A Group Improvisation by the Tone Road Ramblers

This is a long-awaited opportunity for me to write about the Tone Road Ramblers when readers can experience one of their improvisations without its being through the abstraction of prose only. The video comes to us with thanks to Eric Mandat. It can also be viewed on YouTube.

Morgan Powell

As it’s currently constituted, the personnel of the Tone Road Ramblers are: Morgan Powell and James Staley, trombones, and Ray Sasaki, trumpet. These three are original members who have been playing together since founding the collective in 1981. Eric Mandat, the clarinetist and percussionist of odd hand instruments, came in 1989, and though Howie Smith, with his bouquet of saxophone voices (ranging from soprano through contra-bass) has been with the group in one way or another for years, he officially replaced flutist John

Ray Sasaki

Fonville a couple of years ago. Only recently have they been without a formal percussionist, and they find that it’s okay. By nature, the best improvisers are firmly grounded realists, requiring no magic to spin gold from straw. For them, there’s no important difference between them anyway. If you listen, you’ll understand where and how such distinctions dissolve.

I have written about this organization and its members many times before, in Starr Review, New Music Box, and in my book, Sounding OurDepths: The Music of Morgan Powell (2014). Yet, thanks to Eric Mandat’s filming, this is the first time I’ve had video footage from a concert that I could use to show what it is so difficult to tell without the experience. How does the writer translate what is literally inarticulate into words? (See the post before this, in which Ray Sasaki’s helpfully asserts that playing the trumpet is speech for him).

James Staley

The Ramblers generously answer questions during breaks during their concerts because their unique music leaves many with more questions than vocabulary. Let me share a precis of responses to their FAQs:

Everything you hear is spontaneous. It is unrehearsed; there is no initial plan or “setup.” There isn’t a plan about who will play first: Someone will, and there is no discomfort with silence until someone stirs.

TRR has no leader. Ensemble members play (or refrain from playing) in response to what they hear their colleagues playing. No one is waiting their turn. As Ray Sasaki explains it, they are having a conversation that has a life of its own. If we accept the idea that each musician has been speaking with his instrument for most of his life, we are listening in on conversation that takes the many tones conversations do: quiet, calm, argumentative, silly, reminiscent, irritable, celebratory and all the rest. In conversation, sometimes one has nothing to add, or recognizes that he would only interrupt the flow. Sometimes his contribution will deepen it, and sometimes he has  a lot to say. This model may help guide your listening.

Howie Smith

The conversational model also helps listeners organize the experience that is distinctive for having none of the traditional markers we normally depend on to direct us in music: no beat (necessarily), no measured sections, no dependence on Western scales, nothing to guide a listener’s expectations. The music is made of sound, incident, and the ever-occurring present that asks you neither to linger nor to jump ahead. Just listen with the concentration of an eavesdropper: You are all attention, never knowing what surprising gem will come your way, and your heart will race.

Many anticipate chaos at the very idea of group improvisation but listening—and watching—will quickly dispel this notion. This is not a free-for-all, but the production of highly refined musicianship as execution and listening both. Chaos would result from simultaneous exertion of ego, each performer closed to what is going on around him and determined to make his own point. 

Clearly, these musicians aren't in competition with one another but in cooperation. They respond to the sound environment rhythmically and tonally, and they participate in the creation of atmospheres and impulses that will create a whole. They trade places in the composition, moving as the music develops between foreground and background, sometimes supporting with underlying chords or rhythmic punctuations, at other times asserting themselves with outbursts or long lyric lines. All this is executed so fluently that it is often difficult to distinguish voices so protean that they are often unrecognizable from their orchestral exemplars. 

Eric Mandat (courtesy of Rex Gaskins)

The point is not the individual voices, but the experience of a developing composition. Consider the breadth of sounds lavished on the ear and their disposition vis-a-vis one another. These combinations of sound, new to listeners, are new to the performers creating them in the moment. This music occurs because the musicians have made it a practice for over thirty-five years to override deeply-rooted Western musical rules and to free instincts about how to use their instruments—their voices—and what music is in the first place. The Ramblers' conclusion that freedom disconcerts audiences trained to believe that constraints—structure, form and fixed relationships—define music.

But works of art, however they are created, must have limits and feel whole. Performances and compositions, once begun, convince listeners that they've not only stopped but concluded. Ramblers performances will never end with the resolutions of nineteenth-century symphonies, our beloved standard for The End. The frequently-asked question to the Ramblers, "How do you know when it's over?" is not only legitimate, but of great concern to audience members asked to suspend most of their musical information to listen in the first place. 

