"The alt.coffee tapes"

(Katahdin, 1998)

the alt.coffee story :

In 1995, I had just moved to East 3rd Street and was thrilled by the East Village’s then vital music scene, but I was still spending a great deal of time working with Anthony Braxton and various other people from his community. I loved working with Braxton, but I also was on the lookout for some people who were closer to me in age (21) and in aesthetic.
The first time I played with Reuben Radding and John Hollenbeck at John’s rehearsal space near Times Square I was utterly unprepared to meet two musicians who fit the bill so perfectly. Reuben, who I met at my first and only concert at the old Knitting Factory (a duo with Anthony Coleman in the Knot Room), shared my musical obsessions, which at the time were free jazz, field recordings of traditional world musics, and post-punk of the Minutemen/Hüsker Dü type. I had never even heard Hollenbeck before. Of course, he was and is a unique virtuoso, and before he discovered yoga, meditation, and Meredith Monk, he was rather intimidating as a player and as a person. His fiery, unpredictable playing combined with his implacable demeanor gave a mysterious first impression. I wanted to work with them, and Reuben seemed amenable to the concept, but John’s reaction was unreadable. As Reuben and I headed to the F train, I asked him, “Do you think John liked it?” Reuben seemed confident that he did.
So we had a band, but we needed a gig. I also had recently met a couple of young go-getters named John Scott and Melissa Caruso. John was exploring an amazing new technology called “the internet.” He was convinced that it was going to be big. Melissa, a native Lower East Sider (I have often thought of the Fugs song “Slum Goddess” when around her), observed that the rapidly gentrifying East Village needed a low-key, comfortable space where students, drifters, writers, musicians and stray celebrities could lounge for hours on flea market sofas. So they rented a vacant dentist’s office on Avenue A between 9th Street and St. Mark’s Place, installed some T1 lines and an espresso machine and created alt.coffee. Defying logic, John and Melissa decided that what they really needed to attract a sexy young clientele was some avant-garde accordion music. They asked me if I’d be interested in playing there once a week.
It is not hard to get gigs in New York. There are plenty of venues that book unknown musicians who are willing play for the door, for tips, or for no money at all. In the hardscrabble New York jazz world, many artists struggle for years to develop a musical concept playing random one-off gigs with ad-hoc groups of freelance musicians. While this can be a rewarding experience on some (mostly non-monetary) levels, the only way to coalesce a band’s musical identity, start to develop a devoted audience, and maybe even generate some much-needed buzz in one fell swoop is a regular gig with the same people in the same place for an extended period of time. Many of the artists and groups who dominate creative music started with the assistance of regular gigs (Medeski Martin & Wood = Village Gate, Masada = Mission Café & Mogador, Dave Douglas Tiny Bell Trio = Bell Caffe). Having only been in town for a few months, I didn’t realize what a rare and special opportunity John and Melissa were offering me, but Reuben and John, crusty veterans that they were, knew all too well. When I called and pitched them the idea, they jumped at it.
Soon enough, one fine Monday night I was rousing people in varying degrees of stupor from their thrift store sofas, a process which was to be dubbed “harshing mellows.” After pushing aside the larger pieces of furniture and setting up the drums right in front of the window, we looked out onto Tompkins Square Park and Avenue A’s endless stream of humanity. It was clear that this would not be a normal gig. Unlike most jazz clubs where the band is snugly ensconced in the most isolated, cloistered area of the building, so that the pristine listening environment will not be disturbed by ambient noise, we were pushed right up against the street. Our mise-en-scene was permeable to both outside noise and outside people. Everyone passing by heard us, and thanks to free admission, our audience often included random passers-by who would not normally be encountered in the sheltered environment of the jazz club. As one elder musician commented after a particularly disturbing encounter with the outside world (a pair of East Village lunatics came in to provide some thoroughly whacked-out criticism), “I’ve played for the door, but I’ve never played near the door.”
Then, a truly remarkable thing happened. Week by week, more and more people started coming to the gigs- and not just random street maniacs. By the winter of 1996, Monday night at alt.coffee felt… happening! It must have been rather shocking to stumble into a slightly grungy café where three nerdy-looking guys were playing spunky versions of Sun Ra grooves and Turkish folk songs to a rapt (or maybe just nodded-out) crowd of East-Villagers, plus a bunch of oblivious ‘net surfers. Some press coverage followed, and Monday night at alt.coffee became an institution. Even a few uptowners began showing up: clarinetist David Krakauer started sitting in, becoming a regular featured guest and drawing in many more people with his pied-piper-like Klezmer wail.
But as all “Behind the Music” viewers know, success in the music business, even on our stratospheric level, is always accompanied by crushing interpersonal strains leading to an inevitable implosion, after which some band members carry on, in a pathetic attempt to salvage their careers. For Reuben, the stress of leading his Sun Ra tribute band Myth-Science through its rather problematic Knitting Factory-booked tour of European jazz festivals, combined with his crushing schedule of free jazz gigs and his budding career as a freelance porn scribe, led him to a logical and understandable decision: move to Montana. John, knowing that the situation at alt.coffee was too good to lose, formed the Claudia Quintet with Drew Gress, Matt Moran, Chris Speed and me. Since the members of the CQ were too busy to perform every Monday, I transformed Monday night at alt.coffee into a normal concerts series. Our friends like Matt and Theo Bleckmann started playing, as did elder statesmen of the East Village like Tim Berne, Anthony Coleman and Eugene Chadbourne.
As the cachet of a gig at altdot increased, so did the traffic on my answering machine. I became burned out from an endless stream of phone calls from my fellow musicians seeking gigs. John and Melissa started to work on new ventures and spend less time at altdot, and the new staff was less sympathetic to our music. I have a vivid memory of the night when one of the greatest improv performances I have ever witnessed (by John, Matt, Theo, and Skuli Sverrisson), was given the hook by a clueless counterperson. The band seamlessly continued its performance while breaking down its gear, maintaining the same level of intensity until the last drumstick was put away. In some ways I feel like that music never really ended...
Of course, the “new ventures” John and Melissa were working on proved to be more important than we could have imagined. Inspired by alt.coffee’s success, John and Melissa rented the former Kedem kosher winery on then desolate Norfolk street and opened Tonic. In the beginning, Tonic featured a beauty salon in front and a rotating schedule of entertainment including a Wednesday night music series curated by yours truly, an expansion of the alt.coffee booking policy. The first gig at Tonic was Mark Stewart of the Bang on a Can All Stars, Polygraph Lounge, and Paul Simon’s band, playing the daxophone to the horror of a chihuahua. But the Tonic story is one for another day.
Thankfully, the music of alt.coffee survives on this CD, which I produced in an optimistic moment in 1998. Flush with cash from a part-time job at an Internet company (are you feeling the waves of nostalgia yet?), I printed up these CD’s, which sold approximately… bupkis. But now, thanks to the world-wide blockbuster success of my record “Emigré” and those of the Claudia Quintet, maybe the world finally is ready for the music we made on those Monday nights.

