{"id":1684,"date":"2014-08-06T18:26:41","date_gmt":"2014-08-06T22:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/?p=1684"},"modified":"2019-09-12T15:45:04","modified_gmt":"2019-09-12T19:45:04","slug":"chi-venues-beyond-jazz-billy-martin-space-beat-kitchen-outcats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/jazzbeyondjazz\/2014\/08\/chi-venues-beyond-jazz-billy-martin-space-beat-kitchen-outcats.html","title":{"rendered":"Chi venues beyond jazz: Billy Martin @ Space, Beat Kitchen outcats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Evanston Il’s\u00c2\u00a0cross-genre club Space<\/a> showcased drummer Billy Martin’s lively, upbeat Wicked Knee brass band <\/a>last night, and the\u00c2\u00a0neighborhood\u00c2\u00a0tavern Beat Kitchen<\/a> hosted\u00c2\u00a0its weekly exploratory\u00c2\u00a0jam by Extraordinary Popular Delusions\u00c2\u00a0the night before. I’ve barely scratched the surface but clearly Chicago’s got a broad range\u00c2\u00a0of performance venues fun to poke into, considering the bookings.<\/p>\n

Billy Martin,\u00c2\u00a0the man\u00c2\u00a0at the tubs for jam band jazzers Medeski, Martin and Wood, is a generous player, just trying to give everyone (band and himself included) a good time. His chief partner in Wicked Knee is trumpeter-composer-arranger Steven Bernstein who\u00c2\u00a0solos in the lyrical\/humanistic\/humor-tinged spirit that links Louis Armstrong to Lester Bowie and beyond, and leads simple, effective riffs and chorales\u00c2\u00a0with tubaist Marcus Rojas and trombonist Brian Drye (also good soloists) above and against the drummer’s syncopated\u00c2\u00a0beats.<\/p>\n

A lot of Martin’s\u00c2\u00a0rhythms center around his snare drum, as if he grew up in high school marching bands and street-parade second lines. But he knows how to tie in the hi-hat, when to go to the toms or\u00c2\u00a0splash on his\u00c2\u00a0cymbals, how to thump and swing — and to expand in the direction of Balinese gamelan. The brass polyphony sang of New Orleans, with a lope\u00c2\u00a0through Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If iI Aint’ Got That Swing)” and nice use of the modal motif at the bottom of the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Odwalla” (also, I think, Coltrane’s “India”). A crowd of about 75 enjoyed this drop-in by\u00c2\u00a0Wicked Knee, during\u00c2\u00a0a quick midwest tour\u00c2\u00a0including the Dakota<\/a> in Minneapolis (tonight, Aug 6) and Milwaukee’s Cathedral Park free series <\/a>(tomorrow, Aug. 7).<\/p>\n

Jim \u00c2\u00a0(More Questions Than Answers<\/a>) Baker, pianist\/analog synthesist and friend-since-high school of mine, is the fearless leader of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, though there’s no hierarchy imposed on the contributions of reedist Mars Williams, bassist\/guitarist\/trumpeter Brian Sandstrom and drummer Steve Hunt (if these three\u00c2\u00a0seem familiar, it’s ’cause they figured prominently in the Hal Russell Story tribute concert <\/a>I raved about a few days ago). They’ve played together regularly for the past six years regularly, most recently in the barely-lit upstairs rooms of a corner bar, the likes of which exists on basically every fifth block of this city. There were six, seven, eight people in the audience but we listened devoutly as the musicians perf0rmed real-time experiments in ensemble interplay, taking\u00c2\u00a0dynamics, pitch extremes,\u00c2\u00a0intensity, density and periodicity as raw materials to shape. The sounds were sometimes abrupt, conflictual, inconclusive, in search of themselves, but from\u00c2\u00a0every dry or ugly patch the four players eventually reached sonic areas abrim with pleasure and resolve.<\/p>\n

If you’re looking for adventure, there’s nowhere like the underground. It’s an extraordinary popular delusion that music might\u00c2\u00a0or must\u00c2\u00a0be any one thing. Exploration examines\u00c2\u00a0what is and what might be. As Chicago’s home of the El, it’s not odd that there are places like Beat Kitchen where the underground is commonly\u00c2\u00a0on the second floor instead of the basement. Makes no difference; to dig you must\u00c2\u00a0go deep. We\u00c2\u00a0may get\u00c2\u00a0lost in the\u00c2\u00a0depths, but avant garde music hasn’t by itself killed anyone yet.
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