RVANews

Endangered Blood coursing through Richmond, joined by Scott Clark 4tet

David Tenenholtz — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 11:27:43 +0000

On Thursday, April 12 a performance at The Camel will be sure to freak out metal enthusiasts, thrill avant-garde jazzheads, and possibly tickle any residents from the Balkans. Richmond’s Scott Clark will lead his free jazz project The Scott Clark 4tet and will support Trevor Dunn’s Endangered Blood.

Here at the dawn of the 21st century the idea of being an ‘eclectic’ musician is old news. Fusions of all kinds, genre-shifting, and layering have been with us, at this point, far too long to calculate. Today, as a member of the audience, I’m not sure I could even hold a conversation with someone who hasn’t spent quality time listening to Slayer and Webern and Mingus. It is hard to believe there are actually people who don’t appreciate The Swans and Jo Stafford. Trevor Dunn, Arcana II: Musicians on Music

If the above quote is any indication of the myriad influences that Dunn and his group have absorbed over their respective careers in music, then this part of the show is no doubt going to be a total-immersion in what downtown New York City is all about: a complete understanding of musical details and a complete freedom to express them. The cross-pollinated Endangered Blood consists of Dunn, drummer Jim Black, alto saxophonist/clarinetist Oscar Noriega, and tenor saxophonist Chris Speed. Initially, they started performing four years ago at a benefit concert for a musician and friend, alto saxophonist and bandleader Andrew D’Angelo, that needed to raise money for brain cancer treatment. After that first performance, they continued to work together as well as on their respective projects. Having recorded their self-titled debut album on Skirl Records and released it on March 15, the band is now traveling and performing in support of the album and traversing musical territories born out of fascinations with everything from searching ‘60s post-bop, to early 20th century chromaticism, to sweaty post-punk filtered through their acoustic instrumentation.

Trevor Dunn, bandleader

Bandleader Trevor Dunn shows a dedication to using the acoustic contrabass in thrash metal, jazz, a Beach Boys cover--you name it. But he is equally adept as an electric player and most famously showcased his command of that instrument as a founding member of experimental rock band Mr. Bungle. Currently he is a member of John Zorn’s Electric Masada band and works frequently in the metal genre as a member of Fantômas and The Melvins. He also is a member of The Nels Cline Singers, which despite the name, is an all-instrumental jazz project led by Wilco guitarist Nels Cline. As a leader, Dunn also has a group called Trio Convulsant, a metal-meets-jazz concept that shifts in and out of the two poles without being forced. Check out their cover of Duke Ellington’s "The Single Petal of a Rose" off the album Sister Phantom Owl Fish, released on Ipecac records.

Jim Black, drums

Drummer Jim Black is a long-time friend and musical associate of tenorist Chris Speed. A discography on Black’s website is sickly diverse, comprised of work with experimental singer/songwriter Laurie Anderson, saxophone/flute icon Dave Liebman, and Nels Cline. From listening to Endangered Blood, his influences seem limitless, and waves of lyrical jazz accompaniment move seamlessly into punk rock oriented energy where nothing is ornamental and everything is pulsating in the extreme. On one side, the cymbals shimmer and sizzle, and on the other the bass drum fiercely pounds, and the cracking snare is like a razor cutting through it all.

Oscar Noriega, alto saxophone/bass clarinet

Alto saxophonist/bass clarinetist Oscar Noriega is probably the lesser known member within the band, but his resume shines as a downtown New York jazz contributor of the highest order. He is an associate of NEA Jazz Master Lee Konitz and recorded with him in a nonet format in 2006. He is a collaborator with altoist Tim Berne on the latter’s Snakeoil project and appears on a host of recordings with Japanese pianist Sakoto Fujii. Further adding to his creative chops is a band called Slavic Soul Party!, which is a reinterpretation of Macedonian and Balkian folk tunes by some of New York’s downtown jazz musicians. For more background on Noriega, check out an interview with him describing his upbringing in his family band in Tuscon, Arizona playing norteño music.

Chris Speed, tenor saxophone

Tenor saxophonist Chris Speed already had a hit at The Camel recently as a member of The Claudia Quintet back in October and has since been busy touring with a wide variety of creative improvisers like Dave King (drummer for The Bad Plus), pianist Uri Caine, and The Claudia Quintet. He is a founding member of the artist-run record label Skirl Records, which boasts a long roster of the finest creative improvising musicians in New York. Speed, just like Noriega, also is a member of a Balkan/jazz fusion project called Pachora, which includes Black on drums.

— ∮∮∮ —

The Camel is located at 1621 W. Broad Street. Tickets are $7 at the door, $5 for students. Showtime starts at 9pm.

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Listening back: Glows in the Dark

Aaron Williams — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 10:00:37 +0000

On May 24th Glows in the Dark released its second album: Beach of the War Gods. In convincing fashion they performed a 75 minute set of all original compositions.

Listen to Glows in the Dark:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/GlowsintheDark.mp3|titles=Beach of the War Gods Release|artists=Glows in the Dark]

Last May Dean Christesen sat down with guitarist Scott Burton and talked over the entire album.
Click here to hear Deep Dish: Scott Burton

Lauren Serpa took some spectacular photos:

Cameron Ralston on bass

Left to right: Scott Burton, Reggie Pace, Cameron Ralston, Scott Clark

Reggie Pace on trombone

John Lilley on saxophone

Scott Burton on guitar

Scott Clark 4tet: Back line leader

David Tenenholtz — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 10:00:37 +0000

RVAJazz presents RVAJazzfest 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011, 9pm
Purchase tickets online

Drummer and composer Scott Clark has a taste for the “nerdy” sides of music and TV. Some of the music that he composes is held to the rigid structures of “Serialism” by using all twelve pitches in a repeating order. After late-night gigs with indefinable ensembles like Ilad and Glows in the Dark, along with a boogaloo/funk project called The New Belgians, he routinely chills out by watching re-runs of Star Trek at his apartment. I met up with Scott in his apartment, where his own vibrant abstract painting hung above the couch in his living room, to discuss the impetus for his recently formed band, The Scott Clark 4tet, along with his thoughts on the Richmond music scene.

Educational note: “Serialism,” as it is called, had its inception with The Second Viennese School of composers led by Arnold Schoenberg in the early Twentieth century. Clark has re-imagined this exacting style with the unfastened, exuberant style of free jazz harkening back to saxophonist Ornette Coleman’s quartet of the 1960’s. Now read on!

RVAJazz: You’ve been a fixture in the Richmond jazz community for a number of years now, and you’ve got a quartet with a group of guys that have also been mainstays on the Richmond music scene: Jason Scott on saxophones, Bob Miller on trumpet and pocket trumpet, Cameron Ralston on bass, and yourself. What does each of these members bring to the group sound?

Scott Clark: All three of those guys have very unique voices, which is what makes the group work and have its own sound. Bob brings a very distinctive sound. Jason Scott is a great saxophone player, and nobody in town sounds like him, and that’s not a slam on anybody else. The same thing goes for Cameron. This is what you want when you’re starting a band. You want everybody who has a unique voice to begin with, so when you bring that together there is a collective uniqueness.

