Reviews of Beanbender's Shows
From 1998

OPEYE /
Vinny Golia, with George Cremaschi and Garth Powell.

This was one of OPEYE's best Beanbender's shows! They started by all playing gamelan instruments for about five minutes, like five uncoordinated figures from the inside of five of the those giant clocks you see in Europe; the ones where some elaborate scene is staged on the hour, with gremlins and the like banging away. The weird and ridiculous costumes added to the effect. Then the usual movement through the instruments followed: Henry Kuntz playing his loud double-reed musette thingy, his tenor sax, tiny violin, more gamelan, etc., while John Kuntz played a tiny electric uke(?), and a few other string things, Brian Godchaux played viola and electric 5-string mandolin, Esten Lindgren played trumpet and trombone (sometimes both at once) and drumset too, and Ben Lindgren play doublebass. The sound was a little better than usual, due to Godchaux being amplified much of the time. The dynamics of the group and its aesthetic were also quite clear: Henry is usually in the foreground regardless of instrument, he makes the most soloistic statements (while abstract and noisy, his phrasing, articulation and attitude placing these statements within the general context established by Coltrane), while John Kuntz and Brian Godchaux form a middle-ground not entirely unlike Keith Richards and Ron Woods: they play off one other, trading tiny lead lines, and while neither is really repetive (though grooves pop up frequently, they're submerged quickly), connecting strongly (if a bit abstractly) to each other and to a lesser degree with the other strata. Meanwhile, Esten functions as a sort of secondary solo voice, rarely moving past Henry to the foreground, he's a sort of shadow figure. Ben's role is to form a firm background, his bass lines are highly rhythmic, minor-pentatonic (again, touching on Trane's legacy), and are structured with a drummer's sense of repetition and slow development. I must admit, it's taken me a while to appreciate Ben's minimal approach, but I think I've finally come around to it: it works very well as compliment and foil to the complex and skittery upper layers of OPEYE.

Here are a couple pictures of OPEYE, taken by Moe! Staiano:

January 18
the DTs: Dan Lederer and Tim Bolling /
Oluyemi Thomas and Spirit

January 25
Jack Wright with Matthew Sperry /
Jon Raskin, India Cooke, Carla Kihlstedt, Myles Boisen, and Gino Robair

Jack Wright and Matthew Sperry opened with a series of improvs, good stuff. Wright turned in some energetic and athletic blowing, while Sperry, more laid back, did his thing of exploring different sounds on the bass, bowed, plucked or prepared.

Jon Raskin's new quintet played four pieces, capped by a dynamic closer titled "Third Pass to Nowhere." That one started with a Carla Kihlstead unaccompanied solo (always a treat), full of melodic twists and her trademark bowed/pizzacato combination move. Next, the band joined in and India Cooke took her solo -- a different style, more sweeping and a great change of pace. Towards the end, Myles Boisen soloed on a double-necked guitar/fretless bass, sifting through his electronic pedal effects so much that at one point he stopped actually playing and just kept clicking the pedals at his feet, which got a good laugh from the band. The crowd loved the band and especially loved "Third Pass." The compositions (presumably by Raskin) provided lots of space for stretching out solos. Between the strong writing and strong playing, I'm hoping this group sticks together for lots more performances.

-- Craig Matsumoto

February 8, 1998
Wadada Leo Smith, Marco Eneidi, Alec Ramsdell, Damon Smith, Spirit /
Wadada Leo Smith's N'DA Kulture

I know enough about "The Music" (why does everyone talk like it's in capital letters? Is it Holy or sumpin'??) to know that I'm Supposed to Go See Leo Smith. And now he's Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith, which is fine by me: I'm a big fan of Moby Dick. And what's even better, Ishmael Wadada Leo Smith is an incredible trumpet player!! Thank you, whoever it was who told me to Go See this one Particle of the Wave that comprises The Music! It was worth it for that trumpet. Also, Oluyemi Thomas was back on the second half, and he got the spotlight for an equally incredible bass clarinet solo. He kept hammering at this one note, going away and then coming back to it, and he could hit it louder than I've ever heard anyone hit on a clarinet. I thought the wood would crack!

The first half of the concert was okay sound-wise, but they didn't seem to know how to end any of their improvisations, and I thought that the younger guys (piano and bass) played too much. What they played was good, but they just played it at the wrong times. They should have let IWLS play unaccompanied when he came in as he did like a hurricane. The second half began with that great trumpet sound, just with a little piano accompaniment (again, that it didn't need, any more than a hamburger needs mustard). Then they played one long suite that went into a sort of Miles Davis 70s thing a couple times, led by the same Mr. Henry Kaiser who I, well, I really didn't appreciate last time around, shall we say, but this time he actually played some Very Nice Guitar Licks, except that at one point he decided to see what it would be like to play louder than the entire band, with the predictable results: me wanting to walk out - but I was pinned there like a bug and couldn't. But as I said, he did play some things of The Music that made up for at least Some of the Discomfort.

