22 September 2006

-POWERHOUSE AND V5

Though out at night catching shows, I was home during the day composing and rehearsing for upcoming gigs with POWERHOUSE SOUND and the VANDERMARK 5. POWERHOUSE got together on Tuesday the 12th to review material for our gig the next night at the Hideout. Things went well and it felt like it was time to start the work of collaging the pieces in concert, something I’ve been shooting for since the project first began in Oslo last August. Our first set at the Hideout was super strong, all pretty much straightforward pieces, very little use of the cut-up method. The second set faltered at times, the job of radically shifting space, conception, composition, and momentum as a band, without a chance to stop and regroup (almost the whole set was organized as one long suite) proved more difficult to undertake than I expected; you need to more than “know” the material, it has to be fully integrated into the thinking of the group so that the shift from point A to point X feels as natural as moving from A to B. This concert was one more step towards realizing the full aesthetic of the band, we get closer and closer as we head towards the studio recording in November.

The VANDERMARK 5 had a week’s worth of rehearsals before playing a full weekend at Elastic on the 15th and 16th of September. I brought in two more new pieces, “Any Given Number,” and “New Acrylic,” both of which proved to be extremely hard to put together. Maybe it’s knowing the group so well and feeling the need to push hard against what we’ve done before, I’m not sure, but what I thought would be straightforward material proved to be anything but. So I keep learning that while there’s so much to do, there’s also much not to do. The other guys were patient with the process of editing and reorganization and in the end we ended up with two more strong additions to the book. This puts the unrecorded list of compositions at six. I’d like to have two more prepared before the band heads to Europe in November, that way we’ll be able to perform them over the weeks on tour and be totally prepared to go into the studio to record when we return to Chicago in December.

The gig on Friday was difficult, the band had played only two concerts since March, the last one being in July, and from my standpoint the quintet felt stiff, playing the parts well but not opening up on the material as we should. The fact that we had spent most of our time learning the new pieces as opposed to running the old ones during our rehearsals probably didn’t help matters. And I don’t want to admit that the audience affects the way I play, but when nearly half of them simply stare at you when you finish a tune it’s pretty hard to feel good about what’s getting communicated from the stage. Thankfully Saturday felt like return to form, the band was ripping through the pieces (even the brand new compositions felt like they had been part of the book for months) and the audience was there in full force, listening and following the path of the music as it coursed through the night. Nice to leave town with that in my mind, I won’t play in Chicago again until the 8th of November- again with the VANDERMARK 5, for our cd release concert for “A DISCONTINUOUS LINE” in a double bill with Peter Brötzmann, Kent Kessler, and Fred Lonberg-Holm. Should be a nice night of light entertainment.

-Ken Vandermark, Oslo, 9/20/06.