RVAJazz: And speaking of a unique voice, you formulated this band with the idea of another unique band leader, Ornette Coleman.

SC: Ornette is a big influence. I can’t say that there was one specific thing that drew me to that music, but I just knew that from the first time I heard it, I thought, “Oh my god, this is amazing music.” I remember Cameron asked me, when we first met, if I’d ever checked out Ed Blackwell, the drummer for Ornette. This was before I’d checked some of that music out. He said he heard some of that type of playing in my playing. So I went and checked it out and was like, “Yeah, OK! This is some amazing music.” It just clicked. That instrumentation of a chordless quartet is a really intriguing sound. I’d wanted to put together a band like that for a long time.

RVAJazz: And so the compositions that you’ve written here might be free jazz in interpretation, but you’ve also incorporated some twelve-tone music in that as well, correct?

SC: That’s right. Again, it’s another one of those things where some friends of mine who were going to school at JMU talked to me about these twelve-tone composers that were doing this “Serialism” stuff, which was really intriguing. So I would sit and write these twelve-tone rows in Finale [music notation software], and got really nerdy. I still have a bunch of stuff on my computer. I used to write string quartets with these strange things. I never had the intention of having people play them, but it was always just fun to listen to in Finale. I’ve been doing that for years. So I wondered if I could do this with certain rhythms that would make it sound like a swing tune or a jazz tune. And it worked! You have to be careful, because since you are only using the same row of twelve notes, sometimes you can hear it start back over. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because jazz tunes do that. They often have a head, then solos, and then you hear the main melodic stuff come back with the head. Even still we’re finding more possibilities to experiment with these twelve-tone ideas.

RVAJazz : How might you put together a piece in rehearsal with your band?

SC: I have the tunes ready and we’ll play them, but they’re pretty loose. I’ll say, “Here is the head of the song,” and we’ll take solos, and we need to figure out how to get to the end of the song. And then if anybody has an idea while playing through it, like “Maybe we should do this thing here,” we try it out. I think doing it that way is the best, because, like we said, all these guys have unique voices. A lot of times, if it comes down to a matter of doing something on the bass for example, I’ll defer to the bassist.

RVAJazz : So you trust those guys.

SC: Yeah, one-hundred percent.

photo by Lauren Serpa

RVAJazz: Tell me a little bit more about some of the gigs that you’ve had with your band leading up to your upcoming RVAJazzfest performance.

SC: Yep, there have been the Jazz at The Camel gigs on Tuesday nights. It’s been a great outlet for various bands, especially bands that are just getting started. There’s already a built in gig there, and all you have to do is make sure you get into the rotation. Reggie Chapman has also been doing The Black Hand [Sunday Series] thing. Again, it’s another gig that’s built in, and that’s open. They are free gigs so people can just come. I think it’s really conducive to what is happening. A lot of those groups that I’ve played with recently, those venues have been our first gigs. For us, we rely on having those chances to take these songs and bring them to life in a performance situation.

RVAJazz: Thankfully some of those gigs from The Camel have been recorded and are up on the blog now. It’s great that if people didn’t make it to the show, they can still hear your band on the blog.

SC: I think it’s a great thing that the RVAJazz blog is doing. Not only is it good for us in Richmond, but also for people outside of the city that have been hearing murmurs of what is happening in Richmond. There’s an outlet where you can go straight to the source, and check out what is going on. Like this is what it sounded like last Tuesday night. And they put them up online quickly. I think their goal is to have them up by the Saturday following the Tuesday event. It’s good for us so that we can go back and listen as well, and check out what worked and what didn’t, and swap out ideas.

RVAJazz: Great! In addition to your own compositions that you feature in your band, you’ve got some other repertoire by other composers as well?

SC: Yep, we do one tune by a saxophonist named Fred Anderson called “Little Fox Run.” It’s a song that I actually did on my senior recital, with a different arrangement of musicians. I played a duo with Howard Curtis, and there was a bigger group that did “Little Fox Run.” [Saxophonist] Darius Jones played on it, and Cameron was actually on it too. So it is just one of those songs that I thought would be great to hear Jason and Bob play that way. Completely with a free energy. People have been really receptive to that tune, which is the opposite of what you might think. It can turn off people in the wrong setting, in all honesty. We wouldn’t be doing that tune at some restaurant like Ruth’s Chris or something.

RVAJazz: [laughs] Or a wedding.

SC: That’s right. But when you’re playing a gig especially like that, where people come to hear that sound, I think that tune works really well for us. Fred Anderson is a big influence on me, as well as a lot of the Chicago free jazz scene. The late 1960’s, the whole AACM movement that was going on. I was fortunate that Howard Curtis turned me on to all this stuff when I was at VCU. When I was there at first, I didn’t really know anything about it. I had always been attracted to lots of weird music, and various types of non-commercial radio. But he used to just bring in stacks of CD’s, and we’d take a whole lesson where we’d listen to this stuff. That was when Tower Records was still here, and Plan 9 had a healthier selection of music. I would just go and buy all that stuff. I just got engulfed in that sound.

RVAJazz: Who in addition to Fred Anderson and the AACM, who else from Chicago has inspired you?

SC: Well, there’s The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Joseph Jarman, another great player Roswell Rudd. I’ve been checking out this record by a newer trumpeter named Josh Berman, who is just a great writer. It’s like new Chicago stuff. Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, Frank Rosaly is another great drummer, who actually came to Richmond and played when The Jeb Bishop Trio came to town and played with No BS! Brass. Jeff Parker, the guitarist from Tortoise. There is something real cool about the energy up there that seems like a different thing, and musically I feel like there’s some kind of weird connection between what is happening there and what is happening here.

RVAJazz: This might be like Chicago-lite or something.

SC: That’s right. [laughs] It seems like everybody there is playing on each other’s albums, and each other’s gigs. That is kind of what is happening here. Everybody plays on each other’s records. There are so many projects. Everybody can have their own thing, and they have a pool of friends to draw from that are equally as open minded to doing those projects.

RVAJazz: The Richmond scene does seem to be gravitating in a similar way, and creating in a similar way. So you mentioned earlier that your band was a project that you started thinking about years back, but in the midst of free-lancing with Ilad, Glows in the Dark, and The New Belgians, it didn’t come about to start the band until you got the opportunity.

SC: Yeah, actually the two songs that started the band I wrote in 2004, and I’ve been sitting on it forever. At one time, I got together with Cameron and Bob to play them as a trio, and again it fell to the back-burner while other things were happening in life. Probably a year ago now, I felt like I just want to do this, and I started to write more songs, and it came time to make the band happen. I was lucky that all those guys were super into doing it, and I didn’t have to pester anybody. As soon as I asked, they all said “Yeah, of course.”

RVAJazz: Very good! So you guys have had a few gigs now at The Camel and The Black Hand, and what is coming up for the band post-RVAJazzfest?

SC: Some more stuff in the same places, and we also play at the Commercial Taphouse maybe every six weeks or so. Those gigs are always a lot of fun. It’s a great place to play with a whole different energy. It’s funny because I used to go see Brian Jones back in the day when he played there quite a bit, and it’s funny to be on the opposite side now.

