Thursday, the 11th, sees an additional entrant into the musical category that I called “breakbeat jazz” when I wrote about it last year. Grand Pianoramax—keyboardist Leo Tardin, drummer Adam Deitch, and sometimes spoken-word vocalist Celena Glenn—perform a minimal, futuristic combination of jazz and techno…and they will perform it Thursday at the Eighteenth Street Lounge (1212 18th Street NW), with DJ Spinna. It’ll be preceded by an in-store appearance at DJ Hut on P Street.

Here’s a video sample, recorded at WBGO radio in Newark:

While you’re indulging in the D.C. tradition of weather-related paranoia and stocking up on food, water and batteries, maybe you should considering grabbing some earplugs as well. On Saturday, Dub Trio, a heavy-hitting group on Mike Patton’s Ipecac label who mix chunky metal riffs with chilled-out dub, hit DC9. While these guys still have a ways to go before perfecting their formula, at the very least it’s a fascinating one, and as of now at least a seriously hard-rocking one. Hop over to their MySpace page for a listen.

Sunday, what better place to weather a storm (though I suppose it’ll be gone by then) than hanging out in the basement of an imposing university building? The monthly experimental madness that is Electric Possible is on this weekend at its usual location of room B120 in the basement of GW’s Phillips Hall (22nd & H Streets). This time around, the Nobu Stowe Duo (piano/drums), augmented by locals on cello and bass, get top billing. Stowe’s latest album was recorded at, and named after, Baltimore’s An Die Musik performance space, and is a thoughtful, restrained brand of free improvisation that mostly eschews the skronk and cacophony of most collective improv. Stowe’s own comparisons invoke more Keith Jarrett than, say, Cecil Taylor.

Obviously, Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails weren’t the first bands to give away their music for free on the Internet. Some savvy Googling will reveal blogs dedicated to finding bands and labels that give away music for free. In any case, if you’re into out-there jazz, here are a few, um, free free jazz downloads that are well worth your $0:

Bob Ostertag, who’s worked extensively with the likes of John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Fred Frith and so on, has long offered his out-of-print recordings for free download from his Web site. He’s now up to 15 albums downloadable for free. One is the hilarious and atypical Fear No Love, which is kind of a send-up of cheesy ’80s funk, but performed by legendary free improvisers and prominently featuring LGBTQ-empowering lyrics. A more “standard” free-jazz effort of note is the Say No More series, a bunch of fragmented improvs spliced together into chaotic wholes.

Speaking of funk, most of Steve Coleman’s incredibly groovy experimental jazz works are also available for free download from the man himself. The Tao of Mad Phat and Def Trance Beat are a couple good starting points. Like Ostertag, Coleman has written extensively about why he gives away his music for free—long before the likes of Radiohead started doing so.

Insubordinations calls itself “a netlabel for improvised music,” and has 27 full-length releases all available for free download under Creative Commons licenses. I haven’t actually explored most of this stuff, but one that I’ve dug lately is PHAT’s La Grande Peste, which is sort of like jazz filtered through doom metal. Sister label eDogm has 20 more releases across a wider spectrum that includes electroacoustic improvisation, ambient and drone.

Finally, bassist (and D.C. native) Reuben Radding went through a project last year he called 12 in 2007, in which he released a free recording every month in 2007. These all feature Radding with various collaborators, fully improvised; there’s a ton of material to wade through but it all has a pretty solid baseline of quality, as long as you like free improv (much of this is not “jazz” per se, at least in any sense that traditionalists would agree with).

I’m still working my way through much of this stuff, but if anyone has anything to add, I’m all ears.

“I’m a certified senior citizen/Got Florida on my mind/I won’t even mess/With checkers or chess/Just take me to the place where they bump ‘n’ grind….”

Though not characterized by the bump ‘n’ grind, Sunday’s 10 p.m. show at Blues Alley drew a rapt and well-dressed crowd of LP nerds, precocious twenty-somethings, and couples in search of an atmospheric canoodle to see Mose Allison, a man whom Pete Townshend once dubbed “the Blues Sage.”

Mose knows, as the saying goes. And more to the point, he still puts on one hell of a show.

It is now 50 years since Allison’s first release—the groovy Back Country Suite, with which Richard Fariña fell in love—and 80 since his birth, but heck if he ain’t still the cat of cats. His elegant blues (or is it demotic jazz?) is as sharp as ever, his swagger intact, his delivery sly but unaffected (few bluesman can pull off a phrase like “your little psychic walkabout”). Joined by Tony Martucci on drums and Tommy Cecil on bass, Allison stuck almost exclusively to originals, and his few covers tended less toward Nat “King” Cole smoothness and more toward the down-home stuff of Lefty Frizzell (”If You’ve Got the Money…”) and Muddy Waters (a fantastic “Catfish Blues”).