As with making the music, the decision to conclude a piece is a group decision. Like all their decisions at every point, it could go any number of ways and it depends on what they are collectively and individually hearing. When they hear the possibility of completion, there is no necessity of doing so. If some one or two have more to say, the music will continue, refreshed. But when it ends, it ends with a conclusion—but it's one of countless possibilities in the continuum of sound and silence from which improvised music is made.

I Reconsider the Necessity of Criticism

Ray Sasaki speaks trumpet

The work entailed by running a young publishing company has been so all-consuming that I concluded a few months ago that I could no longer devote time to writing Starr Review: that I was overwhelmed and responsible to my authors were sufficient reasons to give it up. I didn’t mention my growing skepticism that it made much of a difference one way or the other whether I wrote or not.

Silly me! I shall pick up my pixels once again on whatever irregular basis I can. My lapse from reviewing has allowed me to conclude that readers or none, I feel compelled to write criticism to reflect and expand the impact of artists I'm moved by—what they think and make. Who can grow without discussion? How can I enjoy art without the time that writing makes me take to consider it deeply, in proportion to the generosity and magnitude of labor that brings art to us?

This weekend past I heard and talked with the brilliant musician and musical thinker, Ray Sasaki who is, among many other things, trumpeter with the Tone Road Ramblers. Ray spoke about the fact that he’s been playing his instrument since he was eight years old. How simply he told his audience that to play his horn is to speak. In essence, he is bilingual and it’s not clear that English is the more fluent language.

This stopped me in my tracks for being so simple, primary, and universally applicable. We often want to be relieved of the work of accepting gifts of art that we have to assemble with toolboxes limited to verbal language. “Artist: Just tell me what you mean! Be your own museum label!”

When Sasaki speaks music, does it matter if I make sense of it with words? Of course it does: that’s what most of us know. Art in all forms is sent out into a verbal world. It’s in the space between musical or visual or spatial language (literary language too!) and our attempts to understand it that meaning, discovery, and love happen. That's the space where criticism helps us appreciate, question, and discuss Sasaki’s sounds, where we can thank him directly or indirectly. In writing, I can lead others to his music and the world of ideas into which he invites us. These are the reasons to write—and to read—criticism. Or “reviews” as single-subject critical pieces are called. (see The Tone Road Ramblers: Always Some Surprises)

Democracy of Book Reviews

Being a publisher now has made me all the more poignantly aware of the dilution of reviewing. In visual art, one has long seen the decline of art reviews in local papers and the brevity of those that appear. Book reviewing, on the other hand, would seem to be undergoing a renaissance, thanks to customer reviews on Amazon’s commercial site and especially reader reviews on Goodreads’ social media network.

Book reviews are central to the literary world. They inform us about meritorious titles, and give us a chance to discuss them in our minds with informed interlocutors. It’s been sad to see book reviews fall away from the weekend sections of city newspapers, or to shrink under niggardly word limits where they do survive. There are fewer than there used to be. So I thought until these days of on-line, popular reviewing.

A book review is a signed essay that describes the work, raises and expatiates upon its themes and connects the work and writer to the wider world. The genre of review flourishing on websites simply summarizes the plot or argument of a work and rates it according to the reader’s feeling of like dislike—five stars or one, thumbs up or down. This isn’t a book review. It’s a book report or, if sufficiently succinct, advertising copy.

Goodreads serves the active and enthusiastic reader as wide-ranging, democratic book club. Readers have the satisfaction of keeping booklists that serve as reading diaries. They are motivated to read more by being in the virtual midst of readers who are always “talking” about books and comparing notes. Readers enjoy the companionship of overlapping communities with similar tastes and enthusiasms, which, in turn may nudge them into broadening their tastes in authors and genres. I think Goodreads has to be a plus for adult reading generally, a club with meetings on any schedule needed and no irresistible fattening noshes.

It’s unfortunate that the posts on Goodreads get called “reviews” since they almost never rise beyond plot summary and a rating based on a personal, eccentric factor. A book receives a “1” because the reader doesn’t like books with lots of characters. Another receives a “5” because the reviewer finds beautiful (for no illustrated reason) the writing that most book critics would deplore as ponderous. In short, analysis, specificity, comparison are hard to find in this world. Authority based on other than taste is rarely present.