RVAJazz: Leading a band yourself.

Clark with bassist Cameron Ralston (left) and Ilad bandmate Gabe Churray.

SC: Yeah, that’s right. And I’m hoping that in May, we can record this batch of tunes that we’ve been doing, so we can document them. I also started writing some new stuff, and now that I’ve got the sound of the band in my head, I can write specifically for those musicians. Hopefully we can record sometime in May, and it won’t take forever to get the record put out. In the immediate future, that is what is happening. I’d love to be able to tour and take the band out on the road, but it’s just a matter of logistics.

RVAJazz: Yep, and keeping the costs down.

SC: That’s right. It’s hard to do when gas is over $3 per gallon, and tolls to New York are like $30 dollars or more.

RVAJazz: Yep. Is there anything you’d like to add before signing off?

SC: I’d like to say thanks to Dean for making this jazz festival possible, and the RVAJazz blog possible. All the stuff that we’ve talked about in some way relates back to the RVAJazz blog. They’re the ones putting this music up on the web. It’s a central location for the Richmond jazz scene.

RVAJazz: Definitely. It’s well promoted, and Dean has put a lot of love into the jazz community here.

SC: That’s right. He keeps it updated so people keep coming back and checking stuff out, and he comes out to shows, and there’s a presence that is a really important thing to have.

RVAJazz: Everybody has been fortunate that he’s done a lot of promo work that not every musician has the stomach for.

SC: That’s part of the game, man. That’s the dirty side of the game, which they don’t really teach you in school. Like when I go to teach younger students today, I won’t be talking about how to book gigs or get your shows listed in newspapers. They don’t care about that. They don’t see that as part of the process, but it should be talked about, because that’s our jobs. You’re going to get as far as you’re willing to work.

RVAJazz: There are two sides to being an artist: you have to be an artist, but you also have to be a businessman.

SC: Right, you have to be a businessman. Drummer Billy Williams, I think, has a business degree. He’s an incredible drummer anyway, but I’m sure he’s learned a lot from taking that path. So as you make this your career, you can see the bigger picture, and reach wider spans of people.

RVAJazz: And hopefully get gigs out of it.

SC: Ultimately that’s what it will come down to: make money, right? [laughs]

RVAJazz: [laughs] That’s right! So what other things are you doing aside from music? I’ve heard you like your late-night Star Trek viewing after the gig.

SC: I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll admit to it. You know, you get home from the gig at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, and there’s not really anything on TV except that. I’ve watched a lot of Star Trek. I think I’ve seen them all…a lot. I’m not really waiting for new episodes. [laughs] It’s a great way to un-wind after the gig.

RVAJazz: Well maybe more people will incorporate that into their wind-downs?

SC: [laughs] Yeah, it will become part of the scene. Most people will watch Sportscenter, which I will too during commercial breaks, or if there is a particularly boring Star Trek that I’ve already seen maybe twenty times. Or I’ll just go to bed, which might be a better idea.

RVAJazz: There you go. Of course, there’s some especially exciting stuff on Sportscenter right now, with VCU and UofR Basketball going so far.

SC: Yeah! There’s a lot of pride in Richmond right now. One thing that’s really unique is that you see the love that a lot of musicians here have for the scene. Maybe that was missing at some point in time, I don’t know, but it seems stronger now than it was in the past. I think it is because certain things have started to get some notoriety. Fight the Big Bull has gotten onto a much larger scene, and NO BS! has done a lot of stuff. And they’re seeing that they can do that stuff here, in the city. Fight the Big Bull has been on who knows how many Top Ten Records lists this past year. And they’re here in Richmond! An interesting side-note: Fight the Big Bull recently played in Roanoke, and there is a guy there who is a Clean Feed Records fanatic. He buys all their records. Fight the Big Bull is one of his favorite bands. He never put two and two together that they were from Richmond. He thought that they were a European band or something. But he was reading the liner notes [to a FTBB album] and saw that they were from Richmond. So he got a hold of Matt White and booked the gig. So that’s kind of the thing to do. Getting people to realize that there is this kind of caliber of stuff happening here.

RVAJazz: Yeah, and your band included.

SC: Yeah, we’re trying to be a part of the scene here.

RVAJazz: Definitely. Well best of luck to you in the band leadership role, and looking forward to hearing you at RVAJazzfest.

SC: Yeah, thanks man. I appreciate it.

Drummer and composer Scott Clark has a taste for the “nerdy” sides of music and TV. He writes music that is held to the rigid structures of “Serialism” by using all twelve pitches in a repeating order. After late-night gigs with indefinable ensembles like Ilad and Glows in the Dark, along with a boogaloo/funk project called The New Belgians, he routinely chills out by watching re-runs of Star Trek at his apartment. I met up with Scott in his apartment, where his own vibrant abstract painting hung above the couch in his living room, to discuss the impetus for his recently formed band, The Scott Clark 4tet, along with his thoughts on the Richmond music scene.

DT: Hey Scott, so we’re going to talk a little bit about your band, the Scott Clark 4tet, that is coming to The Camel on April 9^th for RVAJazzfest. You’ve been a fixture in the Richmond jazz community for a number of years now, and you’ve got a quartet with a group of guys that have also been mainstays on the Richmond music scene: Jason Scott on saxophones, Bob Miller on trumpet and pocket trumpet, Cameron Ralston on bass, and yourself. What does each of these members bring to the group sound?

SC: All three of those guys all have very unique voices, which is what makes the group work and have its own sound. Bob [Miller] brings a very distinctive sound. Jason Scott is a great saxophone player, and nobody in town sounds like him, and that’s not a slam on anybody else. The same thing goes for Cameron [Ralston]. This is what you want when you’re starting a band. You want everybody who has a unique voice to begin with, so when you bring that together there is a collective uniqueness.

DT: And speaking of a unique voice, you formulated this band with the idea of another unique band leader, Ornette Coleman.

SC: Ornette is a big influence. I can’t say that there was one specific thing that drew me to that music, but I just knew that from the first time I heard it, I thought, “Oh my god, this is amazing music.” I remember Cameron asked me, when we first met, if I’d ever checked out Ed Blackwell, the drummer for Ornette. This was before I’d checked some of that music out. He said he heard some of that type of playing in my playing. So I went and checked it out and was like, “Yeah, OK! This is some amazing music.” It just clicked. That instrumentation of a chordless quartet is a really intriguing sound. I’d wanted to put together a band like that for a long time.

DT: And so the compositions that you’ve written here might be free jazz in interpretation, but you’ve also incorporated some twelve-tone music in that as well, correct?

SC: That’s right. Again, it’s another one of those things where some friends of mine who were going to school at JMU talked to me about these twelve-tone composers that were doing this “Serialism” stuff, which was really intriguing. So I would sit and write these twelve-tone rows in Finale [music notation software], and got really nerdy. I still have a bunch of stuff on my computer. I used to write string quartets with these strange things. I never had the intention of having people play them, but it was always just fun to listen to in Finale. I’ve been doing that for years. So I wondered if I could do this with certain rhythms that would make it sound like a swing tune or a jazz tune. And it worked! You have to be careful, because since you are only using the same row of twelve notes, sometimes you can hear it start back over. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because jazz tunes do that. They often have a head, then solos, and then you hear the main melodic stuff come back with the head. Even still we’re finding more possibilities to experiment with these twelve-tone ideas.

