June 14--Can experimental jazz be tuneful?
Can you tap your feet to it?
Can you hum it on the way home from the concert?
You could on Saturday night, when Chicagoan Michael Zerang the Blue Lights celebrated the release of their first album, the immensely appealing "Songs from the Big Book of Love."
If the recording is more accessible than listeners might have expected from well-known Chicago innovators such as Zerang and colleagues, the live performance at Constellation was still more alluring. Though certainly not for everyone's tastes, the music of percussionist Zerang the Blue Lights clearly has been designed to welcome listeners into the world of avant-garde jazz. It would be difficult to imagine a much more effective enticement.
For anyone who has followed Chicago's creative music scene over the past few decades, the personnel Zerang has convened for this project will be instantly recognizable. Cornetist Joshua Berman, bassist Kent Kessler and saxophonists Dave Rempis and Mars Williams each commands ample respect for unflinchingly inventive work in stylistically far-flung bands.
These fierce individualists, however, have wholly embraced Zerang's approach for the Blue Lights, crafting a music that bristles with dissonance in its solos but is very nearly euphonious in ensemble passages. Most of the pieces the band played during the first set were built on an easily perceived backbeats -- or at least a fairly steady pulse -- giving even casual listeners something to hang on to. Add to this songs that often conveyed catchy riffs and three-part horn writing of considerable tonal beauty, and you had the best of two worlds: fiery solo statements alternating with carefully crafted, melodically attractive passagework for the ensemble.
The musicians opened strongly with "Bright Lights Saucy Tights," from the new album, the muscularity of the venture apparent from the outset. Even skeptical listeners would have found it difficult to resist the silvery arabesques of Berman's cornet solo or the all-over-the-horn virtuosity of Rempis' alto saxophone breaks; the writing for those two horns plus Williams' tenor was a model of lucid counterpoint.
Rempis' tenor saxophone and Berman's cornet duetted exquisitely in a new work not on the album, the whimsically titled "How Does a Dancer Sit in a Chair?" To hear Rempis' rumbling low notes counterbalanced by Berman's stratospheric pitches -- both often playing at a hush -- was to behold sensitive improvisers listening acutely to each other. Williams soon entered the fray on soprano saxophone, heightening the drama with an avalanche of high notes, Rempis punctuating the proceedings with a relentless riff. The tension in this music just wouldn't quit.
Some of the most majestically beautiful work of the evening unfolded in "Come to the Palace of Love," from the new album. Kessler's bowed lines on bass and the horns' wide-open tones gave the piece a regal, fanfare-like quality. Before long, Rempis' murmuring alto, Zerang's gently rolling percussion and Kessler's softly stated bass lines showed the subtle side of the Blue Lights.
"The Third Pythia of Flin Flon," also from "Songs from the Book of Love," closed the first set with particularly clever writing. Rempis' baritone saxophone sounded magisterial here, its expansive themes punctuated with pithy asides from Berman's cornet and Williams' tenor. Later, all three horns spun contrapuntal passages that suggested baroque part-writing reconceived for the 21st century.
Granted, conservative listeners might have found some of these solos too freewheeling, while those with more daring tastes may have considered the music a bit too light or simplistic.
To these ears, however, Zerang the Blue Lights generally struck an elegant balance between these perspectives, without condescending to anyone.
Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@tribpub
