Album Review: Seth Andrew Davis, Michael Eaton, Damon Smith and Kyle Quass- Ghost Tantras

The staggeringly productive year devised by the members of the Extemporaneous Music and Art Society continues unabated.  The many performances and prolific recordings emanating from the collective can seem overwhelming to even the most ardent enthusiasts of new music.

Ghost Tantras is among the most recent EMAS-related missives.  True to form, the album is full of surprises.  The album and song titles are borrowed from the poetic “beast language” invented by native Kansan Michael McClure.  The improvisations mirror McClure’s free verse freakouts.

Seth Andrew Davis, a cofounder of EMAS, plays electric guitar, laptop and electronics.  He’s joined by saxophonist Michael Eaton, trumpeter Kyle Quass and bassist Damon Smith.  The otherworldly entropy of “Aieooo” exemplifies the blissful chaos of Ghost Tantras.

The rapid-fire “Ooogreeshk” is free jazz for sufferers of attention deficit disorders.  Laden with bursts of static, “Snahrr” could be a decaying satellite transmission sent from Saturn by Sun Ra.  “Gritoomrm” sounds as if a bottle containing the essence of ESP-Disk heated to a low simmer.

Eaton converses with Quass on “Whahh” and jousts with Davis on “Raooor.” And while Smith implies a routine groove on “Rahhhrr-nohh,” the quartet is hardly conventional. McClure’s epiphany in his 1964 book Ghost Tantras applies to the recording: “so far inside is a whirlwind I ride.”

Album Review: Second Nature Ensemble- Second Nature

The notes accompanying Second Nature, the astounding debut album of the Second Nature Ensemble, include text from The Anarchist Library.  While the music implies extreme polemics, the cerebral sounds of the recording are a more appropriate soundtrack for analyzing subversive texts than for throwing bricks through windows in a riot.

Michael Eaton (saxophones, flute, and clarinet), Seth Andrew Davis (guitar), Dwight Frizzell (wind controller and alto clarinet), Ben Tervort (bass), Alan Voss (drums) and Tim J Harte (electronics) are seemingly unlikely collaborators.  Plastic Sax published an enthusiastic missive about the (mostly) Kansas City musicians’ generational and stylistic clash at a performance at Westport Coffee House last year.

The discordant tone of Second Nature is established on the 19-minute opening track "Alchemy".  A work of sublime beauty is forged from a lethal slurry of abrasive analog and digital sounds.  Intentionally erratic swing does battle with galactic static on the 16-minute “Large/Large II”.  Tervort’s improvisation is among the individual solo features interspersed among the group tracks.

The prolific output of individual members of the collective make it impossible to cite a single release as representative.  Yet in sifting through a myriad of styles ranging from swing to industrial noise, the expansive Second Nature is a good place for lawless agitators, scholastic Marxists and even cutthroat capitalists to begin exploring the most astringent sounds emanating from Kansas City’s improvised music scene.

Concert Review: Black Crack Revue at Westport Coffee House

Just how weird can 100 Midwestern baby boomers get?  Very weird, if the assemblage at Westport Coffee House for the 40th anniversary concert of Black Crack Revue is any guide.  The free-spirited people who paid $15 for entry on Thursday, August 4, provided an outlandish visual counterpoint to the extraordinarily accomplished and often absurdist music of BCR.

The lack of inhibition displayed by fans of the self-proclaimed “Afro-nuclear wavabilly funk swing reggae Turska” band is rooted in the era prior to cell phones and social media.  BCR, an ensemble partially inspired by an extended Kansas City residency of the Sun Ra Arkestra in the early 1980s, acted as inspiring ringleaders.

The current edition of the interstellar jazz and alternative pop ensemble consists of original members including Thomas Aber and Dwight Frizzell as well as more recent additions like Pat Conway and Julia Thro.  The accomplished woodwind specialist Michael Eaton  joined the large cast during the 95-minute opening set.

