Tag: Free Jazz

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The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra: The Future is Now

With “jazz month” drawing considerable attention and attendance at Crosstown Arts for the past two weeks, encompassing everything from hard bop to the city’s burgeoning avant garde scene, it’s worth taking a step back to consider an artist who mastered all those styles and more: Sun Ra.

The fact that both he and his longtime saxophonist John Gilmore were from the South (Birmingham, Alabama and Summit, Mississippi, respectively) makes them all the more relevant to the current moment, above and beyond the fact that Ra’s legacy informs all artists who walk the line between “inside” and “outside.” Those words, of course, are jazz lingo for playing inside the lines of conventional chord changes versus stepping outside into a world of free improvisation.

That line matters when it comes to Sun Ra — born Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount — as the mere mention of his name these days is often used to signify any music that’s outlandishly free or experimental. What’s often forgotten is that, behind the sci-fi-influenced language and costumes of Ra’s futurism, there was a disciplined composer and arranger who revered Fletcher Henderson scores dating back to the 1920s. That’s not to say that the Sun Ra Arkestra didn’t have its moments of more chaotic improvisation, but they were only partial refractions of the ensemble’s wider palette of sounds.

The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra, first released on Savoy Records in 1962, then re-released last fall on 180-gram vinyl, CD, and hi-res digital by Craft Recordings in honor of its 60th Anniversary, is a good case in point. It was an historical milestone, being the first recording made with his band, The Arkestra, after moving to New York from Chicago. Produced by Tom Wilson (who would go on to produce Bob Dylan, the Velvet Underground, and the Mothers of Invention, among others), The Futuristic Sounds of Sun Ra has long been considered one of the avant-garde artist’s most accessible albums.

According to John Szwed’s Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra, the album was not even reviewed at the time and immediately sank into obscurity. So much for being accessible! And yet, compared to what came later from the Arkestra, this album is indeed approachable, and a good entry point into Sun Ra’s oeuvre for listeners hoping to expand their horizons.

It’s “a record which could have easily represented their repertoire during an evening at a club” at that time, as Szwed writes, with a listenable balance between free improvisation and composed pieces for an octet. The latter pieces are not so different from other cutting edge, large-ensemble jazz albums of the time, such as Gil Evans’ Out of the Cool (1960), Charles Mingus’ Oh Yeah (1961), or Oliver Nelson’s The Blues and the Abstract Truth (1961).

That’s apparent right from the start, as “Bassism,” beginning with a sparse bass line, soon incorporates tight horn bursts and grooving piano before making room for a more freestyle flute from Arkestra stalwart Marshall Allen. The tracks continue in that vein, mixing tightly arranged horn lines, piano vamps, and freer soloing in relatively concise compositions. With “Where Is Tomorrow,” the arranged horns soon drop out to make way for intriguing freestyle interplay between two flutes and bass clarinet (the latter played by Gilmore).

That “outness” takes over on the next track, “The Beginning,” which begins and ends with a melange of unorthodox percussion. The album liner notes tout this element, noting that the record features bells from India, Chinese wind chimes, wood blocks, maracas, claves, scratchers, gongs, cowbells, Turkish cymbals, and castanets. These flourishes lend a distinctive sonic stamp to the entire album.

At times, the mood mellows, as with “Tapestry from an Asteroid,” a ballad that became one of Ra’s most-performed works. Interestingly, out of the 10 original selections on the album, “Tapestry from an Asteroid” would stand as the only work that the artist would ever revisit — on stage or otherwise — again. “China Gates” is also in this mood (and is the sole track not written by Ra), with vocalist Ricky Murray sounding almost like Billy Eckstine amid the bells and gongs.

Following the release of Futuristic Sounds, which marked Ra’s sole album under Savoy, the artist and the Arkestra enjoyed a fruitful period in New York and Philadelphia. In 1969, Ra graced the cover of Rolling Stone. In the early ’70s, he became an artist-in-residence at the University of California, Berkeley. Later in the decade, back in New York, his shows would attract a new generation of fans, including the Velvet Underground’s John Cale and Nico. As he grew older, Ra’s influence only continued to grow, with bands like Sonic Youth inviting the artist to open for them. During his lifetime, Ra also built one of the most extensive discographies in history, which includes more than 100 albums (live and studio) and over 1,000 songs. And now, nearly 30 years after his death, the legacy of Sun Ra lives on through the ever-evolving Arkestra, which continues to record and perform today under the leadership of the forever-young Marshall Allen.

