Blink: The Architects (Whistler, 4/19/11)

Blink: "Protect From Light (I)"

If there’s one collective that typifies the spirit of modern jazz and the next step into its “post” era, it’s Chicago-based experimental-jazz quartet Blink.  And though that might sound bogus given the fact that its new album comes only in cassette and digital-download formats, the quartet’s lo-fi approach doesn’t mean that it's not legit.  Since its 2008 debut, The Epidemic of Ideas — a record that imparts heavy emphasis on jazz experimentation and improvisation — the quartet has toured the world, received awards from the Illinois Arts Council, and had its compositions commissioned and performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble and the Peoria Ballet Company.

On its sophomore effort, The Architects, the quartet builds on its mishmash of free jazz, rock, and electronics, this time with a new approach for structured compositions.  The beauty of it all? You can’t really tell the difference.  In jazz, it’s said that the best improvised music sounds composed and the best composed music sounds improvised.  As circular as that sounds, the adage holds a lot of wisdom in understanding the merits of Blink and its overall sound.

Listeners will find the nine-song set, entirely composed by bassist Jeff Greene, to have a distinct balance.  Greene’s compositions build on one another, creating a musical dialogue that revisits melodies and textures to create intricate forms of theme and variation.  But the songs still feel open-ended, with solid foundations for drummer Quin Kirchner, guitarist Dave Miller, and saxophonist Greg Ward to instill in them a loose musical chemistry that is spontaneous and artful.

Like any great jazz outfit, each player in the quartet knows the role of his instrument.  The range of noise – lashings of Albert Ayler-styled atonal saxophone rips, scratchy no-wave guitar riffs, staccato snare hits, and ambient electronic drones – encompasses sounds that push the boundaries of tone and texture.

Bookend tracks “Protect From Light” parts I and II set the record's tone.  Suspended over a bed of looped electronic samples, Ward lays down the song’s central melodic theme.  The sax line is bright and smooth, a stark contrast to Miller’s crunchy guitar and Kirchner’s sparse rhythmic attacks. The electronic samples become more urgent, the drums take a larger presence, and the saxophone becomes free.

For the most part, in exception to a few momentous freak-outs, the quartet has a mellow energy.  But because the instruments communicate so well with one another, the chilled-out energy packs a big punch.  “Social Engineering” is a track with a lot of free-roaming space driven by Miller’s haunting guitar plucking.  Just when a melody begins to materialize, a reverse delay effect is switched on, giving the track a strange, Twilight Zone feel.  But it frees Miller to play over himself, and when he begins to tighten up the space, the rest of the players follow suit.

Whether it’s Ward and Miller trading off forceful phrases in “Align Your Planets,” Greene looping his bass over Kirchner’s flailing on-time/off-time drum fills in “I Will Save The Day (Part II),” or all four players engaging with each other in chaotic climax in “(A) New Life,”  there is usually always a lot of things happening at once.  And even though it sometimes sounds like they all could’ve been playing in separate rooms – sometimes in separate states – they always come back around to drive it home in one single direction.

As the expression of four extremely talented musicians, The Architects is a display of straight-ahead jazz chemistry in its freest form.  Though many jazz groups can be tight, not many can be free. With a modern mix of electronic music and post-rock styles, combined with the confidence to test the boundaries of tone and texture, Blink’s The Architects is a bright spot in the changing face of jazz.

The Dead Kenny Gs: Operation Long Leash (The Royal Potato Family, 3/15/11)

The Dead Kenny Gs: "Black Truman (Harry the Hottentot)"

Smooth-jazz lovers beware.  As an antidote to the polished alto saxophones and rarely improvised easy-listening jams of adult contemporary music, eccentric jazz trio The Dead Kenny Gs has released its second album, Operation Long Leash.  Given its play-on-words moniker that simultaneously drives a sock down the mouth of smooth-jazz king Kenny G and recalls the early '80s hardcore-punk band The Dead Kennedys, the powerhouse trio taps into a sound that fuses jazz and punk.  It’s a crazy mix that works surprisingly well, played intensely by a group that has the skill and knowledge to pull it off.

Composed of three of the members of legendary Seattle-based Critters Buggin — bassist Brad Houser, drummer and vibraphonist Mike Dillon, and saxophonist Skerik — the band uses its genre-mashing experience to anchor it all down.  The trio has played in countless projects together, including all three in The Black Frames, and Dillon and Skerik comprise half of Garage a Trois.  Needless to say, the three have run in the same circles for more than two decades, playing hybrid styles that are everything but conservative.