Ted Reichman

HERE

Wayne Horvitz-Butch Morris-Bobby Previte : "Nine below zero"

(Sound Aspects, 1987)

Nine Below Zero is a relatively early recorded example of all three of the players involved and, interestingly, one of their freest and most rewarding. Horvitz and Previte, in particular, would go on to much more thematic music, drawing heavily from rock, jazz, and fusion, though hints of those borrowings certainly show up here. These pieces are somewhat closer, in miniature form, to the "conductions" which Butch Morris would champion in oncoming years, striking a delicate balance between composition and free improvisation. The general mood is subdued and introspective, Horvitz' signature keyboard sound playing very nicely off Morris' lovely, melancholy cornet. The pieces, with the exception of two typically gorgeous numbers by Robin Holcomb, are all by Horvitz and, when the melody eventually surfaces, have his sense of off-kilter, slightly poppy feel to them, as though rescuing the lone delicious kernels from an otherwise forgettable Top 40 ditty. A couple of tracks feature the unfortunate sound of mid-'80s drum machines, prevalent at the time among with a number of musicians experimenting with new technology, but sounding shallow and trite 15 years hence. Still, as Horvitz and Previte especially have garnered larger followings in the ensuing years, Nine Below Zero is a very worthwhile picture of one aspect of the roots and a fine recording in general.

Brian Olewnick (All Music)

HERE

Jim Staley : "Northern dancer"

(Einstein, 1996)

Jim Staley occupies a unique position among trombonists, crossing genres freely between post-modern classical music and avant-garde jazz. He boasts spectacular technique, including the ability to spit forth clusters of notes at rapid speed. Usually concentrating in the mid-to-lower registers of the trombone, his big, gruff tone hearkens to an earlier era, though his wondrous abilities and style plant him firmly in the free music world. Raised in Illinois, Staley served in the armed forces as a member of a U.S. Army Band in Berlin, before receiving Bachelor and Masters degrees in music from the University of Illinois in the late 1970s. Since 1978, Staley has lived in lower Manhattan, where he has actively performed and recorded with many cutting edge innovators.