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A Native Son Returns: Stephan Crump’s Solo Bass Explorations

Stephan Crump (Credit: Lena Adasheva)

There’s a lot of laughter when Stephan Crump and I catch up on the phone, partly because long ago we played together in Big Ass Truck. Even then, both of us set our sights beyond Memphis. “For me, at that point, I knew that I had to be a musician, and I knew that I was going to finish school and move to New York,” he says of those days. His reason for making a hometown stop now has less to do with our old combo than what he found when he moved on to Gotham. For New York is where he’s truly carved out his own niche in the free jazz/improvisational music scene, and where he’s lived, composed, taught, and performed for nearly thirty years.

On Saturday, he’ll leave a little of what he’s learned along the way in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. And, as he confesses, the possibility of old friends and family distracting him is daunting. “It’s quite rare that I play Memphis. And it’s pretty intense, because there are just so many more dynamics at play for me personally. I could talk about going straight into and through the fear! I’m just recognizing that there’s all this stuff, that’s all wonderful and a blessing, but is a lot to deal with. It’s more distracting.”

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, diving straight into and through the fear is part of the do-or-die attitude that Crump and many other players embrace while improvising in the most unstructured settings. But while he’s often pegged with the free jazz/improv tag, Crump actually plays in a variety of ways across many projects, as he explains below.

Saturday’s show will focus mainly on his latest album, a selection of works for solo bass dubbed Rocket Love, and, as revealed below, Crump is relishing the chance to bring all the sonic possibilities of the instrument to the fore on his current six-city tour.

Memphis Flyer: In your description of making the new record on Bandcamp, you say making it sustained you through the first year of the pandemic, “materially and spiritually.” It sounds like that was a real life-saver.

Stephan Crump: It was, man. There were so many blessings in that period. We have two boys who are now 17 and 13. My wife’s a high school history teacher, so she was teaching all day on Zoom, and I was helping the boys manage online school. I started teaching music online, but having the album project was absolutely a lifeline as far as creativity. Having my Bandcamp fans support an aspect of it made it feel like a community was behind it. A modest community, but it still felt good. So that was great. Also, I had a home studio, and I could have just planned a record and made it and been done with it, but, as I usually do with albums, whether it’s at home or another studio, I wanted to do a different process with this and really take my time and build that community, and not feel like it needed to be a certain number of pieces. It could just be open-ended. I could experiment. It was a really good mode.

How exactly were you interacting with your supporters?

It was through Bandcamp. They have a subscription-based thing that you can do. I wrote my subscribers updates and they would get two pieces a month: one cover or a standard, and an original piece. Then I also did a series of Facebook live concerts from my studio. Not only would I broadcast those to supporters and fans, from all parts of the world, I had all my microphones set up and I was recording it properly in my studio. So some pieces on Rocket Love were just me doing them in my studio in various moments, but some were recorded during those concerts. And that brought a different energy. Facebook Live is not like being in the same space with people, of course, but it’s still a performance and still creates a good kind of tension and energy to engage with. You do have to step up to a certain mode of performance that galvanizes your focus and energy. People would write comments, and I’d stop between tunes to respond. It felt good to me. I needed that.

Musically, it’s just you playing solo, right?

All of the pieces are just me on bass, except for one cool thing which was an experiment that worked out. The record is book-ended by this two-part piece called “Lament.” Those two pieces happened on the last two days of 2020. I wanted to try something different, so I said, “Let me do a piece channeling all my feelings about this year, all the complexities of it. And do a short piece where, instead of just one bass I’ll do three, with overdubs.” But on the first track, which I did on December 30th, I said, “Let me play one of the voices and then immediately play the second one and immediately play the third one, but without listening to any of it, with no headphones.” So I wasn’t listening to what I had played previously.

The next day, I did the same thing, but I listened as I overdubbed. And that’s “Lament, Part II.” I could hear what I played before. But on “Lament, Part I,’ I wasn’t. I love both pieces, but there’s something that is transcendent about the first one. It was such a learning experience because I realized I was playing along with what I had played before, because I was in the same zone, and I had just done it. Emotionally and spiritually, I was playing along with it. But the part of my brain that gets engaged when I’m listening and playing along, and interacting with something, was not a factor. So it remained on a less cerebral plane. It remained on a more spiritual plane.