DT: How might you put together a piece in rehearsal with your band?

SC: I have the tunes ready and we’ll play them, but they’re pretty loose. I’ll say, “Here is the head of the song,” and we’ll take solos, and we need to figure out how to get to the end of the song. And then if anybody has an idea while playing through it, like “Maybe we should do this thing here,” we try it out. I think doing it that way is the best, because, like we said, all these guys have unique voices. A lot of times, if it comes down to a matter of doing something on the bass for example, I’ll defer to the bassist.

DT: So you trust those guys.

SC: Yeah, one-hundred percent.

DT: Tell me a little bit more about some of the gigs that you’ve had with your band leading up to your upcoming RVAJazzfest performance.

SC: Yep, there have been the Jazz at The Camel gigs on Tuesday nights. It’s been a great outlet for various bands, especially bands that are just getting started. There’s already a built in gig there, and all you have to do is make sure you get into the rotation. Reggie Chapman has also been doing The Black Hand [Sunday Series] thing. Again, it’s another gig that’s built in, and that’s open. They are free gigs so people can just come. I think it’s really conducive to what is happening. A lot of those groups that I’ve played with recently, those venues have been our first gigs. For us, we rely on having those chances to take these songs and bring them to life in a performance situation.

DT: Thankfully some of those gigs from The Camel have been recorded and are up on the blog now. It’s great that if people didn’t make it to the show, they can still hear your band on the blog.

SC: I think it’s a great thing that the RVAjazz blog is doing. Not only is it good for us in Richmond, but also for people outside of the city that have been hearing murmurs of what is happening in Richmond. There’s an outlet where you can go straight to the source, and check out what is going on. Like this is what it sounded like last Tuesday night. And they put them up online quickly. I think their goal is to have them up by the Saturday following the Tuesday event. It’s good for us so that we can go back and listen as well, and check out what worked and what didn’t, and swap out ideas.

DT: Great! In addition to your own compositions that you feature in your band, you’ve got some other repertoire by other composers as well?

SC: Yep, we do one tune by a saxophonist named Fred Anderson called “Little Fox Run.” It’s a song that I actually did on my senior recital, with a different arrangement of musicians. I played a duo with Howard Curtis, and there was a bigger group that did “Little Fox Run.” [Saxophonist] Darius Jones played on it, and Cameron was actually on it too. So it is just one of those songs that I thought would be great to hear Jason and Bob play that way. Completely with a free energy. People have been really receptive to that tune, which is the opposite of what you might think. It can turn off people in the wrong setting, in all honesty. We wouldn’t be doing that tune at some restaurant like Ruth’s Chris or something.

DT: [laughs] Or a wedding.

SC: That’s right. But when you’re playing a gig especially like that, where people come to hear that sound, I think that tune works really well for us. Fred Anderson is a big influence on me, as well as a lot of the Chicago free jazz scene. The late 1960’s, the whole AACM movement that was going on. I was fortunate that Howard Curtis turned me on to all this stuff when I was at VCU. When I was there at first, I didn’t really know anything about it. I had always been attracted to lots of weird music, and various types of non-commercial radio. But he used to just bring in stacks of CD’s, and we’d take a whole lesson where we’d listen to this stuff. That was when Tower Records was still here, and Plan 9 had a healthier selection of music. I would just go and buy all that stuff. I just got engulfed in that sound.

DT: Who in addition to Fred Anderson and the AACM, who else from Chicago has inspired you?

SC: Well, there’s The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Joseph Jarman, another great player Roswell Rudd. I’ve been checking out this record by a newer trumpeter named Josh Berman, who is just a great writer. It’s like new Chicago stuff. Ken Vandermark, Tim Daisy, Frank Rosaly is another great drummer, who actually came to Richmond and played when The Jeb Bishop Trio came to town and played with No BS!. Jeff Parker, the guitarist from Tortoise. There is something real cool about the energy up there that seems like a different thing, and musically I feel like there’s some kind of weird connection between what is happening there and what is happening here.

DT: This might be like Chicago-lite or something.

SC: That’s right. [laughs] It seems like everybody there is playing on each other’s albums, and each other’s gigs. That is kind of what is happening here. Everybody plays on each other’s records. There are so many projects. Everybody can have their own thing, and they have a pool of friends to draw from that are equally as open minded to doing those projects.

DT: The Richmond scene does seem to be gravitating in a similar way, and creating in a similar way. So you mentioned earlier that your band was a project that you started thinking about years back, but in the midst of free-lancing with Ilad, Glows in the Dark, and The New Belgians, it didn’t come about to start the band until you got the opportunity.

SC: Yeah, actually the two songs that started the band I wrote in 2004, and I’ve been sitting on it forever. At one time, I got together with Cameron and Bob to play them as a trio, and again it fell to the back-burner while other things were happening in life. Probably a year ago now, I felt like I just want to do this, and I started to write more songs, and it came time to make the band happen. I was lucky that all those guys were super into doing it, and I didn’t have to pester anybody. As soon as I asked, they all said “Yeah, of course.”

DT: Very good! So you guys have had a few gigs now at The Camel and The Black Hand, and what is coming up for the band post-RVAJazzfest?

SC: Some more stuff in the same places, and we also play at the Commercial Taphouse maybe every six weeks or so. Those gigs are always a lot of fun. It’s a great place to play with a whole different energy. It’s funny because I used to go see Brian Jones back in the day when he played there quite a bit, and it’s funny to be on the opposite side now.

DT: Leading a band yourself.

SC: Yeah, that’s right. And I’m hoping that in May, we can record this batch of tunes that we’ve been doing, so we can document them. I also started writing some new stuff, and now that I’ve got the sound of the band in my head, I can write specifically for those musicians. Hopefully we can record sometime in May, and it won’t take forever to get the record put out. In the immediate future, that is what is happening. I’d love to be able to tour and take the band out on the road, but it’s just a matter of logistics.

DT: Yep, and keeping the costs down.

SC: That’s right. It’s hard to do when gas is over $3 per gallon, and tolls to New York are like $30 dollars or more.

DT: Yep. Is there anything you’d like to add before signing off?

SC: I’d like to say thanks to Dean for making this jazz festival possible, and the RVAjazz blog possible. All the stuff that we’ve talked about in some way relates back to the RVAjazz blog. They’re the ones putting this music up on the web. It’s a central location for the Richmond jazz scene.

DT: Definitely. It’s well promoted, and Dean has put a lot of love into the jazz community here.

SC: That’s right. He keeps it updated so people keep coming back and checking stuff out, and he comes out to shows, and there’s a presence that is a really important thing to have.

DT: Everybody has been fortunate that he’s done a lot of promo work that not every musician has the stomach for.

