Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote
Subject: Siamese Twins, Derek Bailey
From: hsu@walnut.SFSU.EDU (William Tsun-Yuk Hsu)
Date: 10 Sep 92 19:17:43 PDT
Distribution: world
Organization: San Francisco State University


A good weekend for improv in the Bay area... (aren't they all :-))

Fri 9/4 Siamese Twins/Splatter Trio/Kalle Laar and Japanese drummer
at the Heinz. Oakland

The Twins are a sax/drums from Cleveland (!) I'm told the sax player
also plays guitar, but he stuck to alto that night. There were probably
some Ornette-ish heads with a lot of freeblowing, but it was hard to
tell where one ended and the other began. The sax player has a fairly
eclectic style, moving from lighter melodic lines to klezmer licks
to extended techniques. And some of the most intelligent and musical use 
of effects I've seen in a long time. The drummer is quite impressive as well, 
and despite the duo format, I never felt that there was space that needed 
to be filled. Occasionally the drummer would get up, dance around, or run
outside the club whooping and chanting. I'm usually a bit wary of
theatrics in an improv situation, but these guys pull them off perfectly.
Don't miss them. They're thinking about moving to the Bay area or New
York, and I was of course trying to sell them the attractions of the
left coast :-)

The Twins were a hard act to follow. This is the first time I've seen
Splatter, and they took a little while to warm up. There were some slow
moments in the middle, but on the whole they delivered an interesting
set, their usual eclectic mix of jazz and rock and new music flavors.
Highlights included a fragmented version of Ornette's Law Years (which
I had been humming at the laundromat earlier that day), and the high
energy finish when the gloves came off and everybody was blasting away.
Matches the high points on their two CDs.

I didn't stay for the last band. The few minutes I caught were interesting
tho.

9/6 Derek Bailey/Greg Goodman live at Woody Woodman's Finger Palace, Berkeley

Longtime improv fans will remember all the old Metalanguage live dates
recorded at the Finger Palace, which apparently is pianist Greg Goodman's
house. Bailey had played earlier that weekend, but I was too busy and
didn't even notice the listing. This Sunday event is actually a recording
session; they decided to invite fans to attend for free. 

I'd seen Bailey once before in Chicago in '89, in one of his spiky and
angular moods. I loved his latest solo CD, which was Bailey at his most
melodic and accessible. The Berkeley session was somewhere in between.
Bailey mostly played electric; in fact the one piece with acoustic
guitar (and Goodman on the piano keys) didn't come off so well. I had
been warned that Goodman had become an annoying improv clown in recent
years, but he was mostly serious and under control that afternoon. Mostly
he stayed inside the piano with the usual preparations, mallets, bowed
and plucked sounds etc. Bailey was clearly the leader in the session,
but Goodman provided diverse splashes of color from inside the piano.
Having tried to do inside-the-piano improv myself, I was very impressed
with Goodman's control and *taste*; it's so easy to degenerate into a
"let's make cute sounds" session. The pieces were a little more 
textural than I expected, Bailey making his usual deft use of distortion
and the volume pedal.

It was a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Bailey was really friendly
made little jokes through the set, and chatted with people afterwards. I
could talk about the yummy free food too, but I don't want to rub it in :-)

After the show, we went by Amoeba Records in Berkeley and I quickly snapped
up (used!) copies of the Bailey/Barre Phillips duets, and Bailey's Village
Life with Louis Moholo and a non-Western percussionist whose name I forget.
The Bailey/Phillips duets were pretty much what I expected, namely a warm,
lyrical, and beautiful session, from two of my favorite improvisers. I
wasn't so excited with Village Life. The sound is truly awful, and after
my first time through, I thought Bailey sounded out-of-place with the
two percussionists. But Richard Shapiro probably has other opinions (we
love the same musicians but usually different recordings ;-))

Bill Hsu
(now reachable at hsu@walnut.sfsu.edu, but my IL address works as well)

Newsgroups: rec.music.bluenote