I feel like it’s just a reminder to me that that’s where the real shit is anyway. That’s what we’re trying to get to when we are listening and interacting. That experimental way of doing it was just a more direct thing. Technically, if you were to analyze it harmonically and melodically, obviously there are things that never would have happened had I been listening and playing. But there’s something that gets communicated that’s so right, that whatever details on the surface that would be deemed to be dissonant or wrong or whatever, are totally irrelevant. That’s just surface information.

The stuff that we think music is about — notes and tones and chords and melodies and harmonic relationships — all of that is just the surface, the crust, of what it is. The real stuff that you need to make any of that worthwhile is living underneath.

Borderlands Trio, featuring Crump, Kris Davis, and Eric McPherson (Photo courtesy Stephan Crump)

Free jazz or improv is your stock in trade, isn’t it?

Yeah, like my project called the Borderlands Trio. We have two albums, and the latest one is a double CD called Wandersphere. It’s a piano trio, all spontaneously composed. It’s always evolving and always grooving. Playing that way is also a big thing that I teach. I love bringing people into that zone and clarifying for them how to be in that mode.

I also compose. I write pieces for my band, and for improvising ensembles. And that’s a whole other thing. How do you create an environment with a distinctive, powerful DNA that maintains its identity while also inviting people in to express themselves, and be as expansive as possible within that?

You write that you had planned the album even before the pandemic hit.

I had been thinking about it the year before, then in January I put the plan together, and February was when I did the initial outreach. I announced the process and planned to start in March. And then…[laughs].

I completed the year. I did it from March to March, which was my original plan. I completed it and had two albums worth of material, but this plan was never about being constrained by good album length. It was about using another forum to see what that brings, and not think about an album until afterwards. So I finished in March, but only later that spring or summer did I decide to curate an album from that whole body of work. And that’s what Rocket Love is.

The bass has so many sonic possibilities, yet it’s rare to be able to focus on that instrument alone.

When you’re talking about the acoustic bass, there’s so much to the sound of it that doesn’t speak through a traditional ensemble. There’s a lot of it you can’t explore and get to as a player, when you’re exclusively playing in those contexts. So it’s something I’ve been exploring in some of my other, less traditional ensembles, to try to make space for some of the expressiveness of the bass. Playing solo is an extreme version of that. You get to decide what your sculpture is, what you present to the audience. You can decide, this piece is going to be about texture, about sound. The next piece might be about melody, or groove. You can make those decisions, and by limiting yourself to the one instrument, you’re also expanding the palette of what’s viable as a piece of art.

Stephan Crump plays The Green Room at Crosstown Arts on Saturday, October 15, 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $20 advance/$10 student | $25 day of the show.

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With a Single Guitar, Marc Ribot Levitates Crosstown Concourse

Marc Ribot live at The Green Room. He never touched the guitar on the stand. (Credit: Alex Greene)

“Whew!” was the general response in the crowd as guitarist Marc Ribot sounded his last note of the night and disappeared backstage. Eyes wide with amazement, the audience seemed to be emerging from a roller coaster ride, and indeed they had, after a fashion. Ribot had just taken us on a mystery tour of his weathered Gibson acoustic (possibly a pre-War model) and every musical method he could muster to coax sound from it.

Most know the guitarist for his work as a session and side man with the likes of Tom Waits, Caetano Veloso, John Zorn, Jack McDuff, Wilson Pickett, The Lounge Lizards, Arto Lindsay, T-Bone Burnett, Medeski, Martin and Wood, Cibo Matto, Elvis Costello, Robert Plant & Alison Krauss, Susana Baca, The Black Keys, Elton John, Madeleine Peyroux, Marianne Faithfull, Diana Krall, Allen Toussaint, and Robert Quine. But he’s led his own groups for over 30 years as well.

The music he played last Saturday in The Green Room was closest in spirit to the free jazz he typically creates with his group Ceramic Dog. But while that trio certainly casts a wide, anarchic net, the variety of music evoked at his most recent Memphis performance was even more inclusive. It ran like a dream one must have to fully process a day of travel, skipping from scene to scene, and in that sense, encompassed some very lyrical and folk passages that were downright traditional. Yet no style or melody was allowed to linger for long, as Ribot’s restless creativity soon replaced it with another musing.