Goodreads reviews do reflect the world of “legit” book reviewing in one discouraging way, that being that a few “hot” books are reviewed hundreds of times while books that are less publicized (and continue that way for all the attention lavished on the best-sellers) go relatively unnoticed. The connection between criticism and marketing is as embarrassing as the emperor’s new clothes. While the publishing world is replete with titles, the marketing budget or previous sales of an author’s books are what draw reviewers both popular and professional. No one wants to be seen making a call on an “unimportant” title: Most reviewers are very conservative, and are unlikely to introduce a new title by themselves. It's also hard to turn down a free book received through a well-oiled network.

I asked a NPR host who once spoke in Columbus why all of the many shows on the network reviewed the same one or two books at a time, when there are always so many to choose from. He dodged the question with a laugh.

Is criticism about passing judgment? Rating? Thumbs up or down? Take my word for it? You’ll love it?

Hooray for readers! Hooray for sharing opinions, for reading together, for swapping books, for keeping au courant. But let’s not mistake Goodreads and Amazon book reports and opinion-posting for criticism—that deeper, time-expanding conversation that takes us farther inside a book and into the widening spirals of space, time, and idea around it.

The Tone Road Ramblers: "Always Some Surprises"

Thirty-two is a good age: At thirty-two, we are smart, energetic and ready to take on the world. 

The power of a musical ensemble at thirty-two? It's off the charts. For a group to reach thirty-two with original members is remarkable in the first place. Rarely do six musicians have a history of cooperative musical and personal relationships deep enough to withstand the many challenges to solidarity posed by the sawing edges of personality, taste, and ambition. 

Tone Road Ramblers on the stage at Roulette, March 1, 2013. Photo by Doron Sadja for Roulette.

The Tone Road Ramblers have such strength, flexibility, and love. They formed as a leaderless ensemble to play experimental concert music, and their music continues to be renewed by the life experience and musical passions of its members. Personal openness and second-nature sensitivities to the world of sound have led them to create a nonpareil, protean, yet timeless music. 

Jim Staley. Photo by Doron Sadja.

The Ramblers arose out of relationships established at the University of Illinois School of Music. Now far flung as virtuosos with eminent careers, four founding members knew each other and played together in Champaign-Urbana during the late 1970s. They are composer and trombonist Morgan Powell; Jim Staley, trombonist and founder-director of Roulette, the New York venue for new music and performance; composer John Fonville, maestro of the flute in all its forms, and professor at the University of San Diego; and Ray Sasaki, virtuoso of jazz and classical trumpet both, and professor at the Butler School of Music, University of Texas at Austin. (Powell and Sasaki have appeared before in this blog in the September, 2012 article about Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection.)

I have written before about clarinetist and new music specialist, Eric Mandat, professor at Southern Illinois University, who joined the ensemble during the mid '80s, replacing the original clarinetist. Ron Coulter, a senior lecturer in percussion, also at Southern Illinois, in 2012 became the third percussionist with the ensemble. 

John Fonville and Morgan Powell. Photo by Doron Sadja.

With its core of enduring relationships, the ensemble's members are cooperative and patient; it's no wonder that their performances seem to come as the result of instinct. 

The Ramblers' primary mode is group improvisation. They appear on stage as a new music ensemble in the traditions of classical music: They arrange themselves formally in a "U" and remain seated; they read music from stands some of the time, thus disguising from the audience the long passages they improvise within scored work. Their core interest in improvisation is, in fact, usually associated with jazz. 

Powell, Sasaki, and Staley are all jazz musicians. Sasaki splits his time between jazz and classical trumpet, teaching a large studio from which his students go into both types of professional work. Powell plays jazz day-to-day. Having been brought up with the big band music, his heart is now deeply devoted to traditional jazz. From his Illinois days, Staley moved from traditional and mid-century jazz into free jazz and the avant-garde. 

Fonville and Mandat weren't raised with early training in jazz or improvisation. They each have played a variety of classical, world, new, and electronic musics, though Mandat's love of klezmer has taken him into that spontaneous, ornamental tradition.  

Eric Mandat. Photo by Doron Sadja.

In traditional jazz, musicians improvise as soloists, one at a time, within a formal structure that dictates when and for how many measures each will take a solo. They know the key, they know the tune, and, if they've played it often enough, some of their improvisation may even have become a matter of "licks," or  habitual patterns they've developed to fill the solo-improvisation spaces; spontaneous creation has taken the back seat.

