Friday, July 27th, 2007 ... 3:00 p.m. - 6:00 p.m. ... KZSU, 90.1 FM

Devoted much of the last hour to the Edgetone New Music Summit, a great DIY program put on each year by Rent Romus, proprietor of Edgetone Records.

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)
Horizontal lines denote microphone breaks.

* Dan Loomis Group -- "Pied Noir" -- I Love Paris (Jazz Excursion, 2007

Previously noted here.

Kneebody -- "Break Me" -- Kneebody (Greenleaf, 2005)

This one's catchy but nicely brash, with random sci-fi synth noises cutting across the picture all over the place. Big fun. These guys are coming to Stanford on Aug. 4, apparently, and they got written up in the SJ Merc today.

Empty-landscape drone, punctuated with some very nice acoustic bass. One of those "producer" trip-hop projects, with John Medeski, Matthew Shipp, William Parker, among others.

Previously noted here. Little chirpy female vocal blips, hard to discern as words.

* Kermit Ruffins -- "Can't Take My Baby Nowhere" -- Live at Vaughan's (Basin Street, 2006)

N'Orleans jazz with gruff vocals, a happy and very live set complete with audience noise during the songs and all the stage banter preserved. A real good time.

Previously noted here. The clattering of toy instruments, apparently.

Previously noted here. Very nice inside-out piano trio.

* Jim Ryan's Forward Energy -- "Bob Bin In" -- FE3 Portland (Edgetone, 2007)

Previously noted here. Lots of abstract work but gets into a straight-jazz groove towards the end.

An aggressive buzz to this track; others on the CD get more thoughtful and spacious. This is an improv session including bassist Damon Smith, who runs the Balance Point Acoustics label. Cast: Shibolet (soprano sax), Josephson (voice), Baker (trombone), Looney (piano), Smith (double bass). Small improv snippets, with titles taken from Mark Rothko paintings.

* Scott Tinkler -- "String Theory" -- Backwards (Extreme, 2006)

Previously noted here. For this track, Tinkler performs solo trumpet alongside a piano, starting by twanging the strings a bit, then playing the trumpet into the piano, letting the strings resonate around his notes. It's an effect probably lost over the radio airwaves, but I had to try it once.

Previously noted here.

A grand set of 20-minute suites on 2 CDs, mixing jazz and classical influences. Quite a variety here. The "Franz Patang" suite features a lot of brash pulsing from the horns but also gets into modern jazz elements. "Music in 7 Houses" follows a quieter, more improv-driven vein, with each "house" focusing on a different instrument, it seems -- acoustic guitar; tribal drum and flute; even a relaxing luau feel in the closing movement.

That's the first disc. The second disc really tears into it, with high-energy tracks packing lots of jazzy elements, such as intense piano solos or fusiony guitar. Great fun, and probably a kick to see live.

Previously noted here.

Previously noted here.

In 2006, the high-profile NYC jazz club Iridium gave Anthony Braxton a four night date. Think about that. A big-name, mainstream venue giving the stage over to Anthony Braxton and a 13-piece band. It's not a moneymaking proposition, but the club's owner, in an interview, said he was glad to do it just for the importance of the music. Bless you, Iridium.

(Steve Smith, a devoted NYC music writer, gives a fantastic first-hand account in his Night After Night blog.)

Every note was recorded for the new label Firehouse 12, which has released the results on a nine-CD compilation -- yes, that's one composition per CD. The label sent radio stations a single CD of excerpts, which we're plenty glad to have.

The music is more supple than Braxton's Ghost Trance Musics, which relied on an incessant thumping beat derived from Native American musics. These pieces shuffle and dart; they shift in and out of moods, sometimes slowing down for long improvs, sometimes kicking into a bop-like gear for what are darn near straight-jazz solos at a brisk, exciting pace. It's still complex stuff with an avant-garde feel, but that doesn't mean it can't kick ass.

A few blocks of music related to the Edgetone New Music Summit...

* Doctor Bob -- "Dark Times" -- Dark Times (Edgetone, 2006)

Previously noted here.

A surreal chant backed by a steady moog pulse: "Our freedom is buring by choice." Interesting sci-fi sparseness to it. Allbee overdubs herself for a tense choir effect towards the end.

Actually not violent at all, these are gentle and sometimes unsettling ambient washes. Very interesting stuff.

A local sample artist who's gotten quite a following. From a 3" CD that arrived in a cute little square package, some funky beats and no wave sax blares, actually quite accessible.

A jangly guitar loop that doesn't quite fit circularly, so you're aware it's an artificial loop. Previously noted, however briefly, here.

Previously noted here and here.

KLiP Trio -- "Wehrman" -- (Should I Be Concerned About This? Music and Records, 2002)

Consisting of Elliott Kallen, John Lauffenburger, and Garth Powell, an out-there "jazz" trio with an abstract-improv aesthetic and a cool black-and- white photo of Sun Ra on their album cover.

Vaguely related to Edgetone, in some way (that I might be remembering wrong), this is a release that came out on vinyl -- which was great, except that the CD-heavy routine at the station meant I was slow to get this added to the library (that was my responsibility for improv/jazz at the time) and, later, kept forgetting to play it. Nice stuff that deserved a better fate; I saw a chance here to sneak a track on the air, and I'll be keeping them in mind in future months, too.

Another act that wasn't part of the Music Summit. Their stuff is all over the map, a very Naked City-like mix of genres that uses jazz as a home base but often cuts into vicious, noisy territory. Jesse Quattro, who provides vocals on here, was doing a solo set at the Summit, so there was at least some connection.

-- Go back to Memory Select playlists.
-- Bay Area free/improv music calendar: http://www.bayimproviser.com.