From the start, the musical quotes seemed to fit Memphis, and perhaps the show really was Ribot’s way of processing his visit here. Opening with a quiet folk melody and chords reminiscent of “Shenandoah,” he quickly moved to more dissonant territory, while somehow still incorporating quotes from “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”

One might consider him a master of the guitar, both acoustic and electric, but he speaks more of his limitations than his talents. As he told Guitar Player magazine in 1997, he’s been handicapped to a degree by having learned to play with his right hand, despite being left handed. “That’s a real limit, one that caused me a lot of grief when I was working with Jack McDuff and realizing I wasn’t following in George Benson’s footsteps. I couldn’t be a straight-ahead jazz contender if you held a gun to my head.”

Yet that same limitation has somehow caused Ribot to approach the guitar almost like a pianist. Multiple melodies wove around each other, as he sounded the low, middle, and high strings nearly independently, creating stunning counterpoint and chordal accompaniments.

At times, you’d hear echoes of other projects he’s led. After one far-ranging flurry of improvisation, he noted that parts of it referenced Marc Ribot Plays Solo Guitar Works of Frantz Casseus, a 1993 album of solo guitar works written by the Haitian-American composer. Other portions evoked his work with Los Cubanos Postizos, comprised of Cuban music, or other eclectic world music sources, including echoes of Bahamian folk singer Joseph Spence.

Other portions were more closely related to John Cage’s music for cacti or other such “outside of the box” works, as when he simply drummed on the guitar body or frailed the fret board with rhythmic abandon. The audience remained galvanized, The Green Room being a perfect venue for those who show up to listen deeply.

Memphis seemed to creep into the journey more directly as well, including bluesy quotes (a snatch of “Blue Monk”?) that would have felt at home on Beale Street, or passages that alluded to standards like “Come Rain or Come Shine.” But Memphis also cropped up in the few sparse comments he made between performances. “Thank you,” he said. “I’m very glad to be back in Memphis. This very room was the last gig I did before the shutdown almost two years ago. So I’m glad to be here. In fact, I’m glad to be anywhere.” Judging from the roaring applause that brought him out for an encore, Memphis music fans were glad as well.

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Frog Squad Gives Satie a Jumpstart

Frog Squad plays Satie at The Green Room (Credit: Alex Greene)

Frog Squad has been turning heads for a few years now, especially among free jazz aficionados. But unlike, say, Dopolarians or other strictly “free” combos based solely on improvisation, Frog Squad has a secret weapon: composition. Memphis Flyer readers know of Frog Squad founder David Collins’ compositions from our feature from this March, focused on his album Memphis, painstakingly scored for quintet. But fewer know that his gift for jazz ensemble scoring overlaps with his Frog Squad work.

Yet that was abundantly clear last night, when Frog Squad took to the stage in The Green Room at Crosstown Arts. And, ironically, Collins’ talent for arranging was brought to light not through his own compositions, but through his interpretations of the work of Erik Satie.

It was intriguing from the start: the work of one of classical music’s most minimalist composers re-imagined by an eight-piece free jazz ensemble. But this wasn’t just any ensemble. The group featured Hope Clayburn on alto saxophone and flute, Franko Coleman on tenor sax and flute, Aaron Phillips on baritone sax and bass flute, Cedric Taylor on keyboards, Khari Wynn on bass, Jon Harrison on drums, and Collins on guitar, with occasional group member Chad Fowler joining on saxello, C Melody sax, alto sax, and flute. This is a heavy band under any circumstances, but especially so when guided by Collins’ arrangements and one of the greatest composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The final sound achieved by the group revealed just how versatile and open to improvisation Satie’s music is. Collins’ approach was to transpose pieces most often known as piano works to full band voicings, using the four horn players sometimes as an integrated unit, sometimes as individual soloists. And solo they did, with great passion and abandon. Fowler and Clayburn especially made use of the full range of their reed instruments’ possibilities for honks, shrieks, and wails, then reined themselves in on a dime to return to the horn section’s arrangements. Meanwhile, the guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums held down funk/jazz grooves the likes of which have never been applied to Satie, one can be sure.

In all, eight pieces were featured: “Gnossiennes” 1-4, “Je Te Veux,” and “Gymnopédies” 1-3. Surely the highlight was Satie’s ethereal “First Gymnopédie,” with the delicate, waltzing chords played by the horn section, as Collins outlined the melody with echoing guitar.

The end result was beyond category. One might compare it to the finer instrumental work of Frank Zappa, or perhaps the wilder, latter day efforts by Gil Evans, but ultimately it was its own sound. There were even lighthearted moments, as when the horn section’s oom-pah-pah dynamics were amplified by all the players doing knee bends in time to their parts. And an intriguing bit of futurism was added by effects pedals that Clayburn and Phillips played through, not to mention some fine synth renderings by Taylor.