Sasaki likens group improvisation to conversation in the sense that everyone has something to say and through listening to the others finds the best way to say it. The conversation will be as rich, intelligent, and interesting as the participants are attentive to their interlocutors. If no one is listening, nothing will come of the intercourse; no one will have an appropriate response or gambit; there will be no definition or sense to the flow of words.

The Ramblers do play some scored music written by its members. These works often include sections of unspecified duration open for group improvisation. Such writing is characteristic of Powell and Mandat. In Powell's daFunkaMonkus, played at their March performance at the University of Texas, there is a staged, pugnacious verbal discussion among the ensemble members about committing to their musical ideas—"playing their own way"—despite audience objections. The rough dialogue leads into an exciting extended quotation about jazz from W. C. Handy, which points the listener to a big connection between Rambler music and its roots in the impulses of jazz—to the freedom and the drive toward change and surprise. This passage is sampled here from TRR's University of Texas dress rehearsal of Morgan Powell's DaFunkusMonkus on March 27, 2013.

It might seem at first blush that group improvisation would create a chaos: sounds from six performers who "do their own things" simultaneously—the ultimate clash of self-involved cross-purposes. In fact, it is the result of exquisitely attuned listening, focused on knowing where the individual can be make the clearest, most relevant, useful, and distinctive contribution. 

Roulette, on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. Photo by
Angela Gaspar.

The Ramblers' brief tour during March took them to the University of Texas at Austin and to Roulette in New York City. Their concert at the University of Texas contained scored works by Powell, Mandat, and Sal Martirano, as well as improvisations. The New York concert, at Roulette in Brooklyn, was improvisations exclusively.

John Fonville. Photo by
Doron Sadja

Roulette has graciously provided rough cuts of recordings from the Ramblers' April 1 New York concert that I've sampled here to give my readers some idea of the range of sounds and the level of mutuality both of mind and virtuosity that this music demands. In SAMPLE no. 1 we hear flutist John Fonville open a piece supported by percussionist Colson. One Fonville creates the sound of at least two flutes through his mastery of overtones produced fluently, in flight, in an atmosphere shaded by the use of a subtle palette of microtones. These tones between the scale tones we are attuned to place his sound in neither minor nor major key, but in a zone of his own devising. So delicately, so vividly, so dramatically, Fonville initiates this group improvisation. It's not hard at all to understand how the rest of the ensemble will become charged with ideas and energy from the get-go. 

Ray Sasaki's lyrical trumpet leads to the close of another improvisation in SAMPLE #2. The beauty of his playing can only be experienced: his level of control over dynamics and seemingly endless phrases uninterrupted by perceptible breathing; the molten quality of his sound into which he injects brief passages of tonguing as quick and light as attacks of hummingbirds. Here, he plays blues in a way that proves the evolution that Handy spoke of. This is not blues as structure: there are no measures to count off, but a languorous, sensuous, mournful beauty; a necklace to which the ensemble attaches charms and pendants of differing weights and colors. His line is ornamented by the sounds that accrue to it. And still Sasaki delivers a seductively personal, conversational tone. It's not the tone of a man talking to himself; I think he's talking above the crowd, to us.

Ron Coulter. Photo by Doron Sadja.

I chose this THIRD SAMPLE to
show how adroitly the Ramblers propel themselves through a spontaneous composition—for it's important to understand that they are not merely making sounds together until they lose steam, but that they are executing a spontaneously created composition. Their improvisations have beginnings, middles, and ends, with evident transitions along the way. On one of their CDs on the Einstein label, Tone Road Ramblers: The Ragdale Years , all of the tracks are improvised. Lacking awareness of this fact, there is nothing to suggest that they are not playing from scored parts. 

In this sample, the ensemble is moved from the massed urgency of low, dense voices by the entrance of the piccolo, which cuts through the rumbling just as a fife is meant to do. The new voice redirects the trombones and calls forth sounds similar to its own. Lilting bird songs respond to the dance of the piccolo. The bird songs are generated by: bird calls. Coulter manages the Ramblers' serious arsenal of noise-making toys that are used throughout, as inspiration guides them.

The Roulette Store is the best source for Tone Road Rambler CDs and for CDs by Staley, Fonville, and Powell issued on the Einstein label. The iTunes Store also carries three albums and the individual tracks (including The Ragdale Years and their most recent, Dancing with the Ramblers, with music by Fonville, Mandat, and Powell.)

For a more in-depth profile of the Ramblers, the reader can access an article by this author posted on Powell's website: Off the Charts. 

