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Once upon a time I played DJ in the basement of a hotel in Città di Castello, Italy. My audience was an international group of philosophers who convene in the scenic city for an annual three-week program called the Collegium Phaenomenologicum.
Wielding a thoughtfully compiled iTunes playlist and utter confidence in the infallibility of my taste, I set about showing those rigid academics what’s what. First Little Beaver’s Party Down. Then Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information. On to Betty Wright’s Clean Up Woman…
Long story short: it was a catastrophe. Dissatisfied requests came pouring in almost immediately: “C’mon man, don’t you have Like A Virgin?” “Did someone else bring an iPod?” That night I realized that, for the most part, we don’t listen to music on its own terms. Instead we find enjoyment in familiarity.
It’s natural to find pleasure in met expectations and to value music for its non-pareil ability to stir feelings of nostalgia… But… there are untold pleasures in the unexpected when it’s met with the right mindset; when one is ready to dance to the swing of a different beat.
This week two groups of music’s most celebrated improvisers visit Milwaukee to rush headlong into the unexpected.
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First up is the Dave King Trucking Company at the West End Conservatory on Thursday, September 3, at 8 p.m. ($20 and BYOB). Dave King is best known as a founding member, composer and drummer of jazz trio The Bad Plus. But calling The Bad Plus a jazz trio is like calling the Beatles a boy band – it’s not incorrect, but it’s misleading. Few other jazz trios are so influenced by rock and pop and I would wager that no other jazz trio has covered Radio Head, Nirvana, Black Sabbath, David Bowie and Neil Young. King’s new group - the Dave King Trucking Company – is similarly oriented by the jazz tradition but no less influenced by a wide-variety of genres. On the Trucking Company’s Kickstarter page, King describes the music as “an Americana-tinged kind of avant-garde jazz, I suppose, if you want to classify it.”
Then, on Sunday, September 6, Ken Vandermark and Paal Nilssen-Love play at the Sugar Maple at 7 p.m. ($10) for the third installment of Options Milwaukee, a new experimental music series. Chicago multi-instrumentalist and composer Ken Vandermark is one of improvised music’s leading lights and one of the few to have gained institutional recognition with a 1999 MacArthur awarding him $265,000 to do with as he saw fit. Drummer Paal Nilssen-Love hails from Møre og Romsdal, Norway where he was raised in a jazz club run by his parents. The drummer is widely admired as an original voice on his instruments, with Down Beat writing “Nilssen-Love is one of the most innovative, dynamic and versatile drummers in jazz!” For invaluable insight into the artist’s collaborative philosophy see this recent interview.