BCR is just as inspiring and energetic as it was in the early 1990s when it was a fixture on the calendars of Kansas City nightclubs.  Then as now, the ensemble is best during its astral jazz excursions, but wacky pop-leaning songs such as “Teenie Boppers in Atlantis” and “Rappin' Kierkegaard” filled the dance floor on an extraordinarily peculiar night to remember.

Concert Review: The Dave Scott Quartet and Arnold Young and the RoughTet at Westport Coffee House

A concert at Westport Coffee House on Sunday, July 10, felt consequential even though fewer than two dozen people paid the $10 cover charge.  A quartet led by trumpeter Dave Scott and Arnold Young’s RoughTet shared the bill in a rare confluence of exceptional homegrown talent.

Scott, a New York based trumpeter raised in the Kansas City area, and the Kansas City drummer Young made waves in the region’s jazz scene alongside their eminent peer Pat Metheny several decades ago.  On Sunday, the bandleaders were joined by representatives of several generations of Kansas City jazz musicians.  Each participant responded to the momentous summit with inspired playing.

A rambunctious couple sitting near the bandstand hooted and hollered throughout Young’s freewheeling 45-minute opening set.  They had the right idea.  Assisted by his longtime compatriot John Nichols on bass and Gary Cardile on percussion, the veteran drummer acted as an irreverent version of Art Blakey as he mentored the youthful tandem of saxophonist Jacob Schwartzberg and trumpeter Quin Wallace.

Renditions of selections from their new album Fear Is the Mind Killer were gloriously raucous.  Scott sat in with the RoughTet before playing a 70-minute set with the New York based Michael Eaton (the saxophonist is from nearby Liberty), bassist Jeff Harshbarger and drummer Marty Morrison.

Eaton took several Coltrane-esque solos and a few of Scott’s distinctive statements resembled variations on “Flight of the Bumblebee.”   Yet the ensemble mostly shifted between the proto-harmolodics of early Ornette Coleman, ominous post-bop and joyful Kansas City swing.  Such transcendent displays of left-of-center artistic excellence in the face of public indifference are a hallmark of Kansas City’s jazz scene.

Concert Review: Second Nature Ensemble at Westport Coffee House

Second Nature Ensemble’s revelatory performance at Westport Coffee House on Sunday, June 27, provided a glimpse into a possible future of a viable form of jazz in Kansas City and acted as a reminder of the significance of a couple of long-standing components of the scene.  Four takeaways follow.

1. Plugged in

Second Nature Ensemble is hardly the first band to fuse electronic-generated sounds with analog avant-garde improvisations, but no locally based ensemble executes the concept with more cultivated acumen.  The music created by Michael Eaton (tenor saxophone), Dwight Frizzell (EWI), Seth Davis (electronics and guitar), Ben Tervort (acoustic and electric bass) and Evan Verploegh (drums) was worthy of comparison to the work of innovative stalwarts like Evan Parker.  The distinctive talent of each of the five men prevents the group from being mere copycats.  Here’s a brief sample.

2. The Reverend

A founding member of BCR, Frizzell is the grand doyen of left-of-center improvised music in Kansas City.  Yet I hadn’t heard Frizzell perform in an improvisational context in years.  Wielding an electronic wind instrument with enthusiastic abandon, Frizzell displayed more boyish energy than his younger collaborators.  I almost expected him to achieve levitation at any moment.

3. Beatdown

Verploegh, a recent Kansas City transplant, is an exciting addition to the local scene.  Intense and unpredictable, he often resembled an angry version of the cheerful Kansas City drummer Brian Steever.

4. Caffeinated

The approximately 25 people who passed through the doors during the two-hour performance were silent.  Their reverent appreciation and the superlative amplification resulted in the most pristine sound I’ve encountered at a post-quarantine concert.  The refreshed layout of the theater below Westport Coffee House and adjacent to Green Room Burgers & Beer indicates the space is still the most advantageous small listening room in Kansas City.