SC: That’s part of the game, man. That’s the dirty side of the game, which they don’t really teach you in school. Like when I go to teach younger students today, I won’t be talking about how to book gigs or get your shows listed in newspapers. They don’t care about that. They don’t see that as part of the process, but it should be talked about, because that’s our jobs. You’re going to get as far as you’re willing to work.

DT: There are two sides to being an artist. You have to be an artist, but you also have to be a businessman.

SC: Right, you have to be a businessman. Drummer Billy Williams, I think has a business degree. He’s an incredible drummer anyway, but I’m sure he’s learned a lot from taking that path. So as you make this your career, you can see the bigger picture, and reach wider spans of people.

DT: And hopefully get gigs out of it.

SC: Ultimately that’s what it will come down to: make money, right? [laughs]

DT: [laughs] That’s right! So what other things are you doing aside from music? I’ve heard you like your late-night Star Trek viewing after the gig.

SC: I’m not ashamed of it. I’ll admit to it. You know, you get home from the gig at 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning, and there’s not really anything on TV except that. I’ve watched a lot of Star Trek. I think I’ve seen them all…a lot. I’m not really waiting for new episodes. [laughs] It’s a great way to un-wind after the gig.

DT: Well maybe more people will incorporate that into their wind-downs?

SC: [laughs] Yeah, it will become part of the scene. Most people will watch Sportscenter, which I will too during commercial breaks, or if there is a particularly boring Star Trek that I’ve already seen maybe twenty times. Or I’ll just go to bed, which might be a better idea.

DT: There you go. Of course, there’s some especially exciting stuff on Sportscenter right now, with VCU and UofR Basketball going so far.

SC: Yeah! There’s a lot of pride in Richmond right now. One thing that’s really unique is that you see the love that a lot of musicians here have for the scene. Maybe that was missing at some point in time, I don’t know, but it seems stronger now than it was in the past. I think it is because certain things have started to get some notoriety. Fight the Big Bull has gotten onto a much larger scene, and NO BS! has done a lot of stuff. And they’re seeing that they can do that stuff here, in the city. Fight the Big Bull has been on who knows how many Top Ten Records lists this past year. And they’re here in Richmond! An interesting side-note: Fight the Big Bull recently played in Roanoke, and there is a guy there who is a Clean Feed Records fanatic. He buys all their records. Fight the Big Bull is one of his favorite bands. He never put two and two together that they were from Richmond. He thought that they were a European band or something. But he was reading the liner notes [to a FTBB album] and saw that they were from Richmond. So he got a hold of Matt White and booked the gig. So that’s kind of the thing to do. Getting people to realize that there is this kind of caliber of stuff happening here.

DT: Yeah, and your band included.

SC: Yeah, we’re trying to be a part of the scene here.

DT: Definitely. Well best of luck to you in the band leadership role, and looking forward to hearing you at RVAJazzfest.

SC: Yeah, thanks man. I appreciate it.

Old band, new sound, one night of fun

Aaron Williams — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 11:00:25 +0000

The best bands in Richmond combine strong group voices with unique individual voices. Occasionally, bands will leave character for one night and do something truly special. On Thursday February 24, Glows in the Dark will host "Mondo Italia Dance Party."

With extremely original compositions and John Lilley (sax), Reggie Pace (trombone), Scott Burton (guitar), Cameron Ralston (bass) and Scott Clark (drums), Glows in the Dark is a spectacular band in their usual element. With many of the members now regularly performing in more dance-oriented groups like Bio Ritmo, No B.S. Brass Band, The New Belgians and Ilad, Glows in the Dark’s members are impressively comfortable with both free form experimentation and backbeats.

Instead of their usual compositions that effortlessly weave through-composed melodic themes that seamlessly transition in to freer improvisations, Glows in the Dark will have one thing on the their mind: dancing. In front of a projector showing sex and violence from 1970’s Italian crime films, the band will take on the roll of DJ. Seamless transitions between compositions and improvisations will keep the crowd dancing for two whole sets.

In addition to all of that dancing, DJ Snow Panda will keep the crowd entertained in between sets with a playlist that will always leave you wondering “who is this?” as unique artists continue the dance grooves. As if the cast of characters isn’t entertaining enough, Lauren Serpa will be sitting in on flute and Eddie Prendergast will be singing a song or two.

The band’s leader, guitarist, composer and all round film guru, Scott Burton, is no stranger to combining films with music. Films or actors that Burton enjoys inspire most of Glows in the Dark’s compositions.

The night will be based on Poliziotteschi Italian crime films. These films are Police-esque films where tough cops are the main protagonists. Oh yeah, they also have everything you might want in an action film: violence, organized crime, car chases, gunfights, explosions and corruption up through the highest level of government. These films combined themes of 1960’s Italian crime films with films like Dirty Harry. By the end of the decade, the directors had turned on their own art and they started creating parodies and comedies. Try and imagine Italian Dirty Harry plus the spontaneous, danceable grooves of Glows in the Dark.

This is the first time anything remotely like this has happened in Richmond. 2011 has already proven to be the year of Richmond musicians taking it the next level and this could be the start of something special for Glows in the Dark.

Catch Glows in the Dark hosting “Mondo Italia Dance Party” at Balliceaux, 203 North Lombardy Street, Thursday February 24. No cover and 21+.

Listening Back: Jazz By Numbers

Dean Christesen — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 11:00:55 +0000

In Listening Back, we chronicle the happenings at The Camel’s free weekly jazz series on Tuesday nights. Be there if you can. But if you can’t, stop by here every Saturday for a recap in sights and sounds. This week, Jazz By Numbers featuring Bryan Hooten, SCUO, Trio of Justice, and Scott Clark 4tet continued the series.

photos by Amber Smith

From soloist to quartet and everywhere (duo and trio in case you needed it spelled out for you) in between, Jazz By Numbers on Tuesday was a night of instrumentations of various size.

Exploring extended techniques and playing as a soloist is not new for trombonist Bryan Hooten, but recently he has begun performing more by himself, with an album likely to be released in the future. Listen for his multiphonics -- multiple notes played at once by creating overtones -- which Hooten uses tastefully a la one of his trombone heroes, Albert Mangelsdorff. The duo called SCUO (guitarist Scott Burton and drummer Scott Clark) drive home heavily hypnotic rhythms in a minimalistic way, making the process in which they vary the music evident. Trio of Justice continued to champion their unusual instrumentation of Reggie Pace on trombone, Reggie Chapman on tuba, and Devonne Harris on drums. Lastly, Scott Clark 4tet gave a teaser to their featured performance at RVAJazzfest 2011 in April.

Listen to Bryan Hooten:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/Bryan%20Hooten%20020811.mp3|titles=Live at The Camel February 8 2011|artists=Bryan Hooten]

Listen to SCUO:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/SCUO%20013111.mp3|titles=Live at The Camel January 31 2011|artists=SCUO]

Note: Due to technical difficulties during this set, we were unable to capture audio. This is their performance from the week before.

Listen to Trio of Justice:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/Trio%20of%20Justice%20020811.mp3|titles=Live at The Camel February 8 2011|artists=Trio of Justice]

Listen to Scott Clark 4tet:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/Scott%20Clark%204tet%20020811.mp3|titles=Live at The Camel February 8 2011|artists=Scott Clark 4tet]

On Tuesday, Larri Branch Agenda and Steve Kessler continue the free series. The Camel is located at 1621 W. Broad St. in Richmond, VA. More information is available at thecamel.org.

