The first week of December, and I can never quite tell – is it a last rush of jam-packed jazz scheduling before the Holidaze hits? Or the first splash in an especially busy month?
Either way, there’s more than enough music to squeeze between shopping excursions and before the party docket gets too crowded. Among them: a last chance to catch the groovemaking pianist Benny Green at the Jazz Showcase (through Dec. 4); a weekend of scintillating Cuban jazz courtesy of Chuchito Valdez (next Friday and Saturday at the Green Mill); and the return to town of an internationally known new-music flutist (who you might not even know had left).
Sunday night (Dec. 4), the hearty vocalist and trumpeter Jeannie Tanner finishes up a weekend engagement at Pete Miller’s (Evanston) with her all-female quartet, featuring pianist Lisa McQueen, bassist Stacy McMichael, and drummer Darlene DuFay. The idea of a band comprising only distaff musicians seems a little quaint: such groups more regularly populated the 30s and 40s, when women jazz instrumentalists were enough of a novelty to make a big deal about it. But Tanner presents this band without any such fanfare, which speaks to the healthy modern-day population of women whose musicianship overshadows considerations of gender.
Tanner’s quartet plays from 5 till 9 Sunday at Pete Miller’s (1557 Sherman Ave.); she and pianist McQueen then move to the restaurant’s Wheeling location (412 N. Milwaukee) to play Tuesday from 6 till 10.
Also Sunday, one of the city’s top improvising ensembles takes the stage – not once but twice – when the killer kwartet KLANG appears at the Old Town School of Folk Music (4 PM) and then at the Hungry Brain (at 10). Led by much- and justly-lauded clarinetist James Falzone, the band also stars vibist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tim Daisy. Expect their 2011 disc Other Doors (Allos Documents), an iconoclastic tribute to the 1930s Benny Goodman Quartet, to grab a spot on many of the Top Ten lists now under construction by jazz critics across the country.
KLANG’s nighttime gig is part of a particularly attractive double-bill offered by Umbrella Music’s Transmission Series. They play at 10; around 11 or so, Frank Rosaly will replace Tim Daisy at the drums to lead his band Cicada Music. This sextet comprises the remaining members of KLANG and also Keefe Jackson and Jason Stein, both playing bass clarinets to form an unusually dark and woodsy clarinet choir with Falzone. Highly recommended; Rosaly is an exquisite propulsive force whose constant shadings demand and reward the listener’s full attention.
(Cicada Music will play an encore gig, along with another and possibly even more enticing Rosaly-led band called Green and Gold, Wednesday at The Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia.)
Monday night brings the final opportunity to hear veteran reedman Eric Schneider in his short (five-week) residency at Andy’s (11 E. Illinois) – which means the last chance to hear how a clarinet sounds with an organ trio. (Better than you’d think, actually.) Keys man Pete Benson of the quartet Sabertooth heads the ace rhythm section, with masterly contributions from two of the very best on their instruments – guitarist Henry Johnson and drummer George Fludas.
The band plays from 5 till 8:30, which gives you time to head to Uptown for the second set by Patricia Barber – she of the brooding vocals and mysterious piano – at the Green Mill (4802 N. Broadway). Barber’s uncompromising quartet returned to their regular Monday slot at the Mill last week, after a month in France and Poland. It had been several years since I last heard her in person, but she sounds as chillingly elegant as ever – and possibly even more pointedly idiosyncratic. She remains utterly at home in the demimonde of the dimly lit Green Mill (where she starts at 8 PM, and also will also play the Friday before Christmas): if Toulouse-Lautrec were alive and living in Chicago, this is whom he’d paint.
Tuesday, Chicago pianist and composer Dave Flippo and his band celebrate the release of his first new album in almost seven years with a set at Jerry’s, the improbably cool sandwich shop in Wicker Park (starting around 9:30, after an opening set from saxist Jim Gailloreto). The album, Tao Tunes, is pretty much sui generis – musical settings for 17 verses from the Tao Te Ching, the foundation-stone of Taoism, one of the world’s oldest and most widely-practiced religious philosophies. (I’ll have a longer review of the album in this space on Monday.)
Then on Wednesday, a homecoming: flutist, composer, and bandleader Nicole Mitchell returns to Chicago to perform with the Chicago Composers Orchestra in her first performance since she moved to California this past summer, to take a teaching position at UC Irvine. Mitchell was among the most lionized and world-traveled Chicago artists of the last decade, so the news of her leavetaking came as a blow. The chance to see her in concert – and to present the world premier of a new composition, no less – makes Wednesday’s choice of music an easy one.
Mitchell will unveil a new composition in ten parts entitled Flight To Freedom for Creative Flute and Orchestra, dedicated to 19th-century civil-rights pioneer Harriet Tubman. “In the work, I draw connections between African-American cultural expression and the orchestra by weaving jazz aesthetics, improvisation, and classical music,” Mitchell explained to me recently by e-mail.
“While writing the piece I envisioned Tubman fearlessly and elusively functioning within the evils of slavery to help others escape, and the intensity of the times in which she lived. . . . A true improviser of her lifetime, Tubman repeatedly and courageously risked her life and faced the unknown out of her love for humanity.”
To top it off, the piece takes place in a most unusual setting. The concert, called CCO Amidst Lush Plant Life, aims to integrate the music with the botanical specimens that fill the Garfield Park Conservatory (300 N. Central Park Ave.), partially recovered from June’s glass-shattering hailstorm. Mitchell's piece will join new works by four other new-music composers, among them Francisco Castillo Trigueros and Lou Mallozzi. Amongst all that greenery, Mitchell the new Californian should feel right at home.
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