- Holtzman

February 15, 1998
Matthew Goodheart and Garth Powell /
Matthew Ostrowski

February 22, 1998
Karen Stackpole's Euphonics /
JOB

March 1, 1998
Biggi Vinkeloe, Miya Masaoka, George Cremaschi and Gino Robair /
The Unmusical Rivets (Beanbender's hosts Alan Brightbill, Doug Carroll, Nancy Clarke, Bill Hsu, Dan Plonsey, and Moe! Staiano.)

Well, I had an excellent time playing! I got to play oboe! I have a tape, and if it sounds good, I'll let you all hear it! Here are three pictures, all taken by Michael Zelner:

March 8, 1998
Georg Graewe solo, and with Gino Robair and Tim Perkis

He plays soooooo fast! I loved it! And I was bored, almost unto death! The second set with Robair and Perkis was much more like Music. They all listened to each other, and made their parts fit together. Excellent dovetailing! Which reminds me - I'm looking for a good carpenter to teach me how to build shelves! Right now all my books are in boxes, or being used to keep my desk (a former door) up. - Holtzman

March 15, 1998
Invisible: Larry Ochs, John Schott, Trevor Dunn, Scott Amendola /
Eugene Chadbourne's Insect & Western Ensemble

March 22, 1998
Henry Kaiser's "Peter and the Wolf" /
Evan Ziporyn

March 29, 1998
Gino Robair / Toychestra / Gamelan Sekar Jaya

Judged on a basis of population, this was Beanbender's biggest or second biggest show ever (the rival is the solo Fred Frith show): 250 people were crammed into a space with only about 140 chairs! And, we (the crew) agreed, about the best night of music one could ever expect for $5!

Gino started things off with a solo percussion improvisation in which he shuffled and sorted through a suitcase of sticks, toys, wood, and cymbals; occasionally pausing to play with one or two items at a time. After a while, he began building a precarious structure of wood with one hand while beating on junk with his other hand. When it finally collapsed, the piece ended. Almost an anti-drum solo, I liked it very much, though visibility was a bit poor!

Toychestra is great! I hope they will always be as fresh when the inevitable happens and they begin to learn to play their instruments! Plastic recorders, toy violins, keyboards, gorillas, and noisemakers of all description are employed in presenting a series of two minute songs which often utilize pop and Latin rhythms and structures. A few songs actually have words; my favorite was the one where Lexa sang a series of nonsense(?) words, first unaltered, and then through a sort of toy megaphone. Other hits were a sort of rhumba, and a song with lots of doo-wop "shoops," both of which still echoe around in my head! Their set was also just the right length; not at all too much of a good thing.

Gamelan Sekar Jaya played what was for them an unusual set, utilizing instruments from four (or more?) contexts, plus a bunch of bird calls, water-bubblers, and rocks. They performed two pieces by their guest director, I Made Arnawa, a piece for a sextet of bamboo instruments, and one traditional piece for the four-note gamelan angklung. All four pieces were amazing, but my favorites were I Made Arnawa's "Daybreak" which employed the water-bubbler, bird calls (including Gino's turkey call!) and rocks in addition to instruments from several different gamelans; and a very loud and virtuosic piece for six people playing bamboo instruments.

- Dan

April 5, 1998
Scott Looney; with Aaron Bennett, Adam Lane, and Tom Nunn /
Offramp

April 12, 1998
RedHanded Trio: India Cooke, Lisle Ellis, and Donald Robinson.

April 19, 1998
Marco Eneidi's American Jungle Orchestra present William Butler Yeats's play Deirdre, directed by Jessica Loos /
Loren MazzaCane Connors, with Bruce Anderson, Henry Kaiser, and Marc Weinstein

April 26, 1998
Gianni Gebbia, solo, and with Tim Perkis, Tom Nunn, Graham Connah, and Gino Robair /
Jonathan Lethem and John Schott's 1001 Noirs, with Jenny Scheinman, Dan Plonsey and Dan Seamans.