Punctuating each quip with a sneaky piano lick, Mose kept the interstitial passages jumping with manic rhythm in the right hand over the left hand’s open fifth/stride patterns—funky enough to make middle-aged white cats in wraparound shades convulse with (or against) the music, but not so frenetic as to threaten the breeziness of lyrics like “If silence was golden/You couldn’t raise a dime.”

There’s something tremendously boyish about an 80-year-old singing this stuff. Allison has always been an insistent naïf (with a nod, of course, and a wink), but now he seems doubly so. Sure, he occasionally finds himself a bit short of breath, and his upper register may have shriveled somewhat; but the sheer delight he takes in his own contradictions seems more exuberant, more self-evident—unshriveled, one might say, by the miles and the years. A “certified senior citizen” by his own account, Allison has broadened the facetious strain in his blues to make old age seem pretty cool.

In other words, the fellow who taught “Young Man’s Blues” to the Who certainly seems to be enjoying the fruits of his own senility.

It’s not just the ever-present half-smile, not just his private scat (which through the years has morphed from a Neal Cassady-type exhortation to a vaguely apprehensive creaking sound), not just an evergreen predilection, in both composition and interpretation, for the zippy one-liner…it’s the reactive dissonance of the old man singing the songs of youth, the wise guy playing the innocent, the white boy stealing the blues.

Parchman Farm:

Young Man’s Blues:

Set list, and recommended discs, below.

Oh, and here’s a video of “Mind on Vacation”:

Sunday’s 10 p.m. setlist:

• “Just Like Livin’”
• “Fool’s Paradise”
• “Swingin’ Machine”
• “Days Like This”
• “If You’ve Got the Money, I’ve Got the Time”
• “Trouble In Mind”
• “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me”
• “Certified Senior Citizen”
• “Ever Since I Stole the Blues”
• “How Does It Feel? (To Be Good-Looking)”
• “What Do You Do After You Ruin Your Life”
• “Middle-Class White Boy”
• “That’s The Stuff You Gotta Watch”
• “Hello There, Universe”
• “Your Mind is on Vacation”
• “Catfish Blues”
• “This Ain’t Me” (encore)

Recommended discography:

• Back Country Suite (1957)
• The Seventh Son (1972)
• Middle-Class White Boy (1982)

…and, of course, the totally fun Greatest Hits (Prestige), to which Christgau gives the most lukewarm A- in CG history. Though it does overlap prodigiously with The Seventh Son.

Tuesday nights at Twins Jazz now belong to local flautist and saxophonist Charles Rahmat Woods, whose edgy trio the Blue Tuesday Club (with pianist Jerrel Pederman and drummer Joe Link) has a regular gig at the U Street haunt. The band’s name was inspired by the intensity of this year’s primary elections—a sign that Woods is something of a political animal, like most of us in this town.

To that end, you get an extra bang for your buck in going to see the Blue Tuesday Club Trio. From now through October, one dollar of your $10 cover charge to see Woods and his gang on Tuesday nights at Twins will go towards Barack Obama’s campaign. You’ve heard about his historic fundraising with small-amount donors? Now you can be one of them, and get some wonderful music for your trouble.

A few weeks ago I wrote up Extra Life; now here comes another offshoot of NYC avant-garde rockers Zs: a quartet of dual sax, guitar and drums by the name of Little Women. Little Women’s debut recording is a 19-minute thrash-jazz blowout released by SocketsCDR, a local label run by Sean Peoples (of FFFFs, Hand Fed Babies, Big Cats and so on). Sockets has previously put out a bunch of DC experimental/noise type stuff, with some 40+ releases under its belt. I believe Teeth is actually their first or second release to come out on an actual pressed CD rather than a CD-R.

There’s a good-cop bad-cop kind of thing going on here: if Extra Life is the nice, accessible Zs spinoff, Little Women are the mean, violent mofos. Much less structured and rigorously composed than Zs’ chamber-music approach to math rock, Teeth sounds like a live-in-the-studio take, featuring all the energy of a punk rock show distilled into less than 20 minutes. The two saxophonists alternate between improvised flailing skronk of the most strident kind and blistering unison lines, with frequent breakdowns that showcase Ben Greenberg (the Zs member here) pounding away with a clean, undistorted guitar tone. Like Univers Zero, who I profiled last week, it’s impossible to pigeonhole this stuff; one moment there’s an obviously free jazz-influenced blowfest, the next there’s a thrash-metal breakdown, and through it all there’s this kind of punk-rock aggro.

