Chicago Improvising Heavy Performing Twice in Lee Co. Thursday, 2018-Feb-1

Marker's members are (left to right) Steve Marquette,
Phil Sudderberg, Andrew Clinkman, Ken Vandermark,
and Macie Stewart. Photo by Julia Dratel.

On Thursday, 2018-Feb-01, renowned improvisor/composer/saxophonist/clarinetist Ken Vandermark (website / Wikipedia page) will bring his new group Marker to the Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at noon and to Standard Deluxe in Waverly at 7:00 pm. The museum concert is free. The evening show is $10 at the door.

Here is the event page for the musuem event, and here is my preview story on the museum's website. Those links have more about the music and some audio of the group. Here is the schedule page for Standard Deluxe.

Those are the basics. For context and background, keep reading.

Where originally I thought this would be far afield from Standard Deluxe's usual fare, Marker's sound and influences may actually fall more in line with what S.D.'s audiences are used to hearing than at the museum, even if conceptually the group is more experimental in nature. In any case, Scott Peek, who books the groups and runs the shop, is open to everything.

As for the museum, A Little Lunch Music (which, if you must know, I coordinate) sort of manifests itself as several mini-series within a series. It's mostly classical music. We have a vocal-music mini-series made up of of Auburn faculty, Matt Hoch's colleagues he sends us from far and yon, and a few regional non-academe pros. We have a prolific wider community of solo classical guitarists whose genre has become a series staple. We have a smaller but consistent group of local and traveling solo pianists, a nice mix of instrumental chamber music, and a smattering of jazz (also known as a smazzering).

What has also arisen, to the joy of a few, to the ire of a different few, and to the bewilderment, I think, of most everyone else, is a yearly appearance on the museum stage of groups of musicians who love, play, and identify with the improvised-music genre more than any other. By improvised music I don't mean jazz, and I don't mean the smazzering of improvisation that is part of just about every kind of music. Rather, I mean collective and mostly unrelenting spontaneous composition whose representative works start, end, and are held together by sometimes no more than a gesture and where the only rules are physics' and even those are threatened.

This almost-yearly improvised-music series-within-a-series happens coincidentally in January or February and is a direct result of a decision likely made by some college senior work-study student working in Residence Life at Loyola University in New Orleans during the summer of 1988, when my name was placed with Jeff Albert's in the Room-321 box on the Buddig (like the ham) Hall chart of dorm rooms for incoming Freshmen. Jeff's career track led him into the improvised-music scene, and Hurricane Katrina chased him to Chicago for a bit where his phone number was added to guitarist Steve Marquette's contacts list.

My wanderings led me here, doing this, and a few years back, Jeff gave Steve my number. Soon after, I booked Steve's group, an unnamed quartet that included Mars Williams, the Psychedelic Furs' saxophonist. The next year, Steve returned with a named trio project, The Few, and then Jeff, now with a worldwide reputation in the field, came up from New Orleans with drummer Dave Capello a few weeks later. We skipped a year to let the soil rest, and this week the mini-series continues with a quintet with Steve as a sideman/co-collaborator rather than organizer/co-collaborator.

Vandermark's is the big name on the bill. With his 1999 MacArthur Fellowship and credits on what looks to be about 200 recordings on his Wikipedia discography page, Ken will not only be the most decorated improvisor we have hosted, but likely the most famous musician. He works with a laundry list of veteran improvisors throughout the world, but for Marker, he's traveling with a quintet of younger Chicago players. Besides Steve, Macie Stewart will be the only other performer we've heard on the series. A member of the experimental rock duo Ohmme, Macie sang (omg) and fiddled with The Few in 2016 and will return this time also on keyboard. Other members are drummer Phil Sudderberg and guitarist Andrew Clinkman.

The times Steve brought us groups, they've been near the front of their tour. In fact, in 2015, that first quartet's museum performance was its very first time improvising together as a quartet! Both groups were traveling from Chicago to New Orleans in preparation for some north-meets-south improvised-music collaboration concerts that Jeff's efforts helped instigate and that Steve helped organize into the Instigation Festival that now alternates cities. But this time, they will be slingshotting off of New Orleans' gravity, bringing all that inertia with them.