Jazz this week: Joshua Redman Trio, Nevermore Jazz Ball, Eli Keszler & Rashad Becker, Marco Benevento, and more

There's a jam-packed schedule of jazz and creative music over the next few days in St. Louis, with a variety of musical styles and sensibilities on offer. Let's go to the highlights...

Tonight, saxophonist Joshua Redman and his long-running trio will open a four-night stand continuing through Saturday at Jazz at the Bistro. Redman last played the Bistro with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Greg Hutchinson back in 2010, and for a look at some of what they've been up to since then, check out this video post from last Saturday.

Also tonight, the eclectic instrumental quartet The 442s will play at the Sheldon Concert Hall.

Tomorrow night, Lindy Hop St. Louis' weekend-long event the Nevermore Jazz Ball gets underway with an opening dance at The Gramophone featuring music provided by the Mound City Mamas, a new St. Louis group led by banjo player Kellie Everett.

Also tomorrow, the Gaslight Cabaret Festival resumes with St. Louisans Joe Dreyer and Rosemary Watts presenting their show "Mixing It Up" at the Gaslight Theater; and the Mike Buerck Orchestra, featuring a number of musicians who have worked in the pit bands at the Muny and/or Fox Theatre, will play a free concert of big band swing for the Jazz at Holmes series at Washington University.

On Friday, pianist/singer Jesse Gannon will perform at the Ozark Theatre, while Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes return to the Venice Cafe.

That same evening, the Gaslight Cabaret Festival will feature two Chicago performers, pianist and singer Beckie Menzie and singer Tom Michael, presenting "That '60s Show" at the Gaslight Theater.

Meanwhile, the Nevermore Jazz Ball will continue with a sextet led by guitarist/banjoist Jake Sanders providing the music for dancers at the Franklin Room, a venue at 816 Allen Ave in Soulard that's usually used for wedding receptions and private parties.

On Saturday afternoon, the NJB will present the annual Cherokee Street Jazz Crawl, a free, public event that will feature Tommy Halloran, Miss Jubilee, Wack-A-Doo, Swing Deville, The Sidemen, the Jazz St. Louis All-Stars student ensemble and more performing at various venues and businesses located along a stretch of Cherokee St. from the 2100 to the 2800 blocks. The Ball continues Saturday evening with Sanders’ Arcadian Serenaders, an expanded version of his band from Friday night, playing for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom.

Also on Saturday night, percussionist and installation artist Eli Keszler (pictured) and electronic musician Rashad Becker will perform separate sets in a concert presented by New Music Circle at the new location of The Luminary, 2701 Cherokee St. For more about both men, plus some performance videos, see this post from a couple of weeks ago.

Elsewhere around town, Chicago's Joan Curto will keep the Gaslight Cabaret Festival going with a performance of Cole Porter songs at the Gaslight Theater; singer Feyza Eren will bring her quartet to house-concert venue the KindaBlue Club; and singers Mary Dyson and Diane Vaughn will team up for a return appearance at Troy's Jazz Gallery.

On Sunday, keyboardist (and now singer!) Marco Benevento will be in town to play at 2720 Cherokee, likely showcasing much of the material from his most recent album Swift, for which he vocalized on record for the very first time.

Looking beyond the weekend, on Monday more of Webster University's student jazz combos will be performing at the Community Music School on the Webster campus; and percussionist Joe Pastor's group returns to 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: Rashad Becker & Eli Keszler

This week, let's take a look at Rashad Becker and Eli Keszler, two musicians who will be sharing a bill playing separate sets in a concert presented by New Music Circle on Saturday, November 8 at The Luminary.

The German-born Becker is known in the music industry as a mastering and cutting engineer with more than 1,200 albums to his credit. His own music uses real-time synthesis and sampling to realize what Becker calls "traditional music Of notional species."

You can hear an example of one of his solo sets in the first video window up above, recorded in April of this year in Turin, Italy. After the jump, there are two more shows by Becker, from June 2013 at the PAN ACT Festival in Boston, and February 2012 in Bristol, England.

Below that are three videos featuring Keszler, a percussionist who also does sound installations. The first, of a work called "Archway," documents a collaboration between Keszler and So Percussion to create a piece of music using the Manhattan Bridge as both the setting and, by running piano wires from the bridge to the ground, an instrument.