For Operation Long Leash, the trio is hostile and straightforward in fusing elements of free jazz, Afrobeat, punk, metal, and anything else that it feels like throwing in the mix.  Behind the hilarious name and the curly dark wigs, there are some serious chops at work.  Switching between instruments and utilizing a healthy selection of effect pedals, it’s sometimes hard to believe that there are only three musicians — and forget trying to decipher who’s playing what.

Sounding more like a noise-rock record, the 10-song set comes off like a swift punch to the face, making clear the band’s mission of subverting the restraints of the respected genres.  The deeper you get into the record, the more liberated the music becomes, and a sense that anything is possible emerges by the end.

Long-time collaborator and guitar virtuoso Charlie Hunter lends his style on the raw funk tune “Black Truman (Harry the Hottentot).”  The trio has mastered the mixing and matching of different sounds; even on this track alone, there is so much happening with harmony, timbre, and the nuances of melody.  Skerik rocks his saxophone in funky staccato bursts, an attack that sounds as raw as Hunter’s shape-shifting guitar riffs.  A wide variety of percussion instruments keep the rhythm inherently Afrobeat influenced, and some spacey electronic elements propel the band into some George Clinton-tinged P-funk.

“Melvin Jones” has the band bouncing back and forth between thrash, Balkan folk, and Klezmer styles, and switching time signatures between each section.  The effect is jarring, almost resembling a music form from a strange, dystopian future.  Like the cross-section where Black Flag and Albert Ayler would meet, the track is ferocious in sonic exploration, while bringing Eastern European melody lines to the forefront.

Though the tracks are as much informed by Jesus Lizard as they are by Roshaan Roland Kirk, they are entirely distinct to the DKG sound.  Songs have everyone playing frantically, making all kinds of disparate negotiations at once — whether it’s Skerik’s Klezmer sax lines with Dillon’s speed-metal drumming on “Sweatbox,” the mad electronic atmospherics with the gritty piano keys on “Bucky Balls (Spherical Fullerene),” or Dillon’s funk-infused vocal growls on “Black Death.”

Operation Long Leash's producer, Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Earth), has worked with Houser, Dillon, and Skerik through Critters Buggin in the past, but he’s also worked with some of the heaviest metal bands in the world.  The result is a well-conceived sound that makes the punk-rock and free-jazz connection that people rarely make.  Not for the soft at heart, Operation Long Leash is aggressive, unrelenting, and designed to kill your speakers.

Do you ever wonder what a stunt driver does during his quiet time at home? Well, you might not have to anymore, thanks to the arrival of Never Stop, the seventh studio album from The Bad Plus.

On “Bill Hickman at Home,” a dreamlike New Orleans blues piece that crawls at a snail’s pace, the piano peels away from the rest of the music as notes warp out of pitch, and the hard-driving, progressive jazz trio imagines late stunt driver / car-chase choreographer Bill Hickman “drinking a glass of milk and playing solitaire” — at least that’s what pianist Ethan Iverson, who wrote the tune, was picturing. And if that seems like a rather absurd setting for an action specialist like Hickman — who is most well known for his work on the iconic (and emphatically masculine) chase sequences in the films Bullitt and The French Connection — it’s precisely the kind of cheeky, off-angle perspective that The Bad Plus has become known for.

The band’s first long-player to consist entirely of original music, Never Stop should, if not silence, at least give pause to anyone — fans and detractors alike — who has up to this point focused on The Bad Plus’ well-documented affinity for reinterpreting rock and pop standards as jazz instrumentals.

“The populist conception of The Bad Plus as ‘the band that plays Nirvana covers’ might help fill seats, but it’s fundamentally incorrect.”

After six albums, Iverson says that the decision was an “obvious” one to make. And whether or not the album succeeds at steering attention to the band’s compositions — which Iverson calls its “lifeblood” — it at least allows for The Bad Plus to finally stand and be judged on its own merits. Arguably, after making waves for covering “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” Iverson and his band mates — drummer David King and bassist Reid Anderson — could have freed themselves of a ton of baggage a lot sooner by putting out an all-originals album as the follow-up to their 2003 major-label debut, These Are the Vistas.

Iverson readily admits that covers have been profitable, but he seems to understand that the attention they’ve attracted cuts both ways. “The populist conception of The Bad Plus as ‘the band that plays Nirvana covers’ might help fill seats,” he says, “but it’s fundamentally incorrect.” He also stresses that original compositions have always made up “about 75–90%” of the group’s repertoire. So if The Bad Plus has been guilty of capitalizing on rampant misconceptions on both sides of the rock and jazz divide — and of pandering to listeners’ most pedestrian instincts by making showy gestures with obvious, overplayed hits — then Never Stop makes the statement that the back catalogue is worth reexamining. And because it comes from a band that has (intentionally or not) relegated its own music to B-side status, Never Stop is a tribute of sorts to the value of the proverbial deep cut.

