Fred Lonberg-Holm, Joe McPhee, Michael Zerang from Dec. 2013. I wish I knew who to credit with creating this striking image – no copyright infringement intended.
After nine years, the free-thinking Immediate Sound  Series ended at Chicago’s indie-alt. Hideout on Sept. 17. Survival Unit III, the decade-old but only  occasionally united ensemble of multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee (from Poughkeepsie) and Chicago-based cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and drummer Michael Zerang performed highly sympatico improvisations before a rapt and appreciative audience of aficionados and sometimes-collaborators, most of whom seemed to know each other.
It was a warm, colorful, informal scene, promoted by its organizer Mitch Cocanig as a funeral for the Wednesday nights he’d curated since 2006, in conjunction with the larger Umbrella Music collective which puts on shows at other venues, too. I wasn’t clear on why events at the Hideout ended, or whether Mitch had options to continue the Immediate Sound Series elsewhere. There were some teary eulogies, but overall the mood in this casual haunt tucked away between warehouses and the city’s Department of Fleet and Facility Management site (where Richard M. Daley still reigns as Mayor, at least in signage) was upbeat, and the Hideout continues rad programming like this weekend’s Festival of Joyous Rebellion.
Of course musicians and their fans grieve when a venue that’s been good for them closes. Attendees I recognized included reedist Mars Williams, pianist/Arp improviser Jim Baker, drummer-Constellation operator-Umbrella member Mike Reed, John Corbett (who began the Immediate Sound Series at the Empty Bottle and turned it over to Cocanig) and Fula flutist Sylvain Leroux (visiting from New York). Also in the room, which reminded me somewhat of New York’s late, lamented Tonic:  jazz journalists Bill Meyer
and (unrelated) Mitch Myers, WNUR radio show host Alain Drout and the inexhaustible Jim DeJazz. There were two sets, and I spent much of the second hanging out on the Hideout’s front stoop “patio,”noshing on delicious fresh tamales sold by a middle-aged Mexican man heaving a huge hotbox down this off-the-track sidewalk at 11:30 pm.
The music of McPhee, (playing pocket trumpet in the legacy of Don Cherry and soprano sax with reference to Steve Lacy), Lonberg-Holm (who discovers odd, fragmentary bowed and plucked bleeps up to enriching counterpoint) and Zerang (sensitive lowdown grooving) blared outside from speakers that anywhere but in such a gritty, lonely spot would have been decisively squashed by neighbors. Here no one cared. Much of the crowd might have been taken for hipsters, and though there’s nothing wrong with that, they struck me as simply people in their 30s and 40s intelligently interested in daring sonic research by masterful explorers. I can’t image the Hideout would want to lose touch with such an audience. Most everyone seemed to be drinking, having paid a $12 entree fee.
Mitch Cocanig himself obviously has his own following. I bet he’ll establish another outpost. Not easily deterred, people devoted to this jazz beyond jazz. Maybe down, not likely out.
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