Free Jazz from Denmark

[ateolf]

It was a really awesome show last night, though kinda went how I was expecting. Really incredible show with almost no one there, but there were some people there and a few people showed up later into it to where we (thanks to Paul's paying some extra!) ended up being only one person shy of meeting what we needed to cover the sound engineer's overhead. Anyway, close enough not to be a big deal and made me feel comfortable giving a little something to the touring musicians since by that point I was already mentally expecting to have to pay that much anyway. So yeah, I'd had a premonition of it given the traction it was getting online plus the fact that it came to me to set up a bit last minute and that friends had another show the same night. But what went down went down very nicely. I first went over early to pick up Kole to give a ride to it. The touring musicians (they asked to be billed by Jensen/Watson/Blancarte/Kay, though I don't think Watson and Kay were actually touring, and instead it was Tactical Maybe with Jensen and Blancarte but with Aaso-Kim and uh, Aaso-Kim) were still sound checking when we got there. After a little bit Billy and his wife Margaret showed up. Then I went to pick up Mary Beth. David and Paul both arrived before the show started. Billy Hayes played and it was awesome. He drummed solo again, this time with a four track cassette machine playing backwards and overblown drums along with him. I didn't recognize the pre-recorded stuff as drums until he told me afterwards, it just sounded like awesome noise texture. Then a couple more people showed up after that set. Pas moi was next with a very 70s electro-acoustic educational film vibe (I found out later that Mort Garson's Plantasia was the cassette they were manipulating so that makes sense! they also had audio from youtube videos about plant care and such). Then one more guy I didn't know at all showed up right before Tactical Maybe played. They were really awesome. There was drums, bass, saxophone, and saxophone/flute (Louise played both saxophone and flute in different configurations sometimes with and sometimes without the mouthpieces getting a lot of different textures...also Nana, the other saxophone played with tupperware and stuff like that in her bell). Happy to make it happen in spite of everything, I knew it wouldn't be too often we'd get a chance to see Danish free jazz musicians in Memphis! (I heard about it later that they'd had something else set up that fell through so they were trying to fill it in and asked around about improvised music scene in Memphis and everyone was like "oh, no, there's nothing for that in Memphis" but then they got someone saying, well...maybe this one thing...) They were good and nice and talked to them, especially Louise, for a bit afterwards. I picked up a bunch of cds from their merch table: Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen/Carol Liebowitz/Tom Blancarte/John Bernard Wagner: Ephemeris, Sweet Banditry: Farvefisen Blomstrer, Kevin Shea Quinitet: s/t, Louise Dam Eckardt Jensen: Ondskabens Lethed, Tom Blancarte/Andrew Drury/Bruce Eisenbeil: Totem> Voices of Grain, Peter Evans/Tom Blancarte: {Sparks}, Tactical Maybe: s/t, Nezelhorns: Sentiment, Nezelhorns: Nezelhorns in an Elephant String, and The Gate: Destruction of Darkness. Whew!