Listen back to other gigs in Richmond

Announcing RVAJazzfest 2011

Dean Christesen — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 17:00:02 +0000

design by Cary Ralston

The third annual RVAJazzfest will take place on Saturday, April 9, 2011, and will feature Harris Eisenstadt and Canada Day, the Brooklyn-based drummer-led quintet whose music and members have been called phenomenal, unapologetic, and exploratory. Following their self-titled debut album on Clean Feed Records in 2009 and Eisenstadt's lauded solo album Woodblock Prints last year, the band is touring in celebration of their new album on the Songlines label.

Along with Canada Day, the evening will showcase two new Richmond-based groups: Scott Clark 4-tet and Old New Things, the latter co-led by trumpeter Taylor Barnett and guitarist Trey Pollard.

RVAJazzfest will be held at The Camel at 1621 W. Broad Street in Richmond, VA. Music will start promptly at 9pm. Attendees are encouraged to arrive early. Tickets will be $15 in advance and $20 at the door, $12 for students at the door. More information on purchasing tickets in advance will be available here soon.

Harris Eisenstadt and Canada Day, photo by Scott Friedlander

About HARRIS EISENSTADT AND CANADA DAY

Canada Day features Eisenstadt (drums, compositions), Nate Wooley (trumpet), Matt Bauder (tenor saxophone), Chris Dingman (vibraphone), and Garth Stevenson (bass).

"Harris Eisenstadt, a drummer and composer originally from Toronto, takes a fixer’s approach to music making, looking for ways to fit the pieces together. He works along jazz’s progressive fringe but doesn’t generally set out to make a ruckus. In his own music especially, he often seems intent on extracting consonance from dissonance or forging ungainliness into grace." (Nate Chinen, New York Times). Critics have called him "one of the new generation's leading composers" (Troy Collins, AllAboutJazz.com), "strong proof that jazz is still young and growing," (Greg Burk, L.A. Weekly), "vital and increasingly influential" (Glenn Astarita, jazzreview.com) and "one of the most creative and skilled musician/composers incorporating traditional material to create new and vital improvised music" (Robert Iannapollo, AllAboutJazz-New York). The Village Voice's Jim Macnie adds, "he's perpetually building new ensembles to suit the variety of music he hears in his head—that's what composers do."

One of only a handful of drummers equally well-known for his work as a composer, Eisenstadt is among the most versatile and prolific musicians of his generation. His eclectic resume includes studies with some of the most respected names in both improvised music and West African drumming, and performances in genres ranging from film and theater to poetry and dance to contemporary classical and opera. Most active in jazz and improvised music, as both an in-demand sideman and a bandleader, he has performed all over the globe, earned commissions from organizations such as Meet The Composer and The American Composers Forum, and appeared on more than 35 recordings over the past decade. His latest recording, Woodblock Prints (No Business, 2010), has received rave reviews, and recent honors include nomination for up-and-coming artist of the year by the Jazz Journalists Association (2009), and rising star in the composer category of the Downbeat International Critics Poll (2009).

Visit Harris Eisenstadt online

Harris Eisenstadt, photo by Peter Gannushkin / DOWNTOWNMUSIC.NET

Nate Wooley grew up in a Finnish-American fishing village in Oregon. He has spent the rest of his life trying musically to find a way back to the peace and quiet of that time by whole-heartedly embracing the space between complete absorption in sound and relative absence of the same. He began playing trumpet professionally at age 13 with his father, and after studying he moved to Colorado where he studied more with Ron Miles, Art Lande, Fred Hess, and improvisation master Jack Wright. His tenure with Jack began to break Nate out of self-imposed molds and into the sound world that he has embraced as his own. Nate currently resides in Jersey City, NJ and performs solo trumpet improvisations as well as collaborating with such diverse artists as Anthony Braxton, Paul Lytton, John Zorn, Fred Frith, Marilyn Crispell, Joe Morris, Steve Beresford, Wolf Eyes, Akron/Family, David Grubbs, C. Spencer Yeh, Daniel Levin, Stephen Gauci, Harris Eisenstadt, Taylor Ho Bynum and Peter Evans. "Nate Wooley is one of those rare players who seemingly pop up from nowhere, fully formed and confidently indicating the future of his instrument in contemporary music." - Bill Shoemaker, Moment's Notice, "Nate is, without hyperbole, one of the most individual and interesting trumpet players out there today." - Dave Douglas

Hailed by the New York Times as a "dazzling" soloist and composer with a "fondness for airtight logic and burnished lyricism," Chris Dingman is one of the most sought-after vibraphonists of his generation. Schooled in the jazz tradition, yet influenced by a wide range of music and experience, Dingman draws inspiration and meaning from a diverse set of musical sources, uniting them in a progressive approach that has earned him praise for his "poignant work" (David Sprague, Variety), his "adaptive humility" (Nate Chinen, NY Times), and as "downright hypnotic" (John Barron, All About Jazz). He has performed and studied with many of the world's greatest jazz musicians, including Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Benny Golson, Jimmy Heath, and many others. Now based in Brooklyn, NY, he is currently working with many of the leading lights on the jazz and creative music scene, both as a sideman and as a leader with his project Waking Dreams.

Garth Stevenson was born and raised in the breathtaking Canadian Rockies where nature became the common thread through his life and music. He regularly carries his 150-year-old bass to the woods, the beach, the desert, and most recently to the penguins in search of new music, sounds, and inspiration. His solo bass music uses looping and reverb pedals to create rich layers of sound and melody. In 2007 he released Alpine, his first solo album which received praise in many magazines including Double Bassist Magazine and Yoga Journal. In 2008 his solo composition “Grandfather” won the International Society of Double Bassists Composition Competition. Stevenson spent February in Antarctica performing and acting in a new film by director Scott Cohen with actors Vincent Kartheiser, Olivia Thirlby and William Campbell. He had the opportunity to play with thousands of penguins, seals, icebergs, and called twelve whales to the boat by imitating whale calls on his bass. His collaboration with Cohen continues as he composes music for the film score. Garth introduced his solo music to the yoga community last year at Wanderlust, a festival of music and yoga at Lake Tahoe, California. Stevenson graduated from the Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship with a degree composition and performance in 2004. While in Boston he played with jazz legends George Garzone, Joe Lovano, John Lockwood, and founded TAQ, a trio with Polish pianist Marcin Masecki and Israeli drummer Ziv Ravitz. In 2005 he moved to New York and joined bands with Sonya Kitchell, John Shannon, Mat Maneri, Petr Cancura and worked as a freelance bassist appearing on over 50 recordings. He has performed on David Letterman, Craig Fergusson, hundreds of radio stations, at Bonnaroo, and at music festivals in Europe, Japan, Canada, and South America.