Recorded nearly a decade after the epochal Mumbo Jumbo, and using some of the same musicians, Jim Staley continues to effectively utilize the trio format, although he adds an effective duo piece with John Zorn (again on alto sax) and a deliberative solo statement on trombone. Every one of the nine tracks has its moments, but the emphasis on longer pieces and greater atmosphere mitigates the edge that made the earlier release so compelling. Still, admirers of Staley's gorgeously subversive trombone will not be disappointed, as he continues to impress with knotty runs, fat, globular splats, and riveting, muted jabs. The two tracks with electric harpist Zeena Parkins take awhile to get moving, but the attractive work of Ikue Mori on drum machines and Davey Williams on guitar adds nicely to the mix.

Steve Loewy (All Music)

HERE

Zeena Parkins : "The opium war"

(Einstein)

This fascinating radio play about the opium trade in New York at the turn of the 20th century is such a confounding, brilliant assortment of fragmented narrative — that tracks wonderfully for those who pay attention — and instrumental prowess it's a wonder of the soundscape form. Zeena Parkins has enlisted the aid of some of Downtown's finest to help realize Ana Maria Simò's text, produced the record, and turned over the entire project to Linda Chapman to direct. Centering on one family in transition in New York, the Parkins/Simò collaboration uses seven cast members to tell a conflicting tale of love, race relations, commerce, and the shifting perception of the narcotics trade in early-20th century New York. Parkins scripted sections for each of the instrumentalists here to play in tandem with one another or solo as an accompaniment to the narrative. DJ Olive, Margaret Parkins, Ikue Mori, Tenko, Chris Cochrane, David Shea, Jo Trump, D.D. Dorveillier, and Jonathan Bepler all lend hands toward creating a non-instructive, yet instrumentally and sonically compelling, musical narrative that suggests the narrative forward. Different sounds become associated with different characters; they appear whenever the character speaks. The play itself is a study in narrative brokenness, with the entire tale being revealed without a narrator. Tensions become nearly unbearable as they reflect the separation and brokenness in human relationships when economics becomes an equation for power within a household, within a neighborhood, within a city. This is arresting stuff. It may not be for everybody, but for those who are patient enough to take it in, it offers great rewards.

Thom Jurek (All Music)

HERE

NB : one fabulous (out of print) album by Zeena Parkins (with Christian Marclay, Tom Cora, Samm Bennett, Iku Mori, Wayne Horvitz...) on LAFOLIEDUJOUR blog : HERE

Aki Onda : "Beautiful contradiction"

(All Access, 1998)

