the hum / By Bob Doran

Whatever It Is We Do

Plays Monk plays jazz, Fishtank Ensemble and other choices

(Sept. 27, 2007)  They’re back. The Redwood Jazz Alliance , that is. The collection of jazz educators and fans intent on bringing a wider range of improv music to Humboldt started with two concerts their first season. The RJA kicks off a more ambitious six show season Thursday, Sept. 27, with two shows at the Morris Graves Museum by the Bay Area-based trio Plays Monk . That would be drummer Scott Amendola (who also plays with Madeleine Peyroux and his own Scott Amendola Band), bassist Devin Hoff (from Nels Cline Singers with Scott) and clarinetist Ben Goldberg from Tin Hat, New Klezmer Trio, etc.

The Plays Monk moniker indicates the repertoire: tunes by the late great jazz pianist Thelonious Monk. Amendola knows Monk’s eccentric music pretty well. He was in TJ Kirk, a ’90s quartet with Charlie Hunter that focused on tunes by Thelonious (T), James Brown (J) and Roland Kirk. Plays Monk came together almost by accident a few years ago when Scott called Ben to see if he wanted to do a gig.

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“He said, ‘Devin and I have been doing this Monk thing as a duo, maybe we should do that.’ I said ‘OK,’ and we just started doing it,” Amendola recalled. “We put a record out and that led to more gigs. It