So What: Local News, Notes & Links

Here's the latest wrap-up of assorted links and short news items of local interest:

* The New Music Circle concert earlier this month featuring saxophonist Tim Berne's Snakeoil was reviewed for DownBeat magazine by St. Louis freelance writer Terry Perkins.

* Guitarist Jeff Beck's show this past Tuesday night at the Fox Theatre was reviewed for the Post-Dispatch by freelancer Dan Durchholz.

* Saxophonist Oliver Lake's latest release (pictured), a duet album with bassist William Parker called To Roy, was reviewed by AllAboutJazz.com's John Sharpe.

* Drummer Kaleb Kirby and his band Animal Children are featured in the latest issue of St. Louis magazine.

* The Sheldon and Jazz St. Louis are among 11 St. Louis arts groups that will get funding next year from the PNC Arts Alive program.

* Hand drummers are congregating this weekend in St. Louis at the first ever Grandmaster Djembe Xplosion, a four-day event presented by Africa United Ballet at Better Family Life Cultural, Educational and Business Center. Instructors from Guinea, Mali, Ivory Coast, New York and Chicago are leading more than 20 workshops and demonstrations of drumming techniques, as well as discussions of African history and culture.

* Jazz radio update: On this Saturday's edition of Radio Arts Foundation-St. Louis's program “Somethin’ Else,”  host Calvin Wilson will be puttin' the bass in your face, with a selection of music featuring bassist Ron Carter, both as a bandleader and as a sideman to Miles Davis, Joe Henderson, and others. The program can be heard at 8:00 p.m. on 107.3 FM, 96.3 HD-2, and online at http://www.rafstl.org/listen. 

Jazz this week: Pedrito Martinez, Tim Berne’s Snakeoil, East West Fusion Fest with Michael Manring, and more

This weekend offers St. Louis fans of jazz and creative music a nice opportunity to see four different touring acts in four days at four different venues, plus a variety of performances from local players. Let's go to the highlights...

Thursday, May 7
Percussionist Pedrito Martinez and his group will make their St. Louis debut with a one-night stand at Jazz at the Bistro.

Martinez (pictured, top left) is a 41-year-old Cuban native who moved his homeland first to Canada in 1998, and then to the United States, where he came to public attention in 2000 for winning that year's Thelonious Monk Institute Competition.

He subsequently helped found the band Yerba Buena, and has gone on to perform with well-known jazz, Latin and pop musicians including Paquito D’Rivera, Wynton Marsalis, Paul Simon, Eddie Palmieri, Bebo Valdés, Bruce Springsteen, Cassandra Wilson, Arturo O’Farrill, Joe Lovano, and numerous others.

Martinez' own group released their first album in 2013, and has performed at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Newport Jazz Festival, New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Montreal Jazz Festival, Montreux Jazz Fest, and numerous other major festivals and venues.

Elsewhere around town, singer Erin Bode will return to Cyrano's, and guitarist Dave Black and friends, with featured vocalist Joe Mancuso, will play at Nathalie's.

Friday, May 8
If you're free during the day on Friday (or able to play hooky from work or school), you can head over to the St. Louis Zoo and take in a free concert by the Mizzou New Music Ensemble*.  They'll be visiting from down the road in Columbia for a 2:00 p.m. performance at The Living World featuring new works from Mizzou composers that were inspired by the Zoo.

That evening, New Music Circle closes out their 2014-15 presenting season with a performance by saxophonist Tim Berne’s band Snakeoil (pictured, center left) at The Stage at KDHX.

Berne's reputation as a top-flight improvisor notwithstanding, Snakeoil is mainly a vehicle for his compositions, which can be intricate multi-part affairs that may seem perplexing at first but ultimately reward close listening. For more about Berne and Snakeoil, and some very recent clips of them in action, please see this post from last Saturday.