Next, there's another of Keszler's works created for a specific location - in this case, the Helm V&A Museum in London - that combines live performance with electronic manipulation of sound. The final video is a clip of a Keszler solo percussion set recorded in 2012 at the Bruismelk Festival in Antwerp, Belgium.

For more about Rashad Becker, read this interview in BOMB magazine; this review of volume 1 of his Traditional Music of Notional Species; and this interview with him about his engineering and mastering work. You also can hear more of Becker's music on SoundCloud.

For more about Eli Keszler, see this 2012 interview at Tiny Mix Tapes; this review of his 2012 two-disc set Catching Net; and his SoundCloud page.

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

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Fall 2014 jazz preview, part 3

It's the third chapter of our Fall 2014 video preview of jazz and creative music performers coming to St. Louis, and today we'll cover the touring acts that will be in town during the first part of November. (You can find part one of the fall jazz preview here, and part two here.) 

Today's first video features the SpokFrevo Orquestra, a 17-piece Brazilian big band who will make their St. Louis debut on Sunday, November 2 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. Seen here performing a full set in 2011, the group blends jazz with frevo, a high-energy Brazilian musical genre associated with Carnival time.

After the jump, you can see saxophonist Joshua Redman, who will return to lead a trio with bassist Reuben Rogers and drummer Greg Hutchinson starting Wednesday, November 5 through Saturday, November 7 at Jazz at the Bistro. Redman is seen here playing two songs - his own composition "I'll Go Mine" and Gil Evans' "Barracudas" - in March of this year at the Visioninmusica festival in Terni Italy, accompanied by pianist Aaron Goldberg, Rogers, and Hutchinson.

That same weekend, the Gaslight Cabaret Festival will be spotlighting three performers from Chicago. Beckie Menzie and Tom Michael, who will perform "That '60s Show" on Friday, November 7, are seen in the next clip dueting on "You and the Night and the Music" at the Chicago Cabaret Professionals 2011 annual gala. After that, it's Joan Curto, who will perform the music of Cole Porter on Saturday, November 8, singing "Change Partners" in a clip recorded at the 2013 Chicago Humanities Festival.

That same weekend, New Music Circle will present a double-bill concert on Saturday, November 8, at the new location of The Luminary, 2701 Cherokee St. The concert will feature separate sets from improvising percussionist Eli Keszler and electronic musician Rashad Becker. Both men are seen here in videos recorded earlier this year (in May and March, respectively) at Cave 12 in Geneva, Switzerland.

Closing out our preview of the first half of November is singer Sheri Sanders with a rendition of the song "Pieces" from the musical Salvage, recorded last year in NYC. Sanders is coming to St. Louis on Thursday, November 13 to do her show "Rock It" as part of the Gaslight Cabaret Festival.

Look for part four of StLJN's Fall 2014 jazz preview next week, and you can see the rest of today's videos after the jump.

New Music Circle 2014-15 season to include Roscoe Mitchell & Craig Taborn, Tim Berne, Thumbscrew, and more

New Music Circle has announced their 2014-15 season, with seven concerts featuring what looks to be an intriguing mix of edgy jazz and improvised music, electronics, and contemporary composition.

The schedule kicks off with a concert by Thumbscrew, featuring guitarist Mary Halvorson, bassist Michael Formanek and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, on Friday, September 12 at Joe's Cafe, the "house concert" venue at 6014 Kingsbury Ave in the Central West End.

All NYC-based, Thumbscrew's members first worked together as the rhythm section for trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum's sextet, and decided to continue performing together as a trio, with the group serving as an outlet for each member's original compositions as well as improvisation.

The Bynum sextet played St. Louis in an NMC-sponsored show in November 2012, but that date included Ken Filiano on bass rather than Formanek. So, along with the welcome return of Halvorson, one of the more original guitarists to emerge in the last decade, this will be the first chance local listeners will have to hear the three of them together.

They'll be followed a double bill featuring separate sets by another NYC-based musician, drummer and sound artist Eli Keszler, and Berlin electronic musician Rashad Becker on Saturday, November 8 at the new location of The Luminary at 2701 Cherokee St.

Keszler's solo music and installations are said to draw inspiration from sources including free-jazz drummer Han Bennik and composer Conlon Nancarrow, while Becker, known for his work as a recording and mastering engineer as well as his own music, "utilizes realtime synthesis and sampling techniques that set into motion intricate sonic worlds that recall the complexities of human speech and various exotic aural phenomena."

