what is jazz?

two concerts offer surprisingly different answers

It's been half a century since the term "jazz" could be applied with a degree of confidence to a wide range of improvised music. Over the intervening years bop, free, fusion and world-music influenced players have struck out on such individual musical journeys that treating them as part of some unified stylistic whole is fraught with esthetic peril. That disconnect between the blanket term "jazz" and the music it seeks to describe was brought into focus yet again last Friday during appearances by the furiously free improvisers John Butcher and Gerry Hemingway at the tiny Wendy Cooper Gallery and jazzfunk reedman Karl Denson's groove machine Tiny Universe at a jam-packed Barrymore Theatre.

U.K. saxophonist Butcher and American percussionist Hemingway both established their free-jazz bona fides long ago. As a soloist and a leader, Butcher has tested the sonic limits of the tenor and soprano sax, bringing tongue pops, metallic buzzes and breathy whispers together into a musical vocabulary that moves well beyond conventional Western concepts of the note and the scale. And at Wendy Cooper, he was the de facto leader of the duo.

But in many ways, Hemingway, a longtime sideman of free music's most daunting intellectual, Anthony Braxton, was the pair's musical nexus. Turning back and forth between a conventional trap kit and an electronically wired pad, the graying yet collegiate-looking drummer blended synthesized burbling and scratching with full-on battery work about as well as anyone could. The man obviously owes something to earlier free-jazz drummers like Sunny Murray and Milford Graves, but his very fruitful exploration of the electronic universe sets him apart from his contemporaries.

Over the course of two and a half sets, he provided consistent rhythmic interest. Even ensemble passages with Butcher that resembled the confluence of wind-blown saw grass and evanescent birdsong were impressively direct and forceful. An audience of about 50 people crammed the gallery to hear these two vanguard players travel to the outer limits of sound, but they deserved a hearing from many, many more.

Denson is a burly saxophonist/flutist with an ear for both classic soul-jazz and grooving funk, and he has obviously arrived on the jam-band scene. An audience of about 800 kids, some scruffy and dreadlocked, some looking like the fresh-faced soccer player next door, couldn't get enough of his electric septet's funky stuff. They danced as hard to Denson's big, honking covers of R&B-leaning tenor saxophonist Gene Ammons as they did to a wah-wah-guitar-soaked take on Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic."

In this crowd, "jazz" was synonymous with getting a groove on. That the solos were mostly canned and the interplay of the rhythm section predictably heavy-handed didn't seem to matter. As the dope-smoking kid in baggies and beads in front of me remarked about halfway through the group's funk-loving second set: "Dude, it's about dancing." The implication was that searching for something bigger than a beat or a lockjaw fusion solo is for squares. Too bad the kid hadn't caught a few minutes of Butcher and Hemingway; he would have been disabused of such a limited notion of jazz damn quick.

© ISTHMUS / Tom Laskin