Jazz this week: Byron Stripling; Bonearama; Lee, McPhee, Corsano & Orcutt; Dave King & Chris Weller; and more

This week's calendar of live jazz and creative music in St. Louis includes New Music Circle's first concerts of their 60th season; the return of a popular trumpeter and singer to Jazz St. Louis; the drummer of The Bad Plus in one of his several side projects; and more.

Let's go to the highlights ...

Wednesday, September 19
Trumpeter Byron Stripling (pictured, top left) returns to Jazz St. Louis for the first of five nights of performances.

Stripling, who directs the Columbus (OH) Jazz Orchestra and also is known for his tribute to the music of Louis Armstrong, will be the first musician to do a five-night run at the Bistro since Sunday matinees and evening performances were added for select artists.

Elsewhere in Grand Center, Cabaret Project St. Louis presents their monthly "Singers Open Mic" at Sophie's Artist Lounge & Cocktail Club; and the weekly "Grand Center Jazz Crawl" features the Jazz Troubadours at The Stage at KDHX, plus the jam session led by bassist Bob DeBoo at the Kranzberg Arts Center and trumpeter Kasimu Taylor's band at The Dark Room.

Also on Wednesday, Wright's Project plays jazz-fusion and funk at Al's Lounge, and bassist Glen Smith and guitarist Eric Slaughter perform at Evangeline's.

Thursday, September 20
Guitarist Daryl Darden, back home from California for visit, will lead a quartet in a free concert for the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University.

Also on Thursday, The People's Key play at the Chase Club, and the Joe Park Trio performs at The Dark Room.

Friday, 
September 21
New Music Circle presents cellist Okkyung Lee, multi-instrumentalist Joe McPhee, percussionist Chris Corsano and guitarist Bill Orcutt (pictured, bottom left) at Joe's Cafe in the first of two nights of improvised duo performances.

While they're in town, Lee also will present a workshop and artist talk at 3:00 p.m. Thursday at SLU’s Xavier Hall Studio Theatre, and McPhee will do a solo performance at 1:00 p.m. Saturday at the Contemporary Art Museum, responding to CAM’s exhibit of works by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Both events are free and open to the public.

Also on Friday, New Orleans' Bonerama returns for a show at the Atomic Cowboy Pavilion, with an opening set from the Funky Butt Brass Band

Elsewhere around town, jazz-fusion band Koplant No plays a free concert at 560 Music Center, and Carolbeth True and Two Times True with saxophonist Larry Johnson returns to the Parkside Grille.

Saturday, September 22
New Music Circle presents a second evening of improvisational duets from Okkyung Lee, Joe McPhee, Chris Corsano and Bill Orcutt, this time at Off Broadway; and trumpeter Jim Manley leads a trio at Evangeline's.

Sunday, September 23
Drummer Montez Coleman and friends will play for brunch at The Dark Room, while Miss Jubilee performs at Evangeline's.

Then on Sunday evening, drummer Dave King of The Bad Plus and Happy Apple teams with Chicago-based saxophonist Chris Weller for a duo performance at The Dark Room.

Monday, September 24
Dizzy Atmosphere plays vintage swing and Gypsy jazz for diners at The Shaved Duck, and guitarist Daryl Darden gets in another gig on his visit home, this time at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups.

Tuesday, September 25
Singer and multi-instrumentalist Tonina Saputo and band perform at The Dark Room.

For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)

Jazz this week: Jeff Lorber Fusion, Lotte Anker & Okkyung Lee, and more

This week's jazz and creative music offerings in St. Louis run the gamut from fusion to free improvisation, with plenty of mainstream sounds as well. Let's go to the highlights... 

Wednesday, February 18
Keyboardist Jeff Lorber and the latest iteration of his Fusion group featuring bassist Jimmy Haslip and saxophonist Eric Marienthal (pictured, top left) will begin a four-night engagement continuing through Saturday at Jazz at the Bistro. You can see a video preview of the performances here, and Lorber, Haslip and Marienthal also are featured in this week's "Music Education Monday" post.

Also tonight, Cabaret Project St. Louis presents their monthly "Open Mic Night" at the Tavern of Fine Arts.

