*Jacob Schwartzberg is featured in The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle.
*Rob Scheps created a fundraiser connected to a recording session in Kansas City.
Confirmation: Weekly News and Notes
Original image by Plastic Sax.
Concert Review: The Dave Scott Quartet and Arnold Young and the RoughTet at Westport Coffee House
Original image by Plastic Sax. From left to right: John Nichols, Jacob Schwartzberg, Arnold Young (obscured), Dave Scott, Quin Wallace and Gary Cardile.
A concert at Westport Coffee House on Sunday, July 10, felt consequential even though fewer than two dozen people paid the $10 cover charge. A quartet led by trumpeter Dave Scott and Arnold Young’s RoughTet shared the bill in a rare confluence of exceptional homegrown talent.
Scott, a New York based trumpeter raised in the Kansas City area, and the Kansas City drummer Young made waves in the region’s jazz scene alongside their eminent peer Pat Metheny several decades ago. On Sunday, the bandleaders were joined by representatives of several generations of Kansas City jazz musicians. Each participant responded to the momentous summit with inspired playing.
A rambunctious couple sitting near the bandstand hooted and hollered throughout Young’s freewheeling 45-minute opening set. They had the right idea. Assisted by his longtime compatriot John Nichols on bass and Gary Cardile on percussion, the veteran drummer acted as an irreverent version of Art Blakey as he mentored the youthful tandem of saxophonist Jacob Schwartzberg and trumpeter Quin Wallace.
Renditions of selections from their new album Fear Is the Mind Killer were gloriously raucous. Scott sat in with the RoughTet before playing a 70-minute set with the New York based Michael Eaton (the saxophonist is from nearby Liberty), bassist Jeff Harshbarger and drummer Marty Morrison.
Eaton took several Coltrane-esque solos and a few of Scott’s distinctive statements resembled variations on “Flight of the Bumblebee.” Yet the ensemble mostly shifted between the proto-harmolodics of early Ornette Coleman, ominous post-bop and joyful Kansas City swing. Such transcendent displays of left-of-center artistic excellence in the face of public indifference are a hallmark of Kansas City’s jazz scene.
Album Review: Arnold Young and the RoughTet- Fear Is the Mind Killer
Arnold Young has dedicated much of the past fifty years to giving the straight-laced component of Kansas City’s jazz community the hot foot. In a deliciously ironic development, the trickster has created a leading contender for the strongest locally released album of 2022.
Fear Is the Mind Killer, the drummer’s powerhouse recording with his band the RoughTet, is suffused with the rebellious spirit of Kansas City icon Charlie Parker and his fellow bebop revolutionaries Dizzy Gillespie, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach. It’s an ecstatic jazz riot.
In spite of its fealty to the venerated sounds of the 1940s, Fear Is the Mind Killer sounds subversive in present-day Kansas City. Young and his collaborators apply a raucous devil-may-care approach to improvised music. And they embrace anarchic noise on tracks including the aptly titled “For Anthony Braxton.”
Young began providing a prominent alternative to Kansas City’s jazz establishment with his band Advertisement for a Dream in the early 1970s. His status as a perennial outsider has intensified Young’s artistic commitment but may also be partly responsible for his indifference to marketing.
Young can’t be bothered with prosaic matters such as websites, press releases and distribution. Fear Is the Mind Killer may or may not feature Jacob Schwartzberg, Quin Wallace and John Nichols.* Whoever they are, his co-conspirators abet Young’s lifelong commitment to getting into the right kind of trouble.
*Young has since confirmed that the saxophonist, trumpeter and bassist are featured on the album. Saxophonist Jack "Blackie" Blackett plays on one track.