The nearly-full Green Room audience was fully engaged, cheering loudly for each fresh take on Satie, then demanding an encore and rounding off the night with uproarious applause.

As the band packed their instruments, I asked Collins how long it had taken him to craft this approach to Satie. “For about a month and a half, that was all I thought about,” he said, as he described driving, walking, or eating with Satie’s music looping through his head. Then there was one full band rehearsal, a smattering of play-throughs with the rhythm section, and a recent ‘incognito’ gig at B-Side Memphis, also known as “a rehearsal,” to quote saxophonist Chad Fowler.

“We recorded the B-Side show, and for tonight we have both the audio and video,” said Collins. “Soon I’ll be taking the best tracks from both shows and making an album out of it.”

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Misterioso Africano: Khari Wynn Discusses Sun Ra’s Influence on His Music

Khari Wynn, aka Misterioso Africano

Khari Wynn is a bit of a globetrotter, or at least he was before the coronavirus brought us all back home. So perhaps it’s not surprising that he’s not a regular presence on the live scene here. By his reckoning, he’s been to at least 20 countries in as many years, and has played around 2,000 shows in that time. That’s because he’s been working as the guitarist, and more recently the musical director, for the group Public Enemy. But that’s another story.

Here in Memphis, Wynn, son of erstwhile Commercial Appeal jazz and pop music critic Ron Wynn, creates music that is very different from Public Enemy’s. In these solo projects, often featuring some of the city’s finest players in supporting roles, Wynn takes a jazzier turn, sometimes with cosmic musings woven into the dense musical compositions. All of them feature Wynn’s own virtuoso guitar playing, as well as being his original compositions, which display the keen musical instincts that won him recognition as one of Crosstown Arts’ resident musicians earlier this year. I spoke with Wynn recently about this solo work and the diverse influences that have informed his music. 

Khari Wynn, aka Misterioso Africano

Memphis Flyer: You have a lot of musical tracks on YouTube under the name Energy Disciples. Tell me a bit about that.

Khari Wynn: Where I got Energy Disciples, the basic concept, was I was very interested in electronic music. I’m still interested in it; I think it’s the new frontier of music. But I wanted to combine electronic music with some of the acoustic instrumentation, and conceptual, more ‘out’ concepts of what somebody like Sun Ra was doing. Sun Ra is so original, because he would have some tunes that were straight big band charts, he would have other tunes that were almost like pop/show tunes, and then he had other stuff that was just absolutely, completely, all the way out. Cacophony/chaos kinda stuff, man. So if you could take that concept and somehow integrate it with electronic music, combined with live instrumentation, I thought that would be an original concept. So that’s what I attempted with that group.

I heard it right from the get go. Like Sun Ra without the Fletcher Henderson.

Exactly. Re-imagined with the influences of the 1980s and ’90s vs. the 1930s and ’40s.

Is it an actual band you assembled?

That was more of a studio project. I have another project that I did after that. Energy Disciples was purely a studio thing that never did anything live. I have another group now called the New Saturn Collective. And we did some live gigs. That’s the live interpretation of the Energy Disciples. Before Energy Disciples, I had a group called Solstice, and and we played around Midtown in the early 2000s. That was way more of a live, jazz/rock sound. Kinda like that late ’60s, early ’70s mix. Rock, but with extended solos but not all the way jazz either. Kinda like Colosseum. The first John McLaughlin record, Devotion, that type of vibe.

Misterioso Africano: Khari Wynn Discusses Sun Ra’s Influence on His Music (2)


There’s even a little Frank Zappa in there.

Definitely. Exactly. The pioneering late ’60s, early ’70s, before fusion got a little corny. It started to get corny in the mid-70s. But it was still real dangerous in the late ’60s early ’70s. Solstice was that kinda thing. But at that time I started going out on the road more with Public Enemy, so I couldn’t really play out. It’s hard in Memphis, to get gigs with stuff like that. It still is. It’s really hard to get gigs like that anywhere, but especially in Memphis. Even on the Midtown scene, it was hard.

So I disbanded that and did Energy Disciples purely as a studio thing. And I would bring in other musicians. And I did about four CDs of that. So then I thought, it may be cool to attempt stuff live again, so that’s when I did the New Saturn Collective. Almost as a combination of Solstice and Energy Disciples. Where it had some of the live aspect of Solstice and then some of the spacier concepts of Energy Disciples.

