September 16, 2005 | Section Three Chicago Reader | August 26, 2005 | Section Three 5
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4CHICAGO READER | SEPTEMBER 16, 2005 | SECTION THREE CHICAGO READER | AUGUST 26, 2005 | SECTION THREE 5 [email protected] The Meter www.chicagoreader.com/TheMeter The Treatment A day-by-day guide to our Critic’s Choices and other previews Look What friday 16 BELLINI At a 2002 show in Athens, Georgia, Bellini drummer Damon Che abruptly left the stage in the middle of the Wind Blew In the band’s set; later that night he loaded his kit in the band’s rented van and drove home to Pittsburgh alone. Former Girls Against Boys drummer Alexis Fleisig filled in on short Hot-shit young trumpeter Maurice Brown, who’s been tearing it up notice, and, even better, he’s stuck around: the quartet has improved immeasurably on its new album, Small Stones in New Orleans for the past four years, comes home to Chicago. (Temporary Residence Limited). Singer Giovanna Cacciola— who, along with her husband, Bellini guitarist Agostino By Peter Margasak Tilotta, used to play in Uzeda—uses her smoky voice to fill in y their very nature, jazz jam ses- lunch, play in their hotel rooms, ask to moving to a different city would help the jagged cracks created by Fleisig’s mathy rhythms and sions are all about surprise, and get on the guest list—and then get him concentrate on his studies. He Matthew Taylor’s lurching bass lines, creating a sound that’s B the post-Jazz Fest show at the called to sit in. After graduating from worked hard with Batiste, but after a both sultry and dangerous. Tilotta’s guitar playing is loud Velvet Lounge on September 4 was an Hillcrest High School he entered year he was itching to perform more and slithery—it recalls Duane Denison’s sharp arpeggios in especially good one. Sharing the front Northern Illinois University’s jazz stud- regularly. He considered going back to the Jesus Lizard, but it’s caked with mud and grit. Mono line with club owner and tenor saxo- ies program, but he was soon struggling Chicago or giving New York a shot, but headlines and Headlights open. a 10 PM, Subterranean, phonist Fred Anderson was trumpeter to balance academic work with regular decided to try New Orleans first. “I had 2011 W. North, 773-278-6600 or 800-594-8499, $10. Maurice Brown, a regular presence at the gigs in the city. “It was killing me,” gigs there, but I never broke into the —Peter Margasak club in the late 90s but a rare sight in Brown says. “I remember getting back scene because I always had to go back recent years. Brown normally would [to De Kalb] at six in the morning to Southern,” he says. have been in New Orleans preparing for when I had an eight o’clock class.” Within six months he’d landed his his weekly gig at Snug Harbor, the most His time at NIU was cut short in late weekly slot at Snug Harbor, forming an prestigious jazz club in the city, but 1999, when acclaimed trumpeter Clark excellent band with some of the best Hurricane Katrina changed his plans. Terry, on Marsalis’s recommendation, young talent in the city. Brown had For now, one of the most celebrated and invited Brown to join him on a ten-day played on records with Fred Anderson, fastest-rising jazz players to come out of jazz cruise aboard the QE2. There Ernest Dawkins’s New Horizons Chicago in the past decade is back home. Brown met and played with musicians Ensemble, Roy Hargrove, Curtis Fuller, Brown, 24, says he’d already been like Nicholas Payton, Lou Donaldson, and others. But he didn’t commit his thinking about leaving New Orleans, and Lonnie Smith; when the cruise own music to CD until last year, form- where he’s lived for the last four years. ended Terry took Brown along for a two- ing his own label, Brown Records, to “I’d been feeling a pull for a while, week European tour. Brown transferred release Hip to Bop , a dazzling display because I was getting a little too com- to Columbia College in part to avoid of his mastery of most mainstream jazz fortable there,” he says. “That’s what you long commutes to his local gigs—he had idioms, spiced with healthy doses of work to get—that balance. But once I a weekly engagement with fellow trum- funk and soul. got it I felt like I needed to move on. I peter Corey Wilkes at the South Loop “I don’t know what a lot of those LDS was just asking myself if I should move cafe Some Like It Black—but he was musicians are going to do,” he says of REYNO back to Chicago or go to