Skip to main content

Le Percheron, An Appreciation.


Le Percheron, An Appreciation.

Hard use, sweat and passion have stripped the varnish from the neck of Adam Linz’s bass.  The worn surfaces fit in just as well as Emel’s classy black beret at the Khyber Pass last week.  

Le Percheron (Linz, Noah Ophoven Baldwin (t) and Cory Healy (d), with Levi (vibes) out ill) settled in quietly at Khyber Pass on November 1. 

I’d forgotten Linz’s propensities with titles:  maybe Linz’s childhood memories, perhaps offspring of Magritte or maybe Dillinger Four discards….   

Big Bear Chases Me started with a seductive rhythm from Linz to which Healy’s drums added funk and soon enough, Noah’s trumpet murmured across the sound stage, adding greater emphasis as the bars passed until Healy’s aggressive rocking drumming reverted to sharp and quieter raps on the rims.  These introduced Linz’s solo on his plucked and lightly amped bass, full of inventive melody and passion, well-accompanied by his vocalizations.

45s on the Roller Rink. Not about 45s per se, but with this music’s sometimes slow, sometimes sparse, but always emphatic lines, the listener gains much from being there.  Eyes follow the drum sticks dropped to the tiled floor for their clattering effect.  You watch Linz embrace and grapple with his bass.  You wait while Noah crouches in the blue-shadowed foreground, then rises to pose his queries, finishing with a series of fingered airy notes, having abandoned use of lips on mouthpiece. The living, visual experience of the performance are umami and herbs that fill out a recipe for the spices of instrumentation.     

Bird Cage: cymbals, solely cymbals to start, soft but much more insistent than you’d expect from such shimmerings….  

5 more pieces  (Froggers’ Brothers, Well and _____ ) filled out the evening of concentrated ventures in sound.  


I wonder…

Might this be
punk jazz
… slowed
… stripped-back 
… recast
… while smoking weed with Miles?


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milo Fine, Anthony Cox and Kyle Motl: Unimpeded Mutual Interpenetration; An Appreciation

  Milo Fine, Anthony Cox and Kyle Motl:   Unimpeded Mutual Interpenetration; An Appreciation. On September 13 , 2026 Cox and Motl brought their double basses to Fine’s Studio Toile d’Angles in near north Minneapolis for two hours of intense, exciting improvisation, perhaps fitting the Free Jazz label.  Fine rotated between playing clarinet, percussion and his Bosendorpher Imperial.  This time I did not ask about planning vs. improvisation.  When I first heard Fine and Cox a year ago, Fine affirmed that that two hour performance was 100% improvised and Cox reported that the two of them had been practicing their improvisation together for five decades.  I suspect Motl, who teaches bass at the U of M,  has not been playing bass for two decades, let alone five, but their answers to my question last fall would have been equally true this week. In my appreciation of the Cox Fine performance in 2025 I express my wonder in the up close experience of Fine’s ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Milo Fine and Anthony Cox August 30, 2025. An Appreciation with Digressions.

Studio Toile d’Angles was carved out of a near north Minneapolis lot and erected next door to the home of Milo Fine, Minnesota’s least compromised multi-instrumentalist, composer and instigator of modern music.  Rectangular and sunk in the land, it is maybe 18 x 30 feet; the roof points to high north and descends covered with solar panels toward the south and inside meets a wall ten feet above the floor. A kitchenette and bathroom are in a back corner. No street shoes permitted.  Twenty or so moveable padded chairs, a couch and cushions are set in loose rows seven feet from Cox and his cello. The front row audience is six feet from the end of Fine’s black lacquer Bosendorpher Imperial piano. It is nine feet six inches long and includes nine notes lower than a concert grand’s 88. Debussy, Bartok and Ravel were early adopters. Capable, I am sure, of near-Richter scale waves, Fine’s often emphatic playing still left space for Cox’s bowed, plucked, tapped, and picked cello.  ...
Post a Comment
Read more

You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma.

  You Don’t Have to Sing the Blues, New Insight About Living With Trauma. “ We have art so that we do not perish because of the truth.” Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power Or, we have art so we can turn sometimes awful truths into new and even joyful life, a dialectic we can enact in  our own experiences.   This is my new understanding of how I have dealt with big trauma by turning to art. I address the personal loss  and tragedy in my wife Karen’s stroke and her survival and how writing, my artistic outlet, gave me surprising joy.   And looking back on my brother David’s even more tragic mental illness, art is there too.  I found things that we  can take from these experiences individually and as a community.  And in the process of looking at all this I’ve  found others who have turned trauma and tragedy into unexpected joy.  Lost and Found Connections In early 2001 Karen was working at Northwest Airlines and we took advan...
Post a Comment
Read more