Old Friends in Low Places: On the Front Line with Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection

Poster by Kerry Helms

Back in August, I discovered one day that a notice had been ripening for several days on my neglected Facebook page. Jazz Sextet: The Champaign Connection was playing from six o'clock until nine Central time that very evening at a wine bar in Urbana, Illinois. It was one o'clock in the afternoon that I read this. Columbus is in Eastern time. With the hour's lag between time zones, five hours would be just enough time to make the three-hundred mile drive. I was on the road in under a half hour.

It still makes me happy to remember the sense of victory I felt  upon arriving with ten minutes to spare then even finding a tall stool empty at the bar, a spot a little isolated, placing me above the inevitably noisy crowd. People pack the house to hear these guys; the two bars where they play (the beer bar—Iron Post—and the wine bar—Buvons) are as tightly packed as a liquor distributor's order book. And they play as a group only in Urbana-Champaign, where all of them teach, taught, studied, or are enrolled in the University of Illinois School of Music.

The front line is the permanent core of Jazz Sextet. On alto and soprano saxophones is Clevelander, Howie Smith. Everything about his full-throttle, athletic playing—his all-out enthusiasm for everything he involves himself in—belies the sober sophistication of his website photographs. Trombonist and fellow composer Morgan Powell, the one group member who has remained in Champaign since the '60s, reminded the crowd that Smith and he have been playing together for forty-five years, since they were graduate students together. Not only have they been partners in jazz, but Smith has been a performer whom composer Powell relies on for interpretation of his work.

Jazz Sextet in June, 2011 at the Iron Post. Left to right: Chip Stephens, Howie Smith, Ray Sasaki, Kelly Sill, Morgan Powell, Joel Spencer

Powell and Ray Sasaki met at Illinois as faculty members when Powell had left the ranks of graduate students to join the composition faculty, and Sasaki came was hired to teach in both his areas of expertise, classical and jazz trumpet. Powell has often written for Sasaki, notably on his 1995 CD, foRay froMorgan: The Beastly Beatitudes. When violinist Dorothy Martirano needed coaching with the extraordinary challenges of learning a piece Powell had written for her, she turned to Sasaki for tutelage in the composer's idiom.

Chip Stephens, of the University of Illinois School of Music's Jazz Studies Division, is the current pianist of choice for the Sextet. I've heard Stephens on several occasions, including as pianist with midwest tour of the Woody Herman ghost band. Again, I've never heard (or seen) anyone like him. On the bench, he would appear to be in a trance, focusing his unmoving face into the short distance while his entire upper body rocks in the gusty wind his maelstrom of music generates. He's like Gaudi architecture, all riffs and adornments straight from nature—from music that you know—and the more amazing for being that way since he links every phrase into a whole that the most artful patissiere would envy: a finely spun wonder of the imagination from the same ingredients that usually bring us Pop Tarts.

Larry Gray and Jay Sawyer at Buvons

The August ensemble was completed by fast-track drummer Jay Sawyer, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, graduate of Western Michigan University, and currently a graduate student in Jazz Studies at Illinois; and the redoubtable Chicago bassist, Larry Gray, who is a Jazz Studies faculty member as well. When Gray, Sawyer, and Stephens get cooking, the rest of the room can disappear, there is such esprit, joking, and vivacity in their music; such grins and jibes among them. On Jazz Sextet gigs in the past I've heard drummers John Von Ohlen and Joel Spencer, bassists Kelly Sill and Arlene Rosenberg. It's one hell of a bar band.

What matters here? Is it all the pedigrees and careers? The fact that you can look up their websites and find their further affiliations with the jazz greats that even people who never listen to music have heard of? 

For me, it's the certainty that I'll hear extraordinary music, amber while it's still alive and flowing, before it sets into preciousness. What I see and hear in this group—that could just as well be playing the Village Vanguard in New York or Chicago's Jazz Showcase—is that they play only twice a year, reunited virtually as playmates, inspired by their own familiar ground of happy associations. They perform with the spirit of boys at play, happy men blowing with abandon and no thought but of music, themselves the music itself. This is as compelling a form as art can take.

It's never that these old friends are reclaiming anything lost; there's no nostalgia. Their reunions are like the resurfacing of a vital, relentless spring of music that continues to flow underground, a wide-branching system that converges as a spectacular geyser a couple of times a year, at its original site. This music is never not a part of Sasaki, Powell, and Smith, wherever they go individually. Twice a year it erupts, and fans gather again to experience Old Faithful's explosion, Champaign-style.