Celebrating his new solo CD on Rastascan, Gebbia played several of the pieces from the recording, but with greater freedom - veering away from his intricate polyphony into wilder, entirely un-patterned digressions, giving the pieces fresh excitement. At the very beginning of the set, Gebbia had to make some adjustments for his saxophone whose leakiness was giving him some trouble, but these uncertainties were barely noticable, and in fact probably pushed him into a more exploratory mode of operations. In the second set, Gebbia demonstrated how well he can modulate his aesthetic to work within groups. Highlights were a duet with Connah, in which each musician anticipated the harmonic movement of the other with amazing prescience, and a duet with Robair in which the latter's clatter was the perfect foil for especially cluttered playing by Gebbia. Nunn and Perkis were ideal choices for this music as well, both knowing well how to move between the foreground and the background; in this set they provided much of the continuity for the group.

Some people love Jonathan Lethem's words for this project, others don't - I think this group would go over best with a crowd with less of a musical perspective on the role of language than at Beanbender's! I always enjoy finding a musical counterpoint to words, and Jonathan makes it easy by writing material in which the listener must assemble the narrative (if they wish) from a set of fragments. When the narrative is more monolithic (as in "Martyr and Pesky"), John Schott has written a sort of soundtrack, so that the music takes on its film-world's background/mood-setting role, and that works well too, provided that Jonathan and the band are sufficiently rehearsed! In this performance (not having played together in over a year), we attempted to stretch against the bounds (Jonathan changing some lines, the musicians changing some tempos), with uncertain results, but the process was a lot of fun!

- Dan

May 3, 1998
024c (not to foresee) James Livingston (sax), Tom Swafford (violin), Loren Dempster (cello); with guests Gino Robair and Bill Hsu /
Ben Goldberg, John Schott, and Trevor Dunn

I enjoyed each of these groups. Both set a mood, and managed to find a lot to say within the realm they chose to explore. 024c used the Oblique Strategies cards employed by Brian Eno for inspiration, yet (as they admitted) the strategies were hardly necessary, being as they tend to be among those already at the fingertips of most veteran improvisors, as 024c certainly are. Their music is one in which the individuals leave a lot of space for one another, making relatively short excursions to the fore, then moving back to allow others to make statements. If I have a complaint about the direction of this particular set, it would be that the discourse was too reasonable, and - other than a conspicuous out-of-the-blue romantic violin solo by Swafford, which was quite a highlight - lacking in maniacal risk-taking. Nonetheless, very listenable and satisfying music; it left me composing in my head.

Goldberg, Schott and Dunn took for their launching pad a set of music by Goldberg, some brand new, some written for other contexts. Goldberg's writing is in the tradition of Monk, Nichols, and perhaps Lacy and Ornette too, in that he uses as his smallest building blocks melodic modules which are combined together into phrases which then in turn are combined with other, contrasting, phrases to make a work which is more a mobile of loosely jostling parts than a song (though, curiously, he announces his works as songs). Like Monk, Goldberg enjoys building phrases that seem to anticipate a cliche at their conclusion, only to substitute an odd interval just at the last moment, however in Goldberg's hands this technique results in a music which is equivocal than it is melancholy. Without the mitigating presence of a drummer, the music had leave to really steep in this mood - every nuance of Goldberg's clarinet tone was in tune somehow with the melodic movement: I noticed this especially in one piece (perhaps "Nine Phrases for (?)" - I'll try to determine the title) in which one of the first phrases is bult upon three low notes which cycle quickly several times before opening into the rest of the melodic cell... A feeling of sad, resignation as compulsiveness was reinforced by Goldberg's especially gritty, wooden sound (having just seen two of the other top clarinetists in this music, Marty Ehrlich and Michael Moore, I can testify that Goldberg's sound is the deepest, darkest, and dirtiest; shunning entirely the range of dog-like feigned cheeriness and slickitude which resulted in the clarinet being banished for so long from jazz). Meanwhile, John Schott was his usual steady self on guitar, his dedication to the details of sound and harmony quite apparent: he seems to measure out the stroke of each chord as carefully as he chooses the voicing - and yet there is also a sort of nihilist humor lurking not far under the surface which propels his solos through particularly knotty shapes as (like Goldberg) he consciously rejects any easy conclusion. While Goldberg and Schott work almost exclusively in an equal-tempered world in this trio (that is, eschewing even the pitch inflections common in most jazz), thereby keeping the focus on intervallic relationships in, and as a commentary on, melody - Trevor Dunn opened up another dimension by playing with intonation a bit on bass - his tone is low and even muddy at times, and he uses lots of broken octaves and near-octaves; ultimately functioning as tuned percussion. Also, Dunn's rhythms fell into cracks - he often implied a different tempo, a changing tempo, or a non-tempo, by accompanying the others with staggering, bumpy and leaping lines; his sense of irregular not-quite-balanced melody in contrast to Schott and Goldberg's, yet somehow the particular contrast working to put their music up upon a set of mismatched little wheels, keeping the relatively somber, static, and heavy guitar/clarinet thing from grinding into the ground. The absence of a drummer revealed just how superfluous a drummer can be - or at least how well the drummer's role can be absorbed by a sensitive musician on another instrument.

