Chicago saxophonist Greg Ward says he got the name for his newest band – Rogue Parade – from a podcast he heard.
Whatever the source, the title seemed just right Friday night at the Green Mill, where Ward and rambunctious colleagues produced a music that strutted joyously from one offbeat to the next in a riot of sound.
Not that everything Rogue Parade played was loud and rhythmically buoyant. But even at slow tempos, this quintet reveled in thick instrumental textures and intriguingly weird sonorities, all made cohesive by the ingenuity of Ward’s compositions and the fluidity of his colleagues’ improvisations.
There’s a great deal about this unit that stands out, starting with its instrumentation, Ward’s keening alto saxophone lines drenched in color, harmony and dissonance from two electric guitars (nimbly played by Dave Miller and Matt Gold). Add Matt Ulery’s bass (electric and acoustic) and Quin Kirchner’s thunderous drums, and you had a band that suggested the work of more than five hyper-kinetic musicians.
Yet for all the decibels and energy involved, not once did this music become overbearing or pompous. These players listened too closely to one another and dealt too carefully with the compositions at hand for that to have happened.
All the music of the evening’s first set derived from Ward and Rogue Parade’s striking new debut album, “Stomping Off from Greenwood” (Greenleaf Music), its first six tracks performed in sequence. If the music bristled with the spirit of invention on the recording, it proved still more emphatically effective in concert.
Who could sit still during the repeated-note agitations and clanging, duel-guitar eruptions of “Metropolis,” which opened the performance? The sinuous themes and full-throated exhortations of “Excerpt 1” unfolded at a slower, more majestic tempo, but the exuberant character of the music remained the same.
Later in the evening, the ever-swelling ensemble sound of “The Contender,” otherworldly sonic effects of “The Fourth Reverie” and inherent rhythmic and harmonic tension of “Let Him Live” attested to the storytelling nature of Ward’s music. The bandleader regarded his solos not as occasions for grandstanding but, instead, as themes awash in ensemble sound, his lines bobbing to the forefront before receding into the background.
But whenever Ward’s alto saxophone was at its most prominent, it was easy to admire the dusky character of his tone and the tightly coiled nature of his musical statements.
Ward has been turning in important work on record and in concert for years. The “Stomping Off from Greenwood” music stands as his newest high point.
Greg Ward and Rogue Parade perform at 8 p.m. Saturday at the Green Mill Jazz Club, 4802 N. Broadway; $15; 773-878-5552 or www.greenmilljazz.com.
Farewell Joseph Jarman
Joseph Jarman, an early member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) and a key figure in one the collective’s most celebrated bands – the Art Ensemble of Chicago – died Wednesday in Englewood, N.J. at age 81, according to news reports.
The spirituality of Jarman’s music was apparent in his work with the Art Ensemble and in his own bands and solo performances, as well. Whether playing an array of woodwinds and unorthodox percussion instruments or chanting hypnotically in various instrumental settings, Jarman conveyed a profound connection with African cultural antiquity — as well as an ears-wide-open, forward-looking approach to creating and organizing sound.
Even before the AACM emerged in 1965, Jarman – who was born in Arkansas, grew up in Chicago and came into the orbit of Capt. Walter Dyett at DuSable High School – was a member of Muhal Richard Abrams’ Experimental Band. In that organization, which created a philosophical and musical framework for the AACM starting in 1962, Jarman played alongside such future giants as saxophonists Fred Anderson and Roscoe Mitchell and drummers Jack DeJohnette and Steve McCall.
“All of these people that we are talking about came from very, very struggling environments,” Jarman said in George Lewis’ definitive study, “A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music” (University of Chicago Press). “Every one of them started out at the bottom – maybe not the flat bottom, but pretty close.”
When the Art Ensemble became a sensation in Europe in the late 1960s, both the band and the AACM suddenly were poised to recast our understanding of where music could go, which they proceeded to do.
“I remember when the Art Ensemble came back from Europe and the guys started to become real, real successful,” singer-bandleader Rita Warford told me in 1995. “And I told them,‘I’d like to be successful, like you.’
“To this day I remember what Joseph Jarman said to me: ‘Success is being successful in the moment, with what you’re doing right now, what you’re practicing, what you’re studying, what you’re performing in front of an audience right now.’”
Jarman moved from Chicago to the East Coast in the 1980s and by the early 1990s had stepped away from music for spiritual pursuits.
But his incalculable contributions to the Arts Ensemble of Chicago returned to the spotlight late last year with the release of “The Art Ensemble of Chicago and Associated Ensembles” (ECM), a 21-CD boxed set documenting the band’s genre-defying work and its rippling effects on world music.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @howardreich