Also on Friday, Miss Jubilee will make her debut at Jazz at the Bistro, for the first of two nights in which the popular retro-style songstress and band will bring their blend of jump blues, pre-WWII jazz, and early rock & roll to the Bistro stage.

Elsewhere around town, singer Feyza Eren and her quartet will provide the music for this year's "Grapes In The Garden" wine-tasting event at the Missouri Botanical Garden; Second Generation Swing plays for dancers at the Casa Loma Ballroom; and guitarists Tom Byrne and Adam Hansbrough will duet at Thurman Grill.

Saturday, May 9
Guitarist Todd Mosby presents the first-ever '"East West Fusion Festival"at the Kranzberg Arts Center, featuring a headlining performance from renowned fusion/New Age bassist Michael Manring (pictured, bottom left), plus sets from Mosby's own new fusion sextet Axis, and the husband-and-wife duo Bryan & Lola.

Also on Saturday, Sarah Jane and the Blue Notes will return to Evangeline's; Farshid Etniko plays the Southside house concert venue KindaBlue; and members of new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound will be joined by their students from the "Music Today!" program at the Community Music School of Webster University for a semester-culminating performance at Tavern of Fine Arts.

Sunday, May 10
This year for her annual Mother's Day show at the Sheldon Concert Hall, singer Denise Thimes has enlisted as her special guest the fine pianist Cyrus Chestnut, who by now should be familiar to many St. Louis jazz fans from his frequent appearances at Jazz at the Bistro. Proceeds from the event benefit the Mildred Thimes Foundation, a charity named after Thimes' late mother that raises money to fight pancreatic cancer. 

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.)

* Full disclosure: In addition to being an alumni of the University of Missouri, yr. humble StLJN editor also is employed by the public relations firm Slay and Associates to assist the University's Mizzou New Music Initiative in publicizing its various events and programs, including the Mizzou New Music Ensemble.

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Buying in to Tim Berne's Snakeoil

Today, let's have a look at some video clips featuring saxophonist Tim Berne and his band Snakeoil, who are coming to St. Louis to perform in a concert presented by New Music Circle next Friday, May 8 at the The Stage at KDHX.

Snakeoil is the latest of several bands led by Berne, who's 60 years old and originally from Syracuse, NY. Something of a late bloomer musically, Berne didn't start playing saxophone until he was in college, focusing mostly on soul and funk until he heard Julius Hemphill's 1972 recording Dogon A.D. and began investigating jazz.

Moving to NYC, Berne wound up becoming friends and studying music with Hemphill. (He remains a strong advocate for his late mentor's music, recording some of it on the 1992 tribute album Diminutive Mysteries and also using his label Screwgun Records to re-release select Hemphill recordings.)

When not leading his own bands, most notably the long-running Bloodcount, Berne also has played with Bill Frisell, John Zorn, Mat Maneri, David Torn, Hank Roberts, Herb Robertson, Gerald Cleaver, Craig Taborn, Nels Cline of Wilco, and numerous others.

Even though Berne usually is identified as an improvising musician, Snakeoil is principally a vehicle for his compositions, which tend to be intricate, multi-part affairs incorporating complex polyrhythms and harmonies. For listeners of a certain vintage, the blend of Berne's alto sax with the clarinet or bass clarinet of Oscar Noriega may even sound a bit Zappa-esque, while pianist Matt Mitchell and Ches Smith, playing mallet percussion as well as a drum kit, can assume the traditional functions of a rhythm section, or not, depending on the requirements of the piece.

Snakeoil released their eponymous debut album on ECM Records in 2012, followed by Shadow Man in 2013. More recently, they've just put out a new record called You've Been Watching Me, with their show in St. Louis being the twelfth of a 15-gig tour in support of the release.

You can hear music from all three of their albums interspersed throughout today's videos, starting up top with an excerpt from a show in October 2013 at The Windup Space in Baltimore, MD.

After the jump, there are three excerpts from a concert on March 29 of this year at the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and a performance of "Lost in Redding" recorded later that same night at a different venue called Rosetti. Note that all these clips were recorded by audience members on handheld cameras, so while the audio is quite listenable, the video can get pretty shaky in spots.