Here's the set list that Ben told Michael Zoka after the set:
1. Triangle Dot Circle
2. [untitled]
3. Problem
4. [untitled]
5. Circle Circle
6. Blue Umbrella

- Dan

May 10, 1998
Rich Halley and the Lizard Bros /
Shoko Hikage, Phil Gelb, Ben Goldberg, and Carla Kihlstedt

May 17, 1998
Dave Slusser's Ellington project /
Compomicro-dexall: Jake Rodriguez, Jeremy Stone, Mike Guarino

May 19, 1998
The Clusone Trio: Han Bennink, Ernst Reijseger, and Michael Moore

It was wonderful to finally see han Bennink, and to watch him play the drums by attaching a string to his hi-hat and pull it from the front row of the audience. They played mostly (all?) songs with references to birds, including "When the red red robin comes bob bob bobbin' along." I like Michael Moore's alto sax tone very much. I only wish they had improvised more! Most of the set was tunes, sandwiched together with little bits of improv, which Bennink often used (and Moore too) as time for comedy. And I like comedy, but, well, I got the impression that in some sense there wasn't so much at stake this evening,; we could all just have a fun time.

- Dan

May 31, 1998
Circular Firing Squad: David Kwan, Eva Baumgartner, Xopher Davidson, Tim Walters, electronics /
Bob Boster Faces Circular Firing Squad

June 7, 1998
Roscoe Mitchell: solo, and with Steve Adams, Jon Raskin, Dan Plonsey, Ben Goldberg, Tom Yoder, Joe Karten, John Schott, Randy Porter, Carla Kihlstedt, Dan Seamans, Ward Spangler, Oluyemi Thomas, Ijeoma Thomas, Tim Perkis.

Playing with Roscoe Mitchell was a great thrill - he's been one of the biggest and mnost inescapable influences upon my music: starting with the honking sound, the subtle and un-subtle play with intonation, the Rollins-esque search for a peculiar little phrase upon which to obsess through repetition and exaggeration, etc. In conversation, he presented himself as a very straightforward student of music, uninterested in teaching because he feels he has so much he wants to learn (he's focussing on studying the bass recorder and baroque flute). He has a strenuous practice regimen which begins early in the morning with playing scales slowly for an hour or two.

The concert went very well, and the pieces which Roscoe Mitchell brought along, arrangements of two recent compositions for the particular ensemble at hand - were quiet, slow and beautiful.

- Dan

June 14, 1998
Moe!kestra

June 21, 1998
Gebhard Ullmann's Tá Lam 10

July 5, 1998
Ben Opie and friends /
Bilge: Eric Glick Rieman, keyboards; David Mairs, drums; David Slusser, theremin, slussomatic, saxophone, samples; Len Paterson, samples, guitar; Robin Walsh, guitar.

August 2, 1998
Positive Knowledge: Oluyemi Thomas, Ijeoma Thomas, Spirit, and special guest, Tim Perkis /
Steve Horowitz's Mousetrap: Dan Plonsey, Dave Revelli, Wiley Evans

August 5, 1998
Ben Goldberg's Brainchild, with: Steve Adams, Dan Plonsey, Jacob Lindsay, reeds; John Schott and Will Bernard, guitars; Graham connah, piano; Carla Kihlstedt, violin; David Ewell (sp?), bass; Smith Dobson Jr., drums; and Jewlia Eisenberg and Brenda Boykin, voice

August 6, 1998
Ben Goldberg's Brainchild, with: Personnel more-or-less the same as above, plus Mantra Ben-Ya'akova, voice

August 16, 1998
Steve Lew Quartet: with Tom Yoder, trombone; Dan Plonsey, clarinets; Wes Anderson, percussion; and Lew, bass /
Low Birthweight, featuring Dave Tohir

Steve Lew writes cool tunes! I like. These guys play well, and it's fun, and you can laugh if you want. It's swell, and it's down and it's weird too. All told, one big yes to Steve Lew and his bugs! Set two: drones and bones. Fine for a bit, fine for a while. When they're done, I go home, and I am not at all sad.