Thursday, February 19
Saxophonist Kristian Baarsvik plays a free concert for the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University; The 442s will perform in the "community room" at St. Louis Public Radio in Grand Center; and singer Feyza Eren returns to Nathalie’s.

Friday, February 20
Trumpeter Randy Holmes' quintet with singer Kim Fuller will present "A Tribute to the Music of Billie Holiday" at Voce; Second Generation Swing will play for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom; singer Joe Mancuso, guitarist Dave Black and bassist Willem von Hombracht will perform at Element STL; and the Midwest Jazz-tette will bring their West Coast "cool jazz' sound to Cigar Inn.

Saturday, February 21
New Music Circle presents a double bill featuring cellist Okkyung Lee (pictured, center left) and saxophonist Lotte Anker at the "house concert" venue Joe’s Cafe.  You can see some performance videos of Lee in this Saturday video showcase post (which also has a link to an earlier post about Anker.)

Elsewhere around town, Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes will return to Evangeline's; guitarist Tom Byrne and clairnetist Scott Alberici will duet at Thurman Grill; and The Wire Pilots will play original jazz-fusion compositions at Focal Point.

Sunday, February 22
St. Louis musicians from a variety of genres will join together in a benefit concert for bassist Phil Burton (pictured, bottom left) at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups. Burton has played with numerous rock, blues and jazz bands around town since the 1980s, and also works as a musical instrument and audio repair technician at Winston Electronics. He recently suffered a heart attack, and the performance will raise funds to help with some of his expenses while he recovers.

Monday, February 23
Trumpeter Byron Stripling will be featured in a free "Happy Hour" of music and conversation with Jazz St. Louis' Phil Dunlap at the Tavern of Fine Arts;  the Webster University Jazz Collective will perform music by Charles Mingus, Horace Silver and more in a Black History Month concert at Winifred Moore Auditorium on the Webster campus; and saxophonist "Blind" Willie Dineen and the Broadway Collective will play their monthly date at BB's Jazz, Blues & Soups.

For more jazz-related events in and around St. Louis, please visit the St. Louis Jazz Notes Calendar, which can be found on the left sidebar of the site or by clicking here. You also can keep up with all the latest news by following St. Louis Jazz Notes on Twitter at http://twitter.com/StLJazzNotes or clicking the "Like" icon on the StLJN Facebook page.

(If you have calendar items, band schedule information, news tips, links, or anything else you think may be of interest to StLJN's readers, please email the information to stljazznotes (at) yahoo (dot) com. If you have photos, MP3s or other digital files, please send links, not attachments.)

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Getting to know cellist Okkyung Lee

Today, our video spotlight falls on cellist and composer Okkyung Lee, who will be making her St. Louis debut in a New Music Circle concert on Saturday, February 21 at Joe's Cafe, 6014 Kingsbury Ave.

Lee, who's originally from Korea, came to the United States in 2000 and settled in NYC, where she has collaborated on performances and recordings with well-known improvising and experimental musicians including John Zorn, Jim O'Rourke, Vijay Iyer, Nels Cline, Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Laurie Anderson, Butch Morris, Evan Parker, Wadada Leo Smith, and many others.

For her St. Louis show, she'll be on a double bill with saxophonist Lotte Anker, with each doing an individual set. (Of course, given the penchant of many improvisors for promiscuous collaboration, it's possible they might end up playing together for a bit as well, but there are no guarantees. Anker also performed here in 2013 in a concert for New Music Circle, and you can check out some of her work in the Saturday Video Showcase that ran not long before that show.)

As for Lee, we start out today with an video excerpt from her solo set last November at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, The Netherlands. After the jump, you can see four more clips from solo shows of hers, in February 2014 at the Rumor Festival, also in Utrecht; at the Latvian experimental music festival Skaņu Mežs, also in 2014; in April, 2012 in Cork, Ireland; and an undated clip from the Music Unlimited festival in Austria.

Just to round things out, we've also included a couple of videos of Lee improvising with other musicians. In the sixth clip, she's seen with saxophonist John Butcher in 2013 at the Next Festival in Bratislava, Slovakia. The seventh and final video shows an excerpt from a set with turntablist Christian Marclay in May 2010 at NYC's Cafe Oto.

