The Hanah Jon Taylor Artet, a quartet including several adventurous Chicago-based musicians, will headline an evening of free/avant-garde jazz on Saturday, August 8th, at the beautiful Grand Hall of Capitol Lakes, 333 West Main Street, in Downtown Madison. Read Kevin Lynch’s preview essay about this concert below.

The Artet features players associated with the world-renowned Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) including Taylor on saxophone and flute, Kirk Brown on piano, Yosef Ben Israel on bass, and drummer Vincent Davis.

Sponsored by the Madison Music Collective, the “Summer Music Summit” begins at 7:00 PM with a set by the Tom Hamer – Tom Lachmund Duo, followed around 8:00 PM by the JoAnne Pow!ers Quartet. The Taylor Artet’s set will begin around 9:15 PM.

Tickets will be available at the door, at $12.00 for the general public and $10 for Collective members. Ample free parking is available in the ramp across the street from the concert hall.

For more information about the concert, call 513-3314. For more information about the Madison Music Collective, including a membership form, visit www.mmcmusic.org.

A Free Jazz Climb to a Summer Summit

by Kevin Lynch

As a former mountain climber, I am struck by the notion of “free jazz” in mid-summer, for the second of Madison Music Collective’s 2009 summer concert series, titled “Summer Music Summit.”

Many years ago, I almost killed myself by foolishly climbing “free” – with no ropes or equipment – in the loose-rock vertical cliffs of Door County’s Peninsula State Park. Alone, with dusk enveloping the cliff and my vision, I climbed uncertainly downward. Suddenly a dislodged rock smashed onto my head and knocked my glasses 25 feet below to what then seemed my destined death spot. Dazed, I hung by one hand, with only my wits and will to create a way to survive, which I did.

So the sense of derring-do and musically risky abandon of “free jazz” improvising, without the secure tethers of chord structures or melody, has a special resonance this summer, as mountains call me again. I know such improvisers impose a hardship on themselves; they must constantly make decisions that determine the fate of a still unknown outcome. They often seem on the edge of failure, the cusp of chaos. They face the precipitous responsibility of true freedom.

“It’s all about communication among the players,” says the leader of the JoAnne Pow!ers Quartet, which performs tonight. “You have to be listening and reacting. If someone plays something staccato, for example, you can react in one way or another but you can’t miss it.” Otherwise you drop the ball, and the music can lose its impact or tenuous thread of continuity and developing form. Pow!ers is one of the second generation of free improvisers, and the organizer of tonight’s Summit concert.

Free jazz history goes back to the late 1950s, with pioneers like Lennie Tristano, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. The latter two remain amazingly vital and uncompromising today, and Coleman’s recent Pulitzer Prize signifies the long, hard climb to a certain kind of respect, which some free music improvisers – especially defiant younger ones – seem to care about to only varying degrees. Like the first generation, the new one doesn’t need any American Bandstand-style rating for “a beat you can dance to.” There are other important and essential purposes for their music which, by the way, most often does employ compositional elements and points of departure, atypical though they may be.

In his superb new book “Miles, Ornette, Cecil: Jazz Beyond Jazz,” Howard Mandel writes of the jazz avant-garde, observing that the music may seem “an exotic import arriving from a mythologized distance, or – for those who embrace it most fervently – be treated as a commonplace, familiar, intimate and sacred gesture like a daily prayer, a philosophy of life or a way of being.”

Pow!ers’ term for her dedication to this art form is “Fire Worship.” That’s the title of the weekly music program she hosts on WORT radio on Tuesday afternoons, which has become arguably the most readily-available local means to experience this music as well as Pow!ers’ own aesthetic for the challenging sonics and liberating feelings the music summons. Her program often reaches the outer limits on the musical landscape, but also provides some resonant cultural guideposts. She recently played Miles Davis’ 20-minute slow-burn adulation of “Guinevere,” the mythical blue-eyed damsel conjured from hippie folk rocker David Crosby’s peyote-fueled imagination.

Earlier in July, Pow!ers seemed to toy with the emotional pulse of mourning in America by promising on the air to “play some Michael Jackson,” only to deliver Michael Gregory Jackson, a terribly neglected guitarist with an utterly personal style of lyrical cubism. I have read virtually nothing about Jackson in the music press since my 1977 rave review of his debut album “Clarity” in Coda, the Canadian jazz and improvised music magazine. And I’d never heard him on the air before, except on my own radio show in Milwaukee in the 1980s. If only the brilliant guitarist Michael – a black man about the same age as the begloved Michael – had received a smidgen of the other’s attention and financing.

Most “fire worshipers” can make similar testimonies of neglected heroes but then, rather than bemoan, deejay Pow!ers delivered another twist. She allayed the public’s grief with black soul rather than sentiment, playing drummer Idris Muhammad’s “Power of Soul,” among the most gratifyingly gutsy and funky jazz romps ever recorded.