- Eff Jay

September 6, 1998
Myles Boisen Guitar Trio, with John Finkbeiner and Mark Schifferli /
Miguel Frasconi (sampler) /
Mark Growden (winds) /
Ron Thompson (7 & 8-string guitars) /
Neil Straghalis

September 20, 1998
Barre Phillips, solo bass /
Matthew Shipp and William Parker

Barre Phillips played an exceptionally elegant set in which the dynamic level was often very quiet - and the capacity audience appropriately hushed. He moved from one sound-world to the next: bowing multiphonics on a single string suddenly giving way to washing the bow across the face of the instrument; using the body of the bass to tap out polymetrical patterns suddenly incorporating strums of half-stopped strings... I noticed that much of the time at least two things were happening at once, e.g., the tapping of the bow on strings produced a second tone, much higher and softer than the fundamental tone, and plucking strings with one hand while tapping with the other. Very deliberate, and yet at the same time incorporating great spontaneity. His use of the bow was sometimes like that of a master of some obscure martial art or ceremonial practice. At one point, after brandishing the bow a bit he slid it down the length of the neck, parallel to the neck, until the the tip of the bow collided with the bridge in a quiet but resonant "tock." At another point, he suddenly thrust the handle of the bow into the strings like an assassin's dagger into an unwitting victim. Most of us gasped.

William Parker and Matthew Shipp followed this set of intricate detail with a 75-minute uninterrupted single improvisation which came from a very different world. Shipp employed thick left hand chords alternating with short strings of repeated notes in his right, in general treating the piano as a percussion instrument, except for a few references to tunes which were harmonized thickly and dissonantly including "Summertime," which came perhaps 20 minutes into the set, and marked the first moment at which Parker and Shipp played together in any obvious way. Much of the time each was in his own pulse and his own world, though as the set went on and I focussed more and more on Parker, I could hear his response (as though grudgingly) to changes in Shipp's playing. There were some beautiful sections, as when Shipp plucked notes inside the piano, and the last ten minutes or so in which Shipp slowly ascended and descended a gapped scale in the bass while Parker played arco way up above.

- Dan

First set: just a bass, naught else. Five strings, though. He starts with a long gaze at all of us. We gaze back. Plays a few notes with no thought, just some twangs. At last turns to the bass, and plays and plays, goes from one place to the next, takes his time. Real cool! A slow, soft dance of bass. Zen bass: the sound of a bow on the air. Set two: Bass plus Keys. Crash bang whiz! But... does Keys hear Bass? Sounds like he does not. Does Bass hear Keys? Not at first; for a long time each whangs and bams to his own pulse, but then, when Keys starts in on dumb tin pan quote, Bass makes fun. Some nice bits, but it's a long set! The bowed bass cries and cries: Where's Mom? Where's Dad? But Keys just don't give a S--t. Keys is gone! And I am too: gone to go to sleep.

- Eff Jay

September 27, 1998
Kattt, Tom Nunn, Doug Carroll and Tim Perkis /
Chris Brown, Jab, and John Ingle

October 4, 1998
Henry Kuntz solo, and with Tim Perkis /
Matthew Goodheart

October 11, 1998
Homophlegm /
Moe! Staiano, Tom Scandura, Ches Smith, Michael DeLaCuesta

October 18, 1998
Compomicro-Dexall: Chris Broderick, Mike Guarino, Jake Rodriguez /
Greg Goodman, George Cremaschi, Garth Powell.

October 23, 1998
Daxophones meet Saxophones with Mark Stewart, Evan Ziporyn, Dan Plonsey, and Pamela Z.

I had fun. All the solo pieces sounded great (we each played one), and the second last group improv was wonderful!

- Dan

November 1, 1998
OPEYE /
Paul Hoskins

November 2, 1998
Tina Marsh and the Creative Opportunity Orchestra

November 8, 1998
Yasuhiro Otani /
Wet Gate /
Dean Santomieri, with Bruce Anderson, Karen Stackpole, David Kwan

November 15, 1998
The Splatter Trio

November 21, 1998
A Tribute to Glenn Spearman, with Marco Eneidi, Spirit, G-FORCE, Donald Robinson, JD Parran, Chris Brown, ROVA, Lisle Ellis, Jim Routhier, William Winant, Matthew Goodheart, Musa Physics, Oluyemi Thomas, Don Paul, The American Jungle Orchestra, Jack Foley, Ben Lindgren, Ijeoma Thomas, Kash Killion, Vinnie Golia, The Double Trio, Jasper Baker and Ahmad Spearman, performing the music and writings of Glenn Spearman.

November 22, 1998
Pauline Oliveros, Dana Reason, & Phil Gelb /
Crib /
Species Being

November 29, 1998
Paul Plimley solo, and with Scott Amendola

December 6, 1998
Jack Wright /
Kaffe Matthews /
Georg Graewe Quartet, with Frank Gratkowski, Kent Kessler, and Hamid Drake