New York. I now picking up an increasing amount of Katrina’s impact. “That’s where they decided to stay and not do anything, road work. Ironically, some of his travels work, and it’s their whole life.” Brown’s DREW and then, boom!” involved teaching: Brown conducted friends and bandmates survived the Freakwater On Saturday, August 27, Brown workshops in Paris with the great expat hurricane, and he’s been able to keep played a gig at the legendary club Chicago saxophonist Johnny Griffin, working—last weekend he played in FREAKWATER Through the years singers Tipitina’s with his funky hip-hop- where some students weren’t much Hungary with the New Horizons c Cathy Irwin and Janet Bean, along with longtime inflected project Soul’d U Out. By the younger than he was. “The thought of it Ensemble. But New Orleans’s Treme bassist Dave Gay, have added some instrumental variety to early hours of August 28, the day before was weird,” Brown says. “But once we neighborhood, where Brown lived, suf- their records by bringing in a single player like Jon Spiegel, Katrina hit, he was riding with a friend got into the discussions it just clicked.” fered heavy flooding; Brown figures his Brian Dunn, Bob Egan, or Max Johnston. But on their last to Memphis, taking only a handful of In 2001, on a friend’s advice, he home studio and nearly all of his album, End Time (1999), they brought in a string section possessions (“my horn, a laptop, and a decided to switch to Southern belongings are destroyed. To help his and full band, and for their first record in six years, the new couple of outfits”). By Tuesday, when it University in Baton Rouge to study fellow Katrina survivors, Brown is co- Thinking of You (Thrill Jockey), they got some wide-ranging was clear he’d be away from New with clarinetist Alvin Batiste. Brown organizing a series of benefit concerts help from key members of Califone. Even so, the music is Orleans for longer than he’d expected, got a scholarship, and he figured that for the New Orleans Musician’s Clinic unmistakably Freakwater: the songs are defined by the way he headed to his parents’ home in (wwoz.org/clinic), starting September Irwin’s earthy, unpolished cry and Bean’s delicate holler south-suburban Markham, where his 24 in New York with Wynton and alternately clash and braid together. Their lyrics are mostly career began. Maurice Branford Marsalis, McCoy Tyner, and nervy portraits of doomed romance—they nail the way lovers Brown started playing trumpet in Brown more; shows in Chicago and LA are suffer pain and misery in relationships and take pleasure in his school band when he was 10, but still in the planning stages. dispensing abuse. But “Buckets of Oil” is a seething his devotion to jazz began at 15, when Brown’s been apartment hunting in indictment of the Bush administration’s deceptions in Iraq, he attended a workshop conducted by Chicago, and for the immediate future and “Cathy Ann” is a poignant elegy for Woody Guthrie’s Wynton Marsalis at a south-side he’ll split his time between here and daughter Cathy Ann, who died in a fire at the age of four. church. “Everybody lined up and New York. “I want to stay here,” he says. The Califone folks do an expert job at fleshing out the moods played one chorus of blues, and when I “But I need that support to do it—I of the songs, bringing a Stonesy swagger to “Hi Ho Silver” played mine he said, ‘Keep going, keep need the clubs to want me to play.” He’s and an old-timey wheeze to “Cricket vs. Ant.” For this show going,’” Brown says. “I ended up play- remarkably upbeat for somebody who’s the core trio will be joined by Spiegel (pedal steel), Jim ing four choruses, and then he pulled lost his home, but he says he misses Becker (fiddle, keyboards, guitar, vocals), and Joe Adamik me to the side and he told me to never pieces of his music he left behind, par- (piano, horns). This show is part of the Hideout Block Party, stop playing, that I could be greater ticularly some completed Soul’d U Out which starts at 7 PM today; see page 62 for the full schedule. than him.” Inspired, he spent his spare recordings on a hard drive. “When I a 8:30 PM, Hideout, 1354 W. Wabansia, 773-227-4433, time practicing and devouring his par- look back, the things I’m thinking $10. A —Peter Margasak ents’ extensive record collection. about are that hard drive, the trumpet Two years later he began sitting I won in a Miles Davis competi- in at jam sessions at clubs like the tion, pictures,” he says.