one century past and one century future... to which overloaded mix (even with players sitting out) Paul Plimley added bits of classical music and a welcome sense of humor. The worst moments were when drums and guitar began to trample the quieter instruments (especially towards the end of the set), but something was always going on... I enjoyed a lot of it.

Dan

I liked the Plonsey/Jonas PB&J thing, though I was sad that the Peanut Butter sandwiches were a no-show. What happened? Peanut Butter goes almost as well with improv as Vodka. Vodka with hot peppers. I wanted them not to be so abstract with the drawing, but what can you do - you know it's going to be abstract, because of how Ornette used that Jackson Pollack on the cover of "Free Jazz" and it's been the same ever since. So-called Creative Musicians are fixated on a tiny period of art history. At least no one started spouting off poetry! The actual musical component was pretty cool, especially some of the duets. At the very end, some idiots started clapping, and it seems like they made Plonsey and Jonas end before they might have wanted to. And then some jerk said, "And on the seventh day, they rested!"

I was really there to hear Paul Plimley, and though the piano was out of tune, he still sounded great. He's one of my favorite pianists, and I liked how he seemed to be poking fun at everyone he was playing with. I sometimes like Henry Kaiser, but sometimes it seems like all he knows about music is how to play fast and randomly. But then the next day someone plays you some utterly incredible music from Burma or something, and it turns out to be some guy Henry Kaiser discovered. The guy has fantastic taste! I don't get it! Also, this is the second time for Amendola where I'm wondering: the guy has chops galore, but why are these guys playing with him? He's a rock drummer at heart, I can feel it! For one thing, he loves to get loud. He's always playing at least as loud as the loudest other person who's playing. He's good, but he gets in the way. I can't quite describe it. It's like when you're really intently listening to something, he's there going, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is cool!" And you want to say, "I know it's cool; so just shut up and let's listen to it! Do something that isn't all over the most fragile parts! You're just like a big dog!" But now I'm carping, and really, you know, I had a good time! Woof woof!

- Holtzman

December 7
India Cooke, violin, with: Alan Kimara Dixon, piano; Marshall Trammell, drums; Martial Anney, perc. /
Mills College Contemporary Performance Ensemble, directed by Steed Cowart and William Winant

December 14
Artifact Artists Night:
Mark Trayle / Chris Brown / Kenneth Atchley / Circular Firing Squad / Tim Perkis / John Bischoff / Jim Horton / Ben Azarm

December 21
Dana Reason, with Phil Gelb, Peter Valsamis, and a Boston-based trombonist /
Moe! Staiano

The precision and flair of Moe! Staiano's percussion are always great to see, but Moe! also knows how to stage a fun show, and it's always a glorious mess. He opened by throwing confetti and jigsaw puzzle pieces at us. Raffles were held using pages from a pulp novel as tickets; prizes included an enema kit and a Barbie doll with a dinosaur head. One song used an 8mm silent film as background for an improv. Another had Moe! pressing dry-ice blocks against a disembodied piano-string board (the strings squeaked as the ice melted against them; it's a great sound but it only worked for a second at a time). The concluding number featured audience members bashing a pinata and (of course) the destruction of a TV set by Moe! and friends. The music itself combined Moe! with clarinets, saxes, piano, and/or drums. A splendid time for all!

-- Craig Matsumoto