Kirkwood Ballers Round 2

This time took Jim with me. What a trip!

For his first round he was drawn to collaborate with Ed Hall and one other (whose name escapes me) - him scatting and vocalizing galore while Ed accompanied with a weird metal thing and the other guy (sorry, other guy, maybe someday I'll know your name) on a monster of a synthesizer. They sounded AWESOME. He really got into the whole collective space of the collaborative experience (Jim, that is) and really became part of the ensemble. He has a great gift for timing and theatre, and in this instance it worked excellently.

Then, a second group decided to invite him up to further collaborate. This time Spirit moved him to channel a monologue, leading inevitably to a discourse on Depleted Uranium. The ensemble thus became a sound accompaniment to an excellently delivered Jimbo rant - entirely different in character from his first experience on stage. Better? Worse? Whose to say? Certainly I expect that Aaron with his ceramic and kitchen percussive tools didn't expect that to be the effect at all - but that is the nature of collaborative noise-making. Certainly in a sense I was a bit dissappointed - I was enjoying seeing him as part of an ensemble in that other way.

Then came Jim's solo turn on stage.

He took over, without missing a beat - mid-sentence, in fact - from the previous rant which had been interrupted by the end of the previous session's 15 minutes. Once again, dizzying, potent, angry, anguished cries emerging from a man who feels too personally the woes and terrors of the world, and seeks to, at every opportunity, give voice to these sentiments and seek, thus, a measure of salvation. He didn't even need the microphone, for God's sake!!

I'm sure it seems entirely weird and 'out there' to the 7 or 8 people there, but if you ask me, there's some weird power there. Something entirely different, edgy, and jarring in what he does. Though he does say some probably unwise things ("no audience"? is that a fair accusation in a general sense for that space? It certainly is at least a little off-putting of not globally inaccurate) his delivery is so perfect - even with no rehearsal - that who can be anything but riveted by it all? I sure was.

He mentioned something about a 'recent article' and it can be found here.

For my part, I got to sing and whatnot, with Tom again and then with a group. It was fun, as always - though once again I quickly abandoned the notion of following the music score. But Tom's songs are always fun - the lyrical perambulations of his mind come through well in the lyrics, and, especially in the last set, the way he droned the lyrics to the beat of what the others' were doing was hypnotizing. The last set with Tom was far superior.

The other solos - two on synthesizer - were, like last week, total roller coasters of the mind. The music took you to strange places - weird, outer space, violent journeying with the synths, and with Aaron and his collaborators' (in their set without Jim) a deeply Eastern soundscape provided a ready path to meditation and chakra explosion.

Who knows - we might go back - if Eyedrum will have us. Certainly I'd like to give the ole thing a try again - Jim might be sworn off improv for a while - though I've half a mind to drag him down to the Java Monkey open mic one of these Sundays. That would be totally insane!!!! I can't even wait.