Music Blogs

Jazz and the Church of Main Street: In the hands of guitarists Bill Frisell and Pat Metheny, jazz often avoids inner city cliches for a dose of bucolic clear skies wonderment. Frisell has recorded a series of albums that celebrate the joys of main street Americana, all be it a weird small town America where little girls twirling hula hoops morph into monsters at midnight. Metheny has taken an even more pastoral and rustic direction, his acoustic guitar-driven reveries the sonic equivalent of flying over the Missouri plains in a hot air balloon. Drummer Matt Wilson is another high plains drifter; all of these artists able to conjure airy terrain from jazz's dark chords and eruptive rhythms. Add Georgia based Will Scruggs and his Jazz Fellowship to that short list.

A vintage Conn and Selmer saxophone player, Scruggs graduated from Emory University with highest honors in jazz performance. Scruggs and his Fellowship kick the booty from the barnyard on Bluebari Jam. A freewheeling quartet of saxophones, piano, bass, drums and the occasional gleeful children's choir, Scruggs's Fellowship plays jazz, but it's more like square dance entertainment. These guys don't take themselves too seriously, as noted in the garrulous farts and armpit jokes of the title track. Like a New Orleans street band, the Fellowship is intent on partying their way all down the block--drinks, shimmies and shakes in tow. "Big B" hits a meditative Latin note, "Swingin' To The Left" rubs the scab raw with a walking bass line so hot it will knock off your shoes, "Sassafras" questions authority with quizzical baritone banter and an uptempo, high flying pulse.

Jazz needs more of these middle American gurus, musicians who can spread the word, win over the kids, and re-integrate the music into the mainstream. With interest in jazz at an all time low in the U.S., thank God for small favors, and Will Scruggs's Jazz Fellowship.

"Bluebari Jam"

Inside out, outside in, with Albert Ayler: Where Will Scruggs aims for compact jazz statements anyone can love, tenor titan Albert Ayler made music free of borders, free of predetermined directions. The original Osmosis release, The Hilversum Session, was highly collectible after its original 1980 release; it now receives full CD remastering and liner notes by esteemed free jazz historian, Russ Musto, courtesy ESP Disk, its compatible final home.

Recorded in front of a small audience in the Netherlands in 1964, The Hilversum Session was the result of months of touring by Ayler's Quartet of Don Cherry (trumpet), Gary Peacock (bass) and Sunny Murray (drums). "Angels" is a seven minute "free jazz" epic, the saxophonist issuing declarative eruptions that thrill with shimmering wilderness appeal. This was a fierce improvisational outfit that could make might music from anything: the rustle of the wind (check Murray's drumming), a cathartic, frigid blast of notes, a disused rhythm shard then pounced upon and explored.

This music may fall under the "free jazz" rubric, but its logic, melodic persistence and cohesiveness is anything but direction-less. This band mastered the fine art of listening, chasing down separate threads to create a single-headed organism. "Angels" wails, shakes, vibrates and soars, but it's no less free than planes in waiting at the local airport. Peacock and Murray are particularly larger than life, draping beautiful sheets of rhythm and color around Ayler and Cherry's giraffe-delicate maneuvers.

"Angels"