For more about Okkyung Lee, check out this 2014 interview with her from Radio Panik; this one she did with the music blog Flowers In A Gun; this 2013 conversation with Fluid Radio; and this interview that ran in 2011 in the Village Voice.

You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump...

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, part 3

Today, it's part three of StLJN's preview of touring jazz and creative music performers who will be coming to St. Louis in the first part of 2015. (You can see parts one and two, covering January and the first part of February, here and here.)

Our first two clips feature cellist Okkyung Lee and saxophonist Lotte Anker, who will be performing separate sets in a concert presented by New Music Circle on Saturday, February 21 at Joe’s Cafe, 6014 Kingsbury Ave.

The video up above is from Lee's performance at the High Zero 2014 festival, held in September at a venue called Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood in Baltimore. After the jump, you can see Anker perform a rather unusual piece for saxophone and bow, recorded October 21, 2014 at Jazzhouse in Copenhagen, Denmark. (For lots more of Anker, see this previous video showcase posted before her appearance here in St. Louis in March, 2013.)

After the edgy improvisations of Lee and Anker, you can enjoy some more traditional sounds courtesy of trumpeter Byron Stripling, who will perform for one night only on Saturday, February 28 at Jazz at the Bistro. Stripling played here in St. Louis most recently in May 2014, doing his "Gospel According to Swing" show with the St. Louis Symphony. 

In this clip from 2013, he's fronting the Naples Jazz Orchestra in a version of the standard "Bourbon Street Parade." For more of Stripling, see this post, which ran before last appearance at the Bistro in 2012.

The next video features singer Rene Marie, who was a familiar face in St. Louis in the early 2000s. She made a number of live appearances here while signed to the locally based label MAXJAZZ, for whom she recorded five albums between 1999 and 2004. She'll return for the first time in a decade to perform Wednesday, March 4 through Saturday, March 7 at Jazz at the Bistro.

Those gigs likely will feature some material from I Wanna Be Evil (With Love to Eartha Kitt), her most recent recording released in 2013 on the Motema Music label. This live-in-the-studio clip of "I'd Rather Be Burned As a Witch" from that album features a band including trombonist Wycliffe Gordon and trumpeter Etienne Charles.

The following week, New Music Circle will present On Fillmore, aka percussionist Glenn Kotche and bassist and Belleville, IL native Darin Gray, in a concert on Saturday, March 14 at The Stage at KDHX.

The duo have made four albums and a couple of soundtracks together since first joining forces in 2000, and gained additional notice in 2013 when they toured with "Apocalyptical," a live show produced by the makers of public radio program "Radiolab." In this clip, recorded in 2013 at Audio Rebel in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, they're playing a piece called "Complications."

Today's sixth clip features Kneebody, who will be making their St. Louis debut with performances from Wednesday, March 18 through Saturday, March 21 at Jazz at the Bistro. Band members Adam Benjamin (keyboards), Shane Endsley (trumpet), Ben Wendel (tenor sax) and Kaveh Rastegar (bass) first met in the late 1990s while they all were students at the Eastman Conservatory.

With drummer Nate Wood, they formed Kneebody in 2000 and since then have recorded nine albums of eclectic instrumental music that touches on styles from jazz to punk rock to the compositions of Charles Ives. In this clip, they're playing "Cha Cha" from their 2013 album The Line in a gig at the Blue Whale in Los Angeles.

Today's seventh and final video features the Dizzy Gillespie Afro-Cuban Experience, who will be in St. Louis to perform on Saturday, March 21 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The tribute group is led by bassist John Lee, who played with Gillespie for many years, and also includes percussionist Mario Grillo, aka "Machito Jr," son of the famed Latin bandleader Frank "Machito" Grillo.

The band's front line features trumpeter Freddie Hendrix, who's played frequently with former St. Louisan Oliver Lake, and saxophonist Sharel Cassity, with guitarist Yotam Silberstein and drummer Robby Ameen completing the lineup. They're seen here in an excerpt from a show in 2013 in Sofia, Bulgaria, playing "Manteca," the seminal Latin-jazz number composed in 1947 by Gillespie, percussionist Chano Pozo, and Gil Fuller.

Look for part four of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview in this space next week. You can see the rest of today's videos after the jump.