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WILLIAM HOOKER, FREEDOMLAND, MOSTLY OTHER PEOPLE DO THE KILLING, CBGB LOUNGE 7/6/05

I know I have a whole ton of recently-received CDs that you'll want to know about (such as the reissue of George Brigman's I CAN HEAR THE ANTS DANCING I think...I've lost it in a large pile of CDs and I know it isn't the JUNGLE ROT one I've been wanting to hear for some time and which I believe is due for digitilization soon anyway, as well as a couple of CD-Rs that Mike Snider burnt for me), but gosh-it-all if I feel like it's my duty to be documenting these final "avant garde freestyle" gigs taking place at the CBGB Lounge until the end of the month. And given the shaky status of CBGB and its various offshoots that's going on as we speak, who knows how much more avant jazz giggage will be going on there in the future considering how the greedy landlords hiding behind the respectable image of benevolent homeless shelter activists are hell-bent on kicking out their noble and well-meaning tenants. (That's not exactly the case...I just thought I'd use some old-timey leftoid-styled ranting in order to stir up the braceros more or less...)

Anyway, a slap-together quartet led by long-time avant garde drummer William Hooker opened the evening's festivities, and to be trite about it all I could say is what a way to start things off (I get that way sometimes!). Now I must admit that I'm not exactly a big fan of Hooker's for some reason or other...maybe it was because noted jazz dorkoid the "Rev." John Gensel (self-appointed minister to the jazz community) scribbled some faint praise notes on an early Hooker album (a good one at that) or it just might be because of Hooker's willingness to perform with a vast array of eighties underground rock personalities, an arrangement that certainly would have thrilled me back in 1981 but nowadays leaves me cold. Fortunately last night's performance only featured one alternative bunsnitch inna pack, mainly Dave Soldier on under-amplified if at all acoustic guitar and violin. Come to think of it, I liked Soldier's Krotopkins CD even though I haven't played it since 1998, so maybe this was a matchup that I could rah-rah for even if Soldier is from the other side of the alternative tracks! The performance was snazz, with the rest of the bunch including saxist Ras Moshe doing a pretty fine job continuing that fine atonal avant splatter that seemed to reach some mythical peak in the late-seventies before everything seemed to slide down the poop chute, reminding me of why I used to look forward to the NEW MUSIC DISTRIBUTION SERVICE catalog just as much as I did Bomp's!

Following Hooker and band were Freedomland, a classic avant/blues/rock collaboration that once again harkens back to the late-seventies freedom groups such as Air who were also creating a jazz/rock-y thing and actually getting covered by the squares at DOWN BEAT and THE VILLAGE VOICE for their efforts. I've been following Freedomland ever since I got hold of their debut CD-R on Rent Control Records (also recorded at the lounge!) with a studio followup being no slouch either, and as you'd expect this group (with a "special guest" I could not make out) really cooked in the same seventies stew way that fellow seventies survivors Hooker and crew did. And yeah, some of you might think that the presence of relatively younger white musicians of a punky past (notably tuba player/baritone saxist David Hofstra ex-Chinese Puzzle and Contortions and drummer Dee Pop of Bush Tetras, Gun Club and series curator fame) playing with black avant legends William Parker and Daniel Carter might open these Freedomland-loving players to the same critiques I may have had of Hooker's gang mentioned above, but everything here was so avant rocky fine that the young turks might as well have been black legends for all the power and energy they put forth! One can only hope this was not their last appearance at the lounge or anywhere else for that matter.

Closing out the festivities were a relatively new quartet called Mostly Other People Do The Killing, and w/a name like that I was expecting some murderous bunch of avant garde freaksters coming off like a fevered combination of Frank Lowe at his most atonal scronkiest and WHITE LIGHT/WHITE HEAT taken to the heights of a Brotzmanian epiglotal spazz attack. Wrong, and I gotta say that I was a bit surprised when I saw this batch, young and frail (w/the exception of a trumpet player who was a li'l stocky) all dressed up in pressed pants and neckties looking just like Jay Hinman going to work! Whew, looked like I had a long night ahead of me, but thankfully these well-scrubbed bright-eyes and bushy-tails (led by bassist "Moppa" Elliot who also teaches music at a St. Mary's High School in the area, making me wonder if in reality these kidz're his students!) took the best moments of mid-sixties Ornette, some Ayler, a few snatches of mid-seventies loft noise and other guideposts I couldn't discern offhand, and mulched them all into a pretty good overview of just what is right with this whole blabberjazz sound. Not that I was bowled over by Mostly Other People Do The Killing's entire reason for being (and the fact that their name and look are an obvious [or so Ty Cumbie said here] attempt to get the new alternative boobies introduced to avant jazz [as if the seventies generation hadda be prodded into it...]), but given how a lotta these new jazz upswingers are more or less trying to aspire to Berklee-trained Al DeMeola moosh-moves, I gotta admit that I like these kiddies all the more for going against that ever-annoying grain of JAZZ LAMESTERISMS!