"This superb quintet...are unapologetic vanguardists who just happen to have a strong grasp of post-bop fundamentals." Downbeat

"A composer of great depth and diversity, Eisenstadt proves a fine trap drummer...and a formidable bandleader who deserves more recognition in both areas." - All Music

"...[One] of the city's finest cutting-edge improvisers. " - TimeOut New York

"[Eisenstadt's] phenomenal control of the full dynamic range of his kit, from ultra-quiet hiss to full-out cracks is impressive." - Signal To Noise

About OLD NEW THINGS

The brainchild of Trey Pollard and Taylor Barnett, Old New Things draws inspiration from American folk music and European chamber-jazz, creating a hybrid music that is honest, direct and expansive. The unique instrumentation of brass, reeds, banjo, pedal steel, acoustic guitar, bass, and drums offers a varied and colorful sonic palate not heard anywhere else. Their debut album Ghosts features original compositions as well as creative interpretations of music by Albert Ayler and J. S. Bach. Ghosts will be available February 1, 2011, on iTunes and CDBaby.com. Old New Things is Trey Pollard (acoustic guitar, pedal steel), Adam Larrabee (banjo), JC Kuhl (tenor saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet), Taylor Barnett (flugelhorn, muted trumpet), Cameron Ralston (bass), and Brian Caputo (drums). On Ghosts, Emre Kartari plays drums.

About SCOTT CLARK 4-TET

Initially inspired in part by Ornette Coleman’s classic quartet with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell, The Scott Clark 4-tet -- led by drummer and composer Scott Clark -- has quickly found its own way of working with time, space, and sound. Featuring Fight the Big Bull members trumpeter Bob Miller, saxophonist Jason Scott, and bassist Cameron Ralston (with whom Clark also plays in Glows in the Dark and ILAD), the Richmond, Virginia-based quartet was formed in late 2010, drawing in listeners with its musicians’ individual reputations and keeping them there with its nuclear bomb-like span of the post-bop/free-bop style.

RVAJazz presents RVAJazzfest 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011, 9pm, doors at 8pm
Harris Eisenstadt and Canada Day, Old New Things, Scott Clark 4-tet
The Camel, 1621 W. Broad St., Richmond, VA 23220. 804-353-4901
$15 advance, $20 door, $12 students
All ages
Purchase tickets online or in person at The Camel any day 5pm or later

If you're a business or individual interested in sponsorship opportunities for RVAJazzfest 2011, please contact Lauren Eubank at lauren AT rvanews DOT com.

Listening Back: UTV.Chamber and Scott Clark 4-tet

Dean Christesen — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 11:00:23 +0000

As part of our new weekly series, we chronicle the happenings at The Camel's free weekly jazz series on Tuesday nights. Be there if you can. But if you can't, stop by here every Saturday morning for a recap in sights and sounds.

Maybe it was the HopSlam, or maybe it was The Camel's free weekly jazz series catching on. Either way, both UTV.Chamber and Scott Clark 4-tet had great audiences to play for on Tuesday night. Perhaps even more than last week, jazz's genre boundaries were stretched and the two sets varied greatly.

UTV considers itself to be "avant pop," made up of seven post-modern minds. Trombonist Reggie Chapman is the anchor, the conductor, and most often the instigator, although everyone from drummer Devonne Harris to vocalist Chelsea Temple play that role. In the middle, tenor saxophonist Marcus Tenney, alto saxophonist David Hood, and flugelhornist Mary Lawrence Hicks weave in and out of the limelight, and the band's most recent addition in guitarist Paul Willson is capable of changing textures instantly.

Listen to UTV.Chamber's set:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/UTV%20@%20The%20Camel%20(01.11.10).mp3|titles=UTVChamber Live at the Camel Tuesday January 11 2011|artists=UTVChamber]

Scott Clark's quartet is a new favorite. Enlisting Fight the Big Bull players Jason Scott (saxophone), Bob Miller (trumpet), and Cameron Ralston (on bass, with whom Clark also plays in Glows in the Dark and Ilad), the drummer leads his band around adventurous compositions without limits. Ralston's playing anchors the band when it needs to and totally frees itself of strict rhythmic responsibility at other times, providing great counterpoint or conversing with drums in various tempos and meters. Bob Miller and Jason Scott are quite capable of starting a fire while it all churns alongside them.

Listen to Scott Clark 4-tet's set:
[audio:http://media.rvanews.com/Scott%20Clark%204tet%20@%20The%20Camel%20(01.11.10).mp3|titles=Scott Clark 4-tet Live at the Camel Tuesday January 11 2011|artists=Scott Clark 4-tet]

Listen back to other gigs in Richmond

Thanks to Lucas Fritz for the audio, Shaun Lilley for photos

Tracing SCUO

Dean Christesen — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 18:52:45 +0000

photo by Lauren Serpa

When guitarist Scott Burton and drummer Scott Clark formed SCUO, their goal was to write music that was harder than they could possibly play. In practice, there's no better way to improve your technical facility on your instrument. In performance, the concept is one that could come off as forced, arbitrary, and ridiculously complex for the sake of being ridiculously complex. But although their music can tend toward lots of notes (and sometimes decibels), it's their minimalist approach toward song structure that gives it all purpose.

At one of their first performances, they demonstrated this brilliantly in their first composition, "Legs." A cacophonous repeated motif breaks just long enough to give the melody some air instead of letting it get lost in all the sound. The piece has a clear structure, and when something changes (akin to the minimalist process of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, or Terry Riley), something in your brain ticks.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoCdXyMntGQ[/youtube]

Burton talks about the duo Hella -- similar to SCUO except with more distortion and noise -- as an influence. In this live tune, there's a clear theme that begins the piece, and the duo comes back to it between other sections that almost acts as verses. Different than SCUO's approach in "Legs," in other words, but with the same tight unison-style playing and seemingly outlandish rhythms.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdMDcG3zAEI[/youtube]

Another of these duos that's inspired Burton is Orthrelm, which contains guitarist Mick Barr. "Barr is a guitar player that Mary Halvorson introduced me to, and I've been obsessed ever since," says Burton, who also finds Barr's new black metal band Krallice particularly intriguing. Their music is often very minimal, Burton says, unlike this track, and their album OV is one 42-minute track that progresses steadily. "That vibe, what Barr is doing, I definitely find appealing," Burton says.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWQTiL2UtpE[/youtube]

"Anytime we get together to play music," Burton says, "we always do minimal stuff. It's almost like an exercise, but it turns out to be pretty cool... It's real intuitive, but the music is always about a structure that you can follow, and that makes us different. It is a conscious thing. It's always about trying to end up somewhere that feels like it makes sense. For us, it's more in common with the music we typically listen to and typically play."

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b87qiv3b6U0[/youtube]

SCUO is two fifths of Burton's band Glows in the Dark, but it doesn't borrow ideas from the quintet. Instead, elements from SCUO's music work their way into Glows, Burton says. "We're not even thinking about Glows, but I'm definitely integrating the things we come up with into newer Glows material," he says.

They formed the duo around a time when they were both practicing heavily and were eager to challenge themselves. "When we wrote out 'Legs'," Burton says, "we had this piece of paper with labeled parts to follow. Our newest song doesn't have anything written and it's harder to play than all the others. It's almost easier not to write it out and instead learn it by playing it over and over again. It's really just a challenge. We want to take this group and these concepts farther than we can do. If we can do them, there's no real end to where it can go."

