SEBADOHS AND DON’TS: Jason Loewenstein just put out a solo record on Sub Pop, and there’s a new Folk Implosion album in the works, so Sebadoh fans know they have a bit of waiting to do — if, indeed, the band ever reconvene. In the meantime, Lou Barlow has been emitting a steady stream of new and archival material via the Web (see his www.loobiecore.com for the MP3s), and he’s embarking on what’s being billed as a solo tour. He’s promising to bring the full songbook with him — Sebadoh, Sentridoh, Folk Implosion — and we recommend showing up early, since the openers are Alaska!, the duo who’ve been filling in as Barlow’s live-and-in-the-studio backing band for Folk Implosion gigs since John Davis quit. The tour hits the Middle East, 480 Mass Ave in Central Square, on Halloween night, October 31. It’s 18-plus and $10. Call (617) 864-EAST.
THE DEVIL AND NICK TOSCHES: The critic, biographer, scholar, and novelist Nick Tosches (The Devil and Sonny Liston; Hellfire: The Jerry Lee Lewis Story; Unsung Heroes of Rock and Roll; Trinities) comes to town September 19 to read from a new novel, In the Hand of Dante, which ties together several of the author’s obsessions. It involves an author by the name of Nick Tosches who stumbles upon the priceless treasure of a manuscript of the Comedia written in Dante’s own hand, the mob boss who gets it for him (a character reprised from Tosches’s novel Cut Numbers), and the author’s attempt to authenticate the work. From there, In the Hand of Dante develops into a beast: part memoir, part Dante scholarship, part hard-boiled crime story, and part open-ended screed — a book about Dante’s epic that’s also an attempt to re-create its essence in a modern context. Tosches reads September 19 at the First Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street in Harvard Square; for tickets and info call WordsWorth at (617) 354-5201.
NEXT WEEKEND:
Mark Harvey and Aardvark
The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra, which begins its 30th-anniversary season with a show next weekend at the Regattabar, represents everything that’s good about the Boston jazz scene. Its broad, multifarious, multi-generational constituency has included classical chamber brass players, avant-gardists, and traditionalists. Its repertoire includes rarely played pieces by Ellington, tributes to jazz heroes like Don Cherry, and pieces that draw on the jazz tradition as well as Christian liturgy — even Christmas carols — for inspiration and formal models. And it often plays for charity. As an ensemble, it’s an ideal musical citizen, and a reflection of its leader and principal composer, Mark Harvey.
In a way, Harvey is Boston’s own jazz priest. His model and mentor was John Garcia Gensel, who was minister to the jazz community in New York when Harvey began his career in Boston. Gensel (who died in 1998) used music as a form of community service by bringing jazz into churches and putting it at the service of charitable causes. Harvey, who came to Boston from upstate New York to study at the BU School of Theology in 1968, is a United Methodist minister. He began at Old West Church, then moved on to Emmanuel Church (home of Craig Smith and Emmanuel Music), and now operates his "ministry in jazz" in association with the Harvard-Epworth Church.
Over the years, Harvey was a prime mover behind the Jazz Coalition, a non-profit organization of jazz fans and musicians that thrived in the ’70s and early ’80s, inviting musicians (like Cherry) who didn’t ordinarily get a chance to play in Boston’s clubs to perform in a different atmosphere — sometimes on Newbury Street at Emmanuel Church or the Church of the Covenant. Harvey also spearheaded the organization’s educational community-outreach programs. These days, he teaches music at MIT.
Harvey is an engaging trumpet player whose style draws a lot from the likes of Cherry and Lester Bowie, with vocal-like inflections and phrasings. As for Aardvark, he says, "The simplest way to think about it is that it’s a large jazz orchestra but with the spirit of a small improvising group, so there’s a lot of room in what we do for individual and small-group things to just happen. And that’s very different from what most people think of as a big band." Despite all those things that "just happen," Harvey likes to organize the pieces in long, evolving narrative structures, and the particular beauty of Aardvark is in the way all that freedom — the solos and chattering duets, brass choruses and free group romps — is contained in those larger structures.
Harvey’s writing was inspired — "conceptually and spiritually" if not technically — by New England Conservatory profs George Russell and the late Jaki Byard. About 15 years ago, Byard took one Aardvark commission and created a performance that inspired Harvey to create pieces spontaneously on stage — mixing and matching passages of music by signaling with cue cards. "Sometimes we will go literally completely off the page, and [after Byard] I began to write more and more of my music that has sections incorporated where things can go in any number of directions." Thus the juxtapositions of free and written passages that conjure Harvey heroes like Ellington, Ives, Mingus, and Sun Ra.
And what about next weekend’s show at the Regattabar? "We’ll be doing New Moon Rising, which is part of my commemoration of September 11, which we premiered a year ago at the Equinox Festival — literally just a week after that had happened — and a couple of pieces from Ellington’s ballet suite The River, which is very seldom done. And we’re going to do a piece called Cantata Tubulidentata — it’s from the Latin word for aardvark, so it’s the song of the aardvark, but it’s a little four-movement cantata that I wrote and it has to be heard to be believed."
The Aardvark Jazz Orchestra play next Saturday, September 7, at the Regattabar, in the Charles Hotel, 1 Bennett Street in Harvard Square. Call (617) 876-7777.
BY JON GARELICK