The final track ends with some or all of the band members babbling and screaming with maniacal abandon, all pretense of “music” tossed aside. Like the rest of this short debut album, it’s not pretty, but it’s certainly intense, and it will probably alienate a lot of listeners. It’s also an indication that these guys don’t take themselves too seriously, an ever-present criticism when it comes to such uncompromisingly uncommercial music.

Three months and one day after his 80th birthday, jazz legend and “World’s Fastest Saxophonist” Johnny Griffin died at home in France this morning.

Griffin, who emigrated to Europe in 1963, made his reputation in the bands of Thelonious Monk, Art Blakey, and Kenny Clarke, and as a leader is best known for the 1957 Blue Note LP A Blowin’ Session with fellow saxophonists John Coltrane and Hank Mobley.

The New York Times Online has posted Ben Ratliff’s obituary for Griffin as it will appear in tomorrow’s print edition.

We’ve probably posted enough about this show (pick, interview, and photo spread). But I shot some video and thought we should put it up anyway for the hundreds of thousands of D.C. residents who decided not to attend the glorious Abe Vigoda-High Places-No Age show this past Tuesday night at the Rock and Roll Hotel.

OK. Show wasn’t so glorious. The main beef: the sound really kind of sucked. If you decided to really nerd out and stand up front, you couldn’t hear the vocals at all. The only way you got a decent idea of what these bands could do live was if you opted to stand in the back of the club. So next time, a little more vocals please!

Anyway, here are the vids with their rough sound and cheap camera work. The first video is of Abe Vigoda, the second is High Places. The video of No Age is one the way and will be posted later:

The late April announcement that Transparent Productions was going on indefinite hiatus left a certain void in the world of high-profile free and avant-garde jazz groups making tour stops in D.C., though some pretty cool Velvet Lounge bookings have picked up a bit of the slack. Fortunately, we still have Creative Differences—even though this series is housed in Baltimore at An Die Musik on Charles Street, making the trek up there is a whole lot easier than going to Philly or NYC to get a proper dose of skronk. The highlight of the series this past spring was a monumental reunion concert from Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, certainly a mind-expanding experience for avant-jazz fans like myself too young to have witnessed the original band in the mid-1990s.

Creative Differences, curated by Bernard Lyons, takes a hiatus each summer, but some of the fall series concerts have quietly been added to An Die Musik’s calendar. To wit:

• Saturday, September 20 - Carl Grubbs & Salim Washington (John Coltrane birthday concert)
• Friday, September 26 - Marc Copland with Greg Osby, John Hebert and Bill Stewart
• Saturday, October 4 - Judi Silvano
• Saturday, October 11 - Steve Lantner with Joe Morris and Luther Grey
• Saturday, October 25 - Fred Van Hove
• Saturday, November 1 - Trio BraamDeJoodeVatcher
• Saturday, November 15 - Jamie Baum Septet

I’d imagine there is more to come since an official announcement has yet to be made (and probably won’t be for a little while longer). There are some names here I don’t recognize, to be honest, but one I can recommend is Trio BraamDeJoodeVatcher, a Dutch piano trio that played a great set at Twins Jazz a few years ago in a show sponsored by, you guessed it, Transparent Productions.

Guillermo Klein played a mind-blowing show at the Library of Congress in February—and, as it turns out, much of his set was comprised of small-band versions of the tunes his big band, Los Guachos, plays on the new disc Filtros (Sunnyside).

“I’m not a jazz composter,” Klein recently told jazz journalist David R. Adler. “The term ‘jazz composition’ is vague.” Indeed, it only covers one aspect of Klein’s music, but a more accurate descriptor is elusive: on Filtros Klein also toys with classical music (”Louange a l’eternite de Jesus”), Andean folk (”Vaca”), torch songs (”Amor Profundo”) and some art-rock (”Volante”). But he also invents his own forms and rhythms, and trying to distinguish the structural patterns in either will accomplish little more than getting you lost–I challenge anyone to listen to “Luz de Liz” and keep up. Nonetheless, it’s one of the best albums I’ve heard this year.

Buy Filtros. As soon as possible. March right up to Melody Records and place a special order (they don’t have it in stock), wait for it to arrive, then take it home confident that both time and money were worth it.