... If anyone who deserves to inherit Ryuichi Sakamoto's role as rootless cosmopolitan, it's Onda. 1998's Beautiful Contradiction CD shares Sakamoto's aesthetic delicacy and networking capacity, with a cast list that includes Brixa Bargeld, French Improv guitarist Noël Akchoté, soundtrack composer Simon Fisher Turner, and on the extraordinary "Do You Remember?", singer Linda Sharrock, wife of the late electric jazz guitarist Sonny. "I was inspired by her voice for a long time," rhapsodies Onda. "It consists of strength and weakness, a fever and ice cold sadness - I thought her voice was a 'beautiful contradiction' in itself. Perfect voice for me. Normally it's not difficult to find someone to work with. If I listen to their sound carefully, I can know them immediately. I just follow my intuition. I saw Noël Akchoté in 1996 or 97, his music was so brilliant and I assumed this guy has a sense that is very close to mine. He knows how to reflect himself in music - he's not just a guitarist."
...
Onda's project sure clock up the air miles: he records in London, Tokyo, Paris, New York. Does he need be on the move to make music? "My imagination is developed in an imaginary space," he muses, "not in a physically existing city such as Tokyo, London, or Paris. Somewhere between two cities. A place maybe existing in a film. Milan Kundera, a Czech writer who now lives in France, his books gave me a good suggestion on this."
...
Escaping into an aesthetic universe revealed to him by his painter mother, and mindful of the hardships he witnessed in Nara's Buraku ghetto of displaced ethnic folk, he bypassed the plasticity 80s New Wave by taking refuge in the free jazz of Albert Ayler, Art Ensemble Of Chicago and Don Cherry. After a few years in London he moved to Osaka, had his mind blown by seeing Otomo Yoshihide's Ground Zero ("The furious sound was so desperate!"), and fell in with screaming singer Yamatsuka Eye (whose group, Boredoms, Onda had once photographed as a teenager) and electronics expert Nobukazu Takemura, forming Audio Sports in 1990. "The mood in Osaka was completely different from Tokyo's: more lively and crazy," he says. "It was a small society and everyone knew each other."
Audio Sports grew from the skewed HipHop of their 1992 debut Era Of Glittering Gas, to the psychotropic brew on 1996's mini-album Strange Emotion, which featured Otomo, rapper D-zine, saxophonist Greg Osby and gender-bending synth player Hoppy Kamiyama. By 1998 onda was ready to strike out on his own; his solo work opens out a space where musicians can spool their contributions into a sound pool. "When I work with musicians in the studio," he says, "I always bring a master plan and try to fix it with them. But sometimes the others have a better idea. And if it's better than mine, I definitely take it. i don't have an interest in a world where everyone has the same idea. I'm not an egoistic tyrant."
"The most important thing in my music," he continues, "[is that] I'm always describing 'personal politics' between individuals. My music exists where their gaze and my gaze cross. When it happens in a studio, I catch it quickly and record it onto a tape. I collect such fragments that really connect to our experience. I try to create a space where voices mingle and overlap. So I think I'm just describing our daily life. I'm always watching for something 'behind the sound'".
If the content of so much electronica refers back only to the tools that constructed it, Onda's poetic sensibility suggests a new expressive range. "I've been questioning whether music evolves from music itself. I stopped thinking about this possibility in 1996. That's why I stopped using the project name Audio Sports. I was playing musical experience and eclectic styles anonymously: a sound game, I think. But what I'm doing now is a mind game."

Rob Young (excerpts from an article in The Wire, September 1999)

HERE

Michael Shrieve : "Fascination" + "Flying Polly"

(Cmp, 1994)

Progressing with guitarist Carlos Santana from his early Afro-Cuban rock and pop-based successes to his experimentation with jazz fusion, drummer Michael Shrieve subsequently released a string of fine solo recordings of his own. These two features guitar hero Bill Frisell and the ever-inventive organist Wayne Horvitz for a rather divergent set featuring ethereal soundscapes, loose grooves, and crunching opuses. Here, Shrieve provides sturdy backbeats to coincide with some nicely placed fills and his acute implementations of the dynamic. This effort highlights Frisell's wily and rather slithery guitar work, enhanced by the glowing sonic characteristics of the production, when viewed upon as a whole. The band is apt to soar skyward via climactic overtures in concert with a crash-and-burn methodology. Needless to say, this affair represents a potent concoction of jazz fusion melded with folksy themes and an avant-garde-type swing vamp, evidenced on "The Glass Tent." Yet, after a string of enterprising solo outings, Shrieve's solo career quieted down to a near whisper during the late '90s and into the new millennium.

Glenn Astarita (All Music)

disc 1 : HERE

disc 2 : HERE

Swami LatePlate : "Doom Jazz"

(Veal, 2007)

Although Jamie Saft is best known as a jazz pianist, especially for his work with various Masada projects, he's a rocker at heart who lists ZZ Top among his favorite bands. Swami LatePlate—his duo with drummer Bobby Previte—seeks to a degree to cross the divide. In one sense a piano trio, with Saft doubling on electric bass, the project borrows as much from heavy rock sensibilities. Their debut album and the first on Saft's new label Veal, falls closer to the jazz side, but the title indicates the process that got them there.
Using doom—a slow, foreboding style of heavy metal—as a template, the duo crafts a set of songs that creeps along powerfully. The themes are simple, generally carried by subdued bass lines and ornamented by the piano like salt on a glacier. What jumps out most is Previte's drumming. Every cymbal vibration and snare snap leaps to the foreground and, with rare exception, decays before the next strike, as much a testament to Previte's assured playing as Saft's engineering. The sound throughout is bright and super present.
Ultimately, the record bears more than a little resemblance to the great and longstanding Australian trio The Necks. Each moment is its own event, each note frozen in amber. Regardless of the rock modeling, the disc is likely to satisfy Saft and Previte's audiences; and given the elegiac, actually beautiful work of some doom bands (the solo piano on Corrupted's "Llenandose de Gusanos," for example), it could appeal to fans of the fringes of metal as well.

Kurt Gottschalk (All About Jazz)

HERE