free improvisation

Jim Baker, keys& synth; Brian Sandstrom, bass; Steve Hunt, drums; Ed Wilkerson, saxes, didgeridoo, oud, Mars Williams, reeds and toys — photo by Marc PoKempner

Keyboardist and synthesizer specialist Jim Baker has led the collective quartet Extraordinary Popular Delusions playing every Monday night in obscure Chicago venues for the past 13 years. My article on EPD, which features saxophonists Mars Williams and Edward Wilkerson Jr. (they switch off), multi-instrumentalist (bass, guitar, trumpet) Brian Sandstrom and percussionist/drummer Steve Hunt — all of whom have extensive creative music experience — was published today in the Chicago Reader — which I last wrote for in the 1980s.

Brian Sandstrom, bass and distorted guitar; Jim Baker, analog synth; Steve Hunt, drums.

Photos here by Marc PoKempner, from the free-form improv ensemble’s current regular gig, in the upstairs loft of the Beat Kitchen (they start around 9 pm, usually end by 11). No cover, no minimum (they put out a tip jazz), no limits — same as their interactive performance as part of painter Lewis Achenbach’s Jazz Occurrence at the Apple Store on Michigan Avenue, 6 pm. on January 24. See you there?

“Music that we’re playing now is just the blues of all of
America, all over again, it’s just a different kind of blues. This is the
blues, the real blues, it’s the new blues, and people must listen to this music
because they’ll be hearing it all the time. Because if it’s not me it’ll be
someone else that’s playing it. The majority of the younger musicians I’ve
heard in New York, they’ve begun to play this way because this is the only way
left for musicians to play. All the other ways have been explored, in the time
past.”Â

So sayeth tenor saxophonist Albert AylerÂ in December 1964 — a clip I used in my latest NPR audio piece about a Swedish documentary filmÂ on Ayler currently touring U.S. arthouses. He believed unbound, exploratory and free (yet focused) improvisation was the sound of the future. Typically depicted as a wild-eyed radical whose mysterious death 38 years ago came at the crux of his brief but ecstatic career, Ayler is being proved right by the explosive energies that seek to turn America’s vernacular music transcendent — at jazz festivals this week and next in New York City and beyond. It’s the only way left for musicians to play!

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Extraordinary Popular Delusions, Chicago free improv all-stars

Prophecy fulfilled: the future now at jazz fests