I’m suggesting the personality behind this free music to help the uninitiated understand the humanity in these musicians, in these seemingly quixotic and eccentric courters of disaster. Listen closely, and free improv can be a dramatic, suspenseful and surprisingly moving experience. You catch the trade-offs, the stunning hook-ups of bright ideas, the swerves that nearly crash and burn, and the sudden blooming of beautiful collusions of expression. Such musicians build, in time, a new living form, perhaps guiding themselves and their audiences up to the vista of a previously invisible mountain that in its wellsprings contains, as Thomas Mann’s magic mountain did, all the frailties and diseases and perseverance and genius of humanity.

Pow!ers’ own playing on saxes and bass clarinet recalls the gospel-tinged incantations of Albert Ayler and late-period John Coltrane, and the spiritually resonant work of the sax giant’s wife, pianist Alice Coltrane. Pow!ers’ sense of tone, texture and form derive from various sources including advanced European innovators like Peter Brotzmann and Asian wind instrumentalists. She’s played with many creative musicians in the Midwest and West Coast, including virtuoso New York percussionist Tatsuo Nakatani and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm. As Pow!ers admits, “You often don’t know where the music is going.” That’s not the same as saying that these musicians don’t know what they are doing. Indeed, any true explorer doesn’t know exactly where she is going.

Tonight, Pow!ers’ evolving musical sense will have like-minded seekers including two stars on Chicago’s thriving free-improv music scene, bassist Jennifer Pendur and fast-rising trumpeter Jaimie Branch, along with Madison-based drummer Michael Brenneis. Pendur has worked extensively with Pow!ers, recently at a concert with poet-pianist Russell Thorne at the Escape Java Joint’s new improv music series. Branch’s avant-rock and improv credits include a fistful of groups, notably Sherpa (named for the heroic Tibetan mountain guides) and Lonberg-Holm’s Lightbox Orchestra, and as a sidewoman for Delmark Records. The versatile Brenneis, has provided the percussive engine for the straight-ahead New Breed Quintet as well as Tomato Box, an avant quartet with reed master Anders Svanoe, and the Active Percussion Duo with Geoff Brady’s tuned percussion.

Pow!ers quartet for tonight’s concert is 75% female. Women remain sadly underrepresented in this and virtually all jazz forms, which prompts one to wonder if jazz still harbors a covert macho or chauvinist strain. Regardless, Pow!ers, Pendur and Branch embrace the courage to proceed and succeed without any chord changes to hang onto, just as women are among the most skillful mountaineers I have known.

The headline group for MMC’s Summer Music Summit is the Hanah Jon Taylor Artet, led by arguably the preeminent saxophonist and flutist in Madison jazz and a leading catalyst, organizer and educator in inter-arts programming. Taylor was founder and director of The Madison Center for the Creative and Cultural Arts, which has offered concerts and multi-arts classes and is again presenting its Summer Culture Coach program this year at various locations around Greater Madison. Taylor also directs Freedom Fest, which in recent years presented such world-class performers as Archie Shepp, Sonny Fortune, Richard Davis, Cecil McBee, Edward Wilkerson, acclaimed Chicago singer Dee Alexander, and Corey Wilkes and Roscoe Mitchell of the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Taylor moved to Madison years ago from Chicago and has been a long-time member of the influential Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM). He has performed worldwide with musicians ranging from Woodstock-famous singer-songwriter Richie Havens to Nina Simone, Miles Davis, and many of the AACM’s leading lights. Taylor has a substantial reputation in Europe, Asia and the Americas. For tonight’s concert, his Artet will include pianist Kirk Brown, Chicago-based percussionist Vincent Davis whose many performance credits include drumming for Roscoe Mitchell and the hot AACM flute star Nicole Mitchell, and bassist Yosef Ben Israel,who’s played with Kahil El'Zabar's Ritual Trio and Ernest Dawkins' New Horizons Ensemble.

Rounding out MMC’s Summer Music Summit is the Tom Hamer-Tom Lachmund Duo, a group that matches two inventive Madison fixtures. Drummer Hamer has worked with various rock and jazz-oriented units, notably the poetry/music collective Dangerous Odds and Primordial Soup, a trio with saxophonist-bass clarinetist Lachmund and the late bassist and “Crazeology” WORT radio program host “Uncle Larry” Hancock. The beloved Larry also played with Lachmund in the experimental new music band, the Barbaric Yawps.

Kevin Lynch is a Madison-based Pulitzer-nominated writer who has covered jazz and the arts for over 30 years for many publications, including Down Beat, The Village Voice, Coda, and Wisconsin’s leading newspapers. He is the author of the forthcoming book "Voices in the River: The Jazz Message to Democracy.”