Next up, multi-instrumentalist Roscoe Mitchell (pictured, top left) and keyboardist Craig Taborn will team up for a duo performance on Friday, December 5 at The Stage at KDHX, which is part of the station's new HQ at 3524 Washington Ave. in Grand Center.

Mitchell, a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM), is considered one of the cornerstone players of the 1960s free-jazz movement. His highly influential 1966 album Sound was one of the first records to showcase the mix of composition and collective improvisation, on both traditional and non-traditional instruments, found in much of the subsequent work by the Art Ensemble and other AACM-affiliated groups.

Mitchell subsequently has led other bands including the Creative Arts Collective, the Sound Ensemble, and Note Factory; and also began teaching, most recently at Mills College in Oakland, where he's been the Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition since 2007.

Meanwhile, Taborn (pictured, center left) has gained a reputation as one of the more versatile keyboardists of his generation, playing piano, electric piano and organ with jazz artists including Chris Potter, Dave Holland, and James Carter as well as with Mitchell's Note Factory and other experimentally inclined players such as saxophonists Lotte Anker, David Binney, and Tim Berne; drummers Gerald Cleaver and Susie Ibarra; and many others.

After the holidays, the schedule resumes in January with the annual "NMC Showcase," which at this point is mostly TBA, though NMC's Jeremy Kannapell tells StLJN that St. Louis pianist Johanna Ballou, a graduate of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama who specializes in music by contemporary composers, will be one of the featured performers.

The following month, Lotte Anker, who played with Taborn and Cleaver in an NMC-presented concert here in February 2013, will return to perform on a split bill with cellist Okkyung Lee on Saturday, February 21 at Joe's Cafe.

Lee has collaborated frequently with visual artists and choreographers, as well as with musicians including Christian Marclay, Thurston Moore, Laurie Anderson, Ikue Mori, Jim O'Rourke, John Zorn, Chris Corsano, Leo Wadada Smith and Vijay Iyer. For more about Anker, check out this video showcase post that ran before her 2013 gig here.

St. Louis' own Darin Gray will be featured in the next concert, as the bassist, known for many years as a prolific and peripatetic improviser and more recently as sideman to alt-rocker Jeff Tweedy, will team with drummer Glenn Kotche in their duo project On Fillmore to play Saturday, March 14 at The Stage at KDHX.

The final concert of the 2014-15 season will feature saxophonist Tim Berne's quartet Snakeoil on Friday, May 8, also at The Stage at KDHX.

Known early in his career for drawing significant compositional and improvisational inspiration from former St. Louisan, Black Artists Group and World Saxophone Quartet co-founder Julius Hemphill, Berne has continued to champion Hemphill's legacy while carving out a musical identity of his own via his label Screwgun Records.

Snakeoil (pictured, lower left) which also includes Oscar Noriega (clarinet, bass clarinet), Matt Mitchell (piano), and Ches Smith (drums, percussion), serves as a vehicle for Berne's original compositions, and has released two albums on the ECM label.

In addition to their concert performances, Keszler, Becker, Mitchell and Taborn, and Gray and Kotche all will take part in some sort of workshop or educational program while they're here, though the details on those events have yet to be finalized.

So what's the takeaway here? As with any season schedule, one can quibble with individual selections, but as a fan of Halvorson and Taborn - neither of whom can be said to be exactly over-exposed - I'm happy to have them back, even if they did play here relatively recently. As for Mitchell, as best I can tell, the last time he performed in St. Louis was in the mid-1980s with the Art Ensemble, so his return is long overdue.

Add in the local debuts of the others and the return Berne - who's been a noteworthy presence on the music scene for decades now but hasn't played here since a 1990s gig at Wash U's notoriously atrocious sounding room, the Gargoyle - and all in all, it's shaping up to be the sort of season that induced Calvin Wilson of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to name New Music Circle as the "Best Place to Hear Jazz" in the paper's recent "Go! List" issue. While other local presenters may have considerably more resources to work with, NMC continues to offer fans of adventurous music one of the best bangs for the buck in St. Louis.

All performances are scheduled to start at 7:30 p.m.. Single tickets are $20 for general admission, $10 students, for all shows except Mitchell and Taborn, which has a ticket price TBA.

(Edited after posting to correct the date on the Keszler/Becker concert, and to note Tim Berne's previous St. Louis appearance.)