6. The Kansas City Symphony’s Matthias Pintscher Conducts Symphony Dances: ‘West Side Story’ and Rachmaninoff with Philippe Quint at Helzberg Hall
My review.

7. Danielle Nicole, Brandon Miller and Go-Go Ray at Records with Merritt
My Instagram snapshot.

8. Seth A Davis, Kwan Leung Ling, Aaron Osborne and Evan Verploegh at 7th Heaven
My Instagram clip.

9. Bryan Hicks, Rod Fleeman and Rich Hill at the Market at Meadowbrook
My Instagram snapshot.

10. Nya at the Blue Room
My Instagram snapshot.

The previous monthly recap is here.

William Brownlee

October 12, 2023

Album Review: Kevin Cheli and Seth Andrew Davis- Pinball

William Brownlee

October 12, 2023

Pinball is an apropos title for the new recording by St. Louis percussionist Kevin Cheli and the Kansas City guitarist Seth Andrew Davis. The three improvised tracks are flush with ricochets, tilts and caroms. Even so, the abrasive give-and-take might as easily been named Curb Stomp, Avalanche or Glitch. Only the most inured listeners will appreciate the album. Yet dedicated aficionados of mayhem will recognize the constant churn of Pinball as a monumental achievement.

(Need of more noise? Davis and his collaborators in the Extemporaneous Music and Arts Society are regularly featured at the Kansas City jazz blog Plastic Sax.)

William Brownlee

August 22, 2023

Blame It On My (Sonic) Youth

William Brownlee

August 22, 2023

After being buffeted by frigid winds and crisp sunlight while traipsing on the soft sand of an Oregon beach for several hours last Sunday, I recovered by sinking into a couch with Evan Parker’s latest release for Intakt Records.

Mentally settled and bodily exhausted, I experienced all 50 minutes of Etching the Ether without a single distraction or chemical enhancement. Completely immersed in sound, I was transported to an elevated dimension.

How did I get there? Most people never acquire a taste for improvised new music, but I consume the often harsh form as if it were candy. A moment on Live in Brooklyn 2011, a new release documenting Sonic Youth’s final concert in the United States, supplies a clue.

Thurston Moore, the loudest member of one of the most transformative bands of my youth, informs the audience that Weasel Walter is slated to perform at the concert’s afterparty at The Stone. The name-check affirms the connection between Sonic Youth’s art-punk free jazz.

The aside also brought me full circle. Since performing with a group including local standout Seth Davis in Kansas City last year, Weasel Walter is featured on the exhilarating March release Branches Choke. Etching the Ether is even better.

The quartet of Parker (soprano saxophone), Peter Evans (trumpets), Matthew Wright (electronics) and Mark Nauseef (percussion) draw on the most refined developments from Tokyo, Philadelphia and the International Space Station. As Sonic Youth might put it, it’s a late-life riot.

William Brownlee

May 24, 2023

Album Review: Seth Andrew Davis- Fondue Shube

William Brownlee

May 24, 2023

If the best works of art necessitate a reconsideration of commonplace elements of everyday life, Seth Andrew Davis’ new album Fondue Shube is resoundingly profound. The Kansas City musician describes the release as “Brutalist Maximalist Noise.” It took me several sessions to consume all 74 minutes of the pernicious album. The aftereffect of the deliberately disagreeable clamor is startling. The mechanical whir of a fan in my bedroom is suddenly musical. I now seek patterns in the thrum of a neighbor’s air conditioning unit. The dull roar of passing airplanes are transformed into songs with melodies. Fondue Shube may not go down easily, but it’s efficacious medicine.

William Brownlee

April 13, 2023

Album Review: Alex Cunningham, Seth Andrew Davis, Damon Smith and Weasel Walter- Branches Choke

William Brownlee

April 13, 2023

Footage of Alex Cunningham, Seth Andrew Davis, Damon Smith and Weasel Walter improvising at Charlotte Street Foundation continues to fill me with joy nine months after I posted the brief clip to Instagram. Branches Choke, fifty minutes of gleeful entropy recorded in Kansas City the day after that performance, is similarly provocative. The cover art evokes the anarchic punk band Crass while the album possesses the ear-splitting racket of glass bottles shattering in an empty recycling bin. The Kansas City guitarist Davis sounds like he’s torturing a Slinky toy. The St. Louis tandem of bassist Smith and fiddler Cunninghim occasionally synchronize their agonized groaning. The thumps and rattles produced by New York percussionist Weasel Walter are funny even without the riotous visuals. The outrageous Branches Choke is astounding.

William Brownlee

March 16, 2023

Concert Review: CRAG Quartet at the Bunker Center for the Arts

William Brownlee

March 16, 2023

Original image by There Stands the Glass.

I didn’t include The Bunker Center for the Arts in the feature I recently wrote for KCUR about music venues in Kansas City. Yet there was nowhere I would rather have been on Tuesday, March 14.

A stellar array of new music improvisers performed at the art gallery. The three-part concert opened with a riveting set by saxophonist Benjamin Baker, guitarist Seth Andrew Davis, bassist Krista Kopper and drummer Evan Verploegh.

Davis and Verploegh are the reigning Plastic Sax People of the Year. Almost every time I hear the core members of the Extemporaneous Music and Arts Society of Kansas City- and that’s been about a dozen times in the past 12 months- I think it’s their best outing to date. The simmering improvisation on Tuesday was no exception.

Guitarist Joshua Gerowitz and multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia played next. The serpentine extemporizations of the Los Angeles based artists were striking, partly because Golia possesses a swagger that makes him the free jazz version of Ronnie James Dio.

The touring band CRAG Quartet headlined. Golia, violinist/composer Christian Asplund (violinist/composer), Steve Ricks (trombone/electronics) and Ron Coulter (percussion) made a stupendous racket that sometimes resembled an emergency siren. And as with many of the most imaginative new music improvisers, their playing possessed a delightful undercurrent of humor.

William Brownlee

January 19, 2023

Album Review: Daniel Pioro- Saint Boy

William Brownlee

January 19, 2023

Hearing musicians and arts presenters apologize to audiences for staging challenging or unconventional music always makes me furious. The excellent Kansas City bassist Krista Kopper came uncomfortably close to begging forgiveness for the cutting-edge repertoire performed at InterUrban ArtHouse in Overland Park, Kansas, on Wednesday, January 18.

The program exhibited by her No Treble trio included premieres of experimental pieces by three Kansas City area composers. Even though the audience of about 40 was presumably receptive to new music, Kopper offered defensive explanations of the adventurous sounds. The strength of Viktor Suslin’s woozy “Grenzubertritt” and “Evening Redness in the West,” Seth Andrew Davis’ twist on Spaghetti Western scores, spoke for themselves.

Nothing on Saint Boy, the wondrous new album of chamber music by the British violinist Daniel Pioro, is as jarring as the gnarliest moments of the concert in Kansas. Even so, the album’s blend of old (Johann Sebastian Bach and Hildegard von Bingen) and new (Laurence Crane’s “2020 Music” and Pioro’s Glass-like title track) is unconventional in the hidebound realm of classical music. In this ahistorical moment, apologies aren’t necessary.

William Brownlee

July 25, 2022

July 2022 Recap: A Monthly Exercise in Critical Transparency

William Brownlee

July 25, 2022

(Screenshot of the trailer for Grand Théâtre de Genève’s 2022 production of Turandot by There Stands the Glass.)

Top Ten Albums (released July 1-25)

1. Moor Mother- Jazz Codes