Is New Saturn Collective a set group of people, or a rotating cast?

It’s a rotating cast. Now I’m working on this other concept, so I’m starting to rotate the players. On each New Saturn Collective album it was a new cast. I like to bring in different players. I composed all the music. But different players give it a different interpretation, so it always takes you a different place. Each player puts their individual personality onto the thing so it’s good to keep it fresh.

I’ve also got this improv project that’s called Misterioso Africano, and it’s pure improvisation, nothing worked out. Sometimes we get into the avant-garde noise thing, sometimes we just groove. 

Misterioso Africano · The New Time of Celebration (africano inaugural departure transmission)

Misterioso Africano: Khari Wynn Discusses Sun Ra’s Influence on His Music

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Dopolarians: Free-Jazz Collaborators With a Southern Sound

Dopolarians, while not exactly a household name, are quietly becoming a widely celebrated group in jazz circles. The record they released last fall has been lauded in the pages of Pitchfork, Offbeat, and Rolling Stone. But what’s rarely mentioned in all of this press is that the group has its roots in Memphis’ free-jazz scene of 20 years ago — and a friendship that has endured since those days. Which is not to say that Garden Party, the group’s debut on Mahakala Music, is a Memphis record — the group’s members are too far-flung for that claim. But it is certainly a Southern record, and that’s a unique claim in the free-jazz universe. That it is indeed free jazz should come as no surprise, as the group brings together several luminaries from that world, most notably drummer Alvin Fielder, who played with the likes of Sun Ra and others, when free jazz was a markedly revolutionary musical statement.

Other players include tenor saxophonist Kidd Jordan and bassist William Parker and relative spring chickens Chad Fowler (alto saxophone), Chris Parker (piano), and singer Kelley Hurt. It’s those last three who make the group’s show at Crosstown Arts’ Green Room this Friday a return.

Marc Pegan

Dopolarians

“Chris and I used to live in a house together on Meda in Cooper-Young,” Fowler tells me. “We had a bunch of free sessions — including a couple sessions with [late free-jazz pioneer] Frank Lowe when he would come to town. It wasn’t too long before Chris was touring with him. That connection actually led to Chris meeting William Parker, Alvin, and Kidd and all those people.”

This was some two decades ago, when there was a surprising amount of free-jazz improvisation going on here. “I actually studied with [saxophonist] George Cartwright a bit,” Fowler recalls. “He did a piece for big band, and I was part of that. [Guitarist] Jim Duckworth was also a big influence. We played Sonny Sharrock and that kinda stuff in a group called The Jim Spake Action Figures. And the drummer Samurai Celestial, who was once with the Sun Ra Arkestra, was around Memphis quite a bit back then.”

Ultimately, Fowler introduced Chris Parker to Hurt. The two eventually married and settled in Little Rock. When Fowler moved to Lake Desoto, Arkansas, in recent years, after many peregrinations, the three reconnected. “Initially it was Chris who had the brainchild of the Dopolarians,” says Fowler. “It started with a project we did in Arkansas to commemorate the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School. Chris and his wife, Kelley Hurt, who’s from Memphis, wrote the No Tears Suite for that. Chris called me and [trumpeter] Marc Franklin. We also ended up getting Brian Blade, who is one of the best drummers of his generation. And that made us realize, ‘We can play with great players.’

“So we figured, let’s work with the people who we’d love to work with. And also make it still be really Southern. There’s this frustrating thing, where it’s assumed you have to be in New York or Chicago or San Francisco to do avant-garde jazz music. But if you look at the history of the music, it almost all started in the South, whether it’s Ornette Coleman or Pharoah Sanders or Sun Ra. All these people [in Dopolarians] were born and grew up in the South, other than William Parker. And we recorded it in New Orleans. A lot of it was fully improvised music, but it feels like the blues in a way that a lot of avant-garde music doesn’t. It feels soulful. Some of these people are really into the Hi Rhythm Section and Stax music.”

While Friday’s show will be something of a homecoming, Fowler says it will also serve as a memorial to Fielder, the de facto leader of the group, who passed away just over a year ago. “The new drummer is Chad Anderson — a protégé and a great friend of Alvin’s for many years. And Kidd Jordan’s doctor just told him he can’t travel. So we have the great Douglas Ewart coming down. Everyone in this group is somehow connected through these weird threads.”