SCUO is playing The Camel on Jan. 31 with The Suite Unraveling (NYC), and again at The Camel for Jazz by Numbers on Feb. 16. They hope to release their first album in April.

Double take: Glows in the Dark

Dean Christesen — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:02:31 +0000

At Commercial Taphouse on Sunday night, Glows in the Dark tucked into the bar's back corner playing music suggestive of spy films, apocalyptic comic strips, and crime. Last night on Balliceaux's new stage, they performed the music of 70s Italian soundtrack composers with the films on the wall as their backdrop. Less was left to the imagination of the audience, and the presentation of the video with the music provided for a totally different experience.

I learn more and more every time I hear Glows in the Dark, and each little discovery makes me wait eagerly for the next one. At the Taphouse, I couldn't help but explore their music's relationship with film. It's partially the notion they put in my head with, for example, their constant homages to film scorers of the past (see Monday night). On the other hand, their music just seems to be made for film.

Composer and guitarist Scott Burton's compositions drip with drama, but it's input from the entire band that makes everything go. "I really like ideas from everyone in the band," he's told us in the past. "It’s a lot like being a film director: everyone has ideas and you just have to pick the best ones."

At times when a soloist is playing over a building groove -- like trombonist Reggie Pace, saxophonist John Lilley, or bassist Cameron Ralston weaving their stories into the fabric -- I like to picture the improviser as a character of a film, the rest of the band the musical backdrop. The importance of the individual comes to the forefront like the acting abilities of a film's main character while the rest of the cast are just as important to the work as a whole.

Their intense free jazz freak outs (like Burton and drummer Scott Clark's episode in their own "Through A Glass Darkly" on Monday night) can be less chaotic than others of its kind. There's often a continuity that speaks more to extended conflict than all-out madness. The madness is there when it needs to be, but their great control helps their stories grow.

Much of their music follows the same structure a good story would. Granted, so does a lot of music like it. The difference here is in the undeniable sense of narrative in Burton's and the band's compositions. All parts of the story are strong: the exposition is suggestive of things to come, the climax rises to unimaginable heights, and the falling action is dramatic as could be. But what caps off many of the tunes as great pieces of music is in the resolution. New themes emerge, subdued in energy but rich with poignancy and emotion, and sometimes defeat. It leaves the listener physically yearning for another go.

At Balliceaux, car chases, dirt bikes going over massive jumps, and lots of frontal nudity accompanied Glows in the Dark's arrangements of soundtracks from the period. They reaffirmed any suspicions that their music is suitable for film. Film buff Burton has a deep knowledge of the style (both the cinematography and music) that suggests that good fortune isn't all that's at hand when it comes to their film-influenced music. Years of studying, practicing, and crafting his band's sound has created a package full of imagery with a story to tell.

RVAjazzfest: Glows in the Dark

Dean Christesen — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:40:00 +0000

Glows in the Dark will perform at RVAjazzfest with Steven Bernstein, Fight the Big Bull, and Boots of Leather on February 21, 2009, 8pm, at The Camel. Tickets are $10, all ages welcome.

by Joey Ciucci

Given Glows in the Dark's penchant for cerebral, sometimes disorienting tunes, the title of their first album, Music to Listen to Glows in the Dark By, is rather analogous to bands’ singular style. Scott Burton may be keeping time on guitar, while drummer Scott Clark absconds with the beat, floating around Cameron Ralston’s driving bass attack, as Reggie Pace forces his trombone to make entirely unnatural noises and John Lilley drops sheets of intermittently atonal and mellow sounds. Change a few things around, and Music to Listen to Glows in the Dark By quickly becomes dark music to listen to on a glowing, Commercial Taphouse Sunday night—a freaky, thematic, free vibe brought to you by some of Richmond’s finest and weirdest musicians.

Bandleader, composer, and guitarist Scott Burton, like many Richmond musicians lucky enough to be around during the Devil’s Workshop's brief gigging career, used the legendary band's weekly Bogart’s shows not only as inspiration but as a place to meet other players. Burton, who studied with Mike Ess at VCU although he didn’t major in music, started playing standards but eventually changed direction with the Free Breaks Trio. The Free Breaks Trio manipulated break beats by artists including Mad Lib and MF Doom, and played them in relatively uninterrupted sequences. This group also signified Burton’s burgeoning musical relationship with drummer Scott Clark.

Burton writes GitD’s music in stepwise fashion, first jotting down melodies as text letters, transferring them to notation as ideas flesh out, then devising bridges, setting structure and developing an overall feel for the tune. His scores include cryptic handwritten notes concerning free sections, and Scott Clark uses these, according to Burton, to “always do something way cooler than I had imagined.” Clark’s meticulous, calculated style is unique among Richmond’s excellent cadre of big hitting, big beat drummers. “Scott comes from a different place,” says Burton. “He’s so comfortable playing free… not playing time but the sense of time is always there.” Clark, whose form is such that he wears drumsticks down to a perfect point, is central to the unit’s sound. By combining precise, rudimentary beats, a sweeping sense of time, and sonic textures that jettison traditional backline drumming, Clark provides necessary structural integrity for GitD’s intense improvisational style.

Burton's compositions generally feature melodies that include counterpoints for one or both horns. A tune will move through a fairly standard head before being deconstructed for solo and free sections. Although saxophonist John Lilley, who replaced Jason Arce after his departure to New York, “isn’t as comfortable playing over fast, weird changes as Arce, he really opens up in the free sections.” Lilley’s solos channel the style of a past era. Covering a wide dynamic range, he plays with an exuberance that makes academic concerns secondary. Trombonist Reggie Pace’s signature voice really fits in this group—he’s able to utilize his seemingly endless repertoire of tonal variations and conversational phrasing. Bassist Cameron Ralston epitomizes a musician equally comfortable with being a capitvating solo and conversational voice as he is an asset to the band's sturdy foundation. Burton stays occupied directing the group and comping with oddly voiced, open chords, but also solos with rapid fire intensity, punctuating the groove with bursts of sound from his undistorted, acoustic sounding archtop.

When asked to compare Richmond’s sound with other scenes, Burton noted Richmond players tendency to “improvise out of the song…it’s a more compositional approach to soloing.” This is a decidedly good attribute, and one that GitD aptly demonstrates. Despite extended group improv and free sections, and a affinity for the outside sound, one never gets the sense that GitD is chopping out interchangeable solos, regardless of their technical proficiency. Whether playing a Burton original or an adapted John Carpenter movie theme, GitD challenges themselves and listeners to observe boundaries and cross them, and to listen and play in the moment.

Glows in the Dark is: Scott Burton: guitar/composition; Scott Clark: drums; John Lilley: saxes; Reginald Pace: trombone/shakers; Cameron Ralston: bass.

RVAjazzfest is made possible by the generous support of Richmond Jazz Society, Inc., RVA Magazine, Francis J. Balint & Associates, and Urban Views Weekly

Photos by Peter McElhinney