Champaign Connection at the Iron Post in Urbana, full house in June 2011.

***

While the Jazz Sextet's front line's constituted of an important composer and two definitive interpreters of his work (hear, for instance, the incomparable Destiny and Desire by Powell, a duet played by Smith and Sasaki), their voices and modes of playing are breathtakingly distinct. In jazz rather than contemporary chamber music, the surprise might be in finding these three in the same lineup. Not only am I amazed by the art and musical personality of each, but also by the integrative power of jazz itself.

Ray Sasaki with Chip Stephens

Ray Sasaki practices in two sessions every day, one devoted to classical, one devoted to jazz. This discipline comes home—one hears and feels it—in the considered perfection of his solos: in his articulation; his round, open tone; the converging of emotion and his control over it. "Stardust" is a signature tune, and, with self-mocking humor, he opens the Sextet's performance of  STARDUST here.

When Sasaki plays, his eyes are open and he looks like he is inspecting the music as a material that he's sculpting as it emerges from the bell, as if it were molten gold to which his breath imparts elegant form.

Howie Smith draws on power sources unfathomable to me. The man is kinetic, seeming by the end of a two-set, three-hour session just to have warmed up. His presence is declarative and frontal; when he solos, he takes the stage like a thespian delivering the soliloquy that reveals the heart of the matter. Notes cascade from his horn as words do from a master of revenge drama; he explores changes as the betrayed hero rehearses his fury. Here's a sample from THERE WILL NEVER BE ANOTHER YOU.

Howie Smith

Still, I particularly admire Smith's way with ballads; he makes full use of the sweet possibilities of the alto and soprano voices. He's told me that the ballad is, in fact, his favorite mode. While I find myself gripping my barstool, not to be blown off by his athletic runs and chases, I lean forward and shiver to the emotional radiation from his rendering of WHAT'S NEW.

When Powell is up front, he plays softly, almost diffidently it would seem, and listeners have to bow in, sharpen their ears and even, perhaps, suspend their chatter to hear what's going on. Subtlety is his mode. Where others play the melody or play along the melody's harmonic changes—in a more traditional way—Powell calls our attention into the middle of the band itself, away from our outside perspective in the crowd. Every musician's ears have to be tuned to the ensemble; as improvisers, their music is at least as much the product of group decision as of personal ones. But Powell demonstrates this more radically, often by using his trombone not as an instrument of melody, but to join the rhythm section or to respond to or interact instantaneously with his fellows. In this sample from STELLA BY STARLIGHT we hear Powell playing with Stephens at the piano, using his trombone percussively, allowing the rhythm section sometimes to assume the melody. No role is fixed; it's all trust and play. Powell's friend and colleague, Dorothy Martirano, has more than once said that Powell is a musician who elevates the playing of everyone around him: This passage is one example of what she means, as he shares "his solo" with Stephens, bassist Gray, and drummer Sawyer. 

Morgan Powell

It's folly, of course, to write only of the styles of soloists, anyway, for the magic of an ensemble is precisely what Powell illustrates: the interplay of sounds, ideas, decision and impulses among the group members, listening to each other on the fly. Even solos are always shared. What we hear is only partially the result the each musician's skill in blowing, striking, or plucking: Their skills in listening and responding have no less weight. As listeners, we are the ones with options. We can float on the current; or we can saddle up, take the reins, and listen back.

It's a big disadvantage with any music not to be there when it's made, not to see as well as hear, for we hear with all our senses when we have the chance for our eyes, our deep muscles, and even our skin to react to the physical sensation of sound; to the visual information that improves or enhances our understanding of music's structure and surfaces.

But the chances are very small that most of us will make it to a bar in Urbana-Champaign on one of the weekends when Jazz Sextet plays, so with the kind endorsement of the band, I post several whole samples of this rarely heard music. "Basin Street Blues" and "It's You or No One" are tunes they nearly always play, freshly inspired by them every time, especially with changing rhythm sections.

This excerpt from a first set medley includes Powell's "Body and Soul," then a throw-down of comedy and heart-break staged by Stephens and Gray in back-to-back "Stompin' at the Savoy," and "Sophisticated Lady."

Close your eyes, spend some time, and be there.

Poster for June, 2011 by Kerry Helms

________________________________________________________________
With particular thanks to Howie Smith for his recordings, and to Tom Johnson for coaching me through audio edits. Blame for inconsistency in the quality of these samples is to be attributed to me alone.