An arts exchange program sent tubist Marc Unternahrer from Luzern, Switzerland, to Chicago in 2002. There he hooked up with cornetist Josh Berman, tenor saxophonist Keefe Jackson and drummer Frank Rosaly. The Swiss presence notwithstanding, this band’s spare, plainspoken style of free improvisation owes something, however distantly, to Chicago’s AACM. Horns wheeze and sigh. Harmony happens. The band delivers phrases delicately as if laying them out side by side in a display case; and when they aren’t layering short phrases over one another, they’re all being quiet. All four members seldom play at the same time and much of the foreground is ceded to front line hornmen Jackson and Berman. Jackson drops the poker face and blows hard on the longest, best tune, “Take the Place,” but the real charmers of this session reside in the rhythm section. Unternahrer is remarkably agile on the tuba and-free improv be damned-he’s as likely to run stout counterpoint as he is to dog Berman with an upper-register flutter. All the while, Rosaly builds little cities of rhythm around his bandmates’ earnest phrases.
Originally PublishedRelated Posts
Sonny Terry/Brownie McGhee: Backwater Blues
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Jonathan Butler: The Simple Life
Jonathan Butler’s optimistic music belies a dirt-poor childhood growing up in a South Africa segregated by apartheid. Live in South Africa, a new CD and DVD package, presents a sense of the resulting inner turmoil, mixed with dogged resolve, that paved the way to his status as an icon in his country and successful musician outside of it. Looking back, the 46-year-old Butler says today, the driving forces that led to his overcoming apartheid-the formal policy of racial separation and economic discrimination finally dismantled in 1993-were family, faith and abundant talent.
“When we were kids, our parents never talked about the ANC [African National Congress] or Nelson Mandela,” he says. Butler was raised as the youngest child in a large family. They lived in a house patched together by corrugated tin and cardboard, in the “coloreds only” township of Athlone near Cape Town. “They never talked about struggles so we never knew what was happening.”
Start Your Free Trial to Continue Reading
Become a JazzTimes member to explore our complete archive of interviews, profiles, columns, and reviews written by music’s best journalists and critics.
Harry Connick, Jr.: Direct Hits
Two decades after his commercial breakthrough, Harry Connick Jr. taps legendary producer Clive Davis for an album of crooner roots and beloved tunes
Scott LaFaro
Previously unavailable recordings and a new bio illuminate the legend of bassist Scott LaFaro