Stripped of the band’s most tried and true gimmick, Never Stop reveals what The Bad Plus could (and should) have exploited as its “gimmick” all along — namely, the idiosyncratic writing style of all three band members. Iverson explains that he, King, and Anderson all write alone before presenting complete compositions to the whole band. At that point, he says, there is “lots of room for everyone to have their say” in how the arrangements take shape.

For Never Stop, released in September on E1, King and Anderson contributed three tunes apiece while Iverson contributed two, and longtime fans should be able to distinguish each composer’s hallmarks — in Iverson’s words, King’s “meta-metric and prog-rock rhythm concepts,” Anderson’s “wonderful command of melody,” and Iverson’s “jazz surrealism.” Iverson considers the title tune, an Anderson composition, to be “pure pop candy,” while he describes King’s "The Radio Tower is a Beating Heart" as “post-Albert Ayler ecstasy followed by a wild minimalist groove.”

If much of Never Stop revisits familiar territory, that’s partly because, according to Iverson, each band member came to the band with his writing style more or less fully developed. “I'm pretty sure all of us knew what we did by the time the band was formed,” he says. They’ve also focused on refining their approach rather than attempt to reinvent themselves. “Hopefully,” Iverson adds, “you get better over time. But the voice is the voice, really. I don't know if I've ever really written anything better than ‘Guilty’ on Vistas. But ‘Bill Hickman At Home’ has some of that same surreal blues feel, only a little more complicated and worked out.”

Unsurprisingly, some of the album’s most affecting moments occur when the band turns the bombast way down. At their best, Iverson and company certainly have a knack for musical muscle and bravado. But, much like the imaginary Bill Hickman that the band immortalizes on the aforementioned tune, the more subdued aspects of The Bad Plus are appreciated more easily away from the glare of flashy stunts.

Bob Log III

For 15 years, Bob Log III has knocked out fucked-up, floor-stomping rhythms for adventurous show-goers, performing in full-body cannonball suits with a telephone-receiver mic fastened to a motorcycle helmet.  His one-man-band MO consists of crazy blues riffs, drum-machine beats, solo kick-drum rhythms, and steel-stringed slide guitar.

True to form, My Shit is Perfect is quintessential Bob Log with elements of stop-start timing, lighting-fast picking, and mostly incomprehensible lyrics.

Gouseion: More Friends for the Fire EP (Run Riot)

Electronic producer Cassidy DeMarco returns with another release as Gouseion, purveyor of buzz-saw synthesizers and big beats.  For this EP, DeMarco stresses backing harmonies and scales back the power of his drum samples, resulting in a dancier mix whose appeal reaches beyond raves.

Released less than six months after his last full album, Nijikon, this EP is a digital-only release.

Gouseion: "We're in High School"
Gouseion: \"We\'re in High School\"

Bushman's Revenge: You Lost Me at Hello (Rune Grammofon)

Led by the down-tuned riffs of Even Helte Hermansen, the guitarist for the outstanding Norwegian prog-jazz group Shining, Bushman's Revenge filters a heavy rock trio through the lens of an improvisational jazz outfit.

The group cites inspiration as much from Black Sabbath and Jimi Hendrix as Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, and You Lost Me at Hello oddly sounds a bit like all of it, even if it leans on the first two.  Boundless free jazz meets structured rock and roll on the album, which comes recommended for fans of both styles.

Pulling Teeth: Paradise Illusions / Paranoid Delusions (Deathwish Inc.)

Punching in at five songs and 23 minutes, this doubly themed release takes hardcore group Pulling Teeth in a crushing and despairing direction.  The group's full-throttle tempos, speed picking, push beats, and wailing solos are still present, but the final product is a more-complete, ominous concoction that adds a few melodic breakdowns.

Rahim AlHaj: Ancient Sounds (UR Music)

Iraqi political refugee Rahim AlHaj found asylum in the USA in 2000, finally free of the torture and imprisonment that he suffered at the hands of Saddam Hussein for aligning himself with anti-Hussein groups.

A master of the oud, AlHaj now lives in New Mexico, where he was able to vote last November for the first time in his entire life.  His beautiful Arabic style, full of microtones and complex rhythms, has taken small elements of Western structure over the years, although this duet recording with sarod master Ustad Amjad Ali Khan is rather traditional.

Stinking Lizaveta: Sacrifice and Bliss (At a Loss)

Splashing together prog rock, math rock, stoner/psych rock, and bits of Eastern flavor, Stinking Lizaveta accomplishes quite a bit for having a semi-standard rock-trio lineup.  Guitarist Yanni Papadopoulos shines with his technical and diverse creations, and he adds keyboards and theremin as sonic supplements.  Sacrifice and Bliss comes strongly recommended for instrumental-tech-rock geeks.