The last two clips were recorded in May 2013 at The Stone in NYC, and though they also were made by audience members, the visuals of "OC/DC" and "Forever Hammered" fortunately are a bit more stable.

For more about Tim Berne and Snakeoil, check out Berne's just-published interview with the Post-Dispatch's Calvin Wilson, and his 2012 interview with Nate Chinen for Jazz Times.

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

StLJN Saturday Video Showcase: Winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, part 5

Today, it's the fifth and final part of StLJN's winter/spring 2015 jazz preview, offering a look at the touring bands and musicians who will be performing here during the first half of the year.

(Parts one through four can be found here, here, here, and here. And speaking of part four, last week in this space we were remiss in not mentioning tenor saxophonist Harry Allen, who will be performing with Freddy Cole from Wednesday, April 1 through Saturday, April 4 at Jazz at the Bistro. You can see and hear Allen in action in this post from before his last gig here with Cole in 2013.)

Resuming our preview chronology in mid-April, today's first video features singer Kurt Elling, who will be returning to St. Louis to perform Wednesday, April 15 through Saturday, April 18 at Jazz at the Bistro. Elling has been a frequent visitor here in recent years, appearing most recently in June of last year at the Sheldon. He's seen here in a full set from the 2013 Jazz TM Festival in Timișoara, Romania, accompanied by his former pianist and music director Laurence Hobgood, bassist Clark Sommers, guitarist John McLean and drummer Kendrick Scott.

After the jump, you can see a clip featuring guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli and singer Jane Monheit, who will be teaming up on Saturday, April 18 to play for the annual benefit gala for the Sheldon Concert Hall. This version of "They Can't Take that Away From Me" was recorded in 2006 for PBS' Legends Of Jazz program. (For more, read this review of Pizzarelli's show last November at the Bistro, and check out this video showcase post featuring Monheit that was posted before she played the club in May of last year.)

Next is pianist Benny Green, who will be leading his trio from Wednesday, April 29 through Saturday, May 2 at Jazz at the Bistro. This clip of Green playing "Taking a Chance on Love" with drummer Lewis Nash and bassist Christian McBride in 2013 at The Blue Note in New York City.

Today's fourth video features singer Cécile McLorin Salvant, one of the most talked-about new performers in jazz, who will be making her St. Louis debut on Saturday, May 2 at the Sheldon. She's seen here singing and playing Fats Waller's "Jitterbug Waltz" in 2014 at the Victoires du Jazz festival in Paris.

A couple of weeks later, violinist Regina Carter and her Southern Comfort project will be here for performances from Wednesday, May 13 through Saturday, May 16 at Jazz at the Bistro. Carter and company are seen here playing "I'm Going Home" in April, 2014 in the studios of WNYC radio.

After that, you can see saxophonist Tim Berne's Snakeoil, who will perform in a concert presented by New Music Circle on Friday, May 18 at The Stage at KDHX. This video shows the second half of a Snakeoil set recorded in 2013 at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, Connecticut.

The next two clips featuring organist Dr. Lonnie Smith and guitarist Lionel Loueke, who will be paired for a series of shows starting Wednesday, May 27 through Saturday, May 30 at Jazz at the Bistro. Clip #7 shows Smith and his trio in 2011 at the Lamantin Jazz Festival in Szombathely, Hungary, while clip #8 captures a brief solo number by Loueke in 2014 at the Asheville Percussion Festival in North Carolina.

Today's final video features trumpeter Terence Blanchard with his latest project, E- Collective, performing "Oscar Groove" on October 23, 2014 at the Blue Note Milano. Blanchard, who spent a good chunk of 2013 here working with Opera Theatre St. Louis on the premiere of his opera Champion, will be back to play Wednesday, June 10 through Saturday, June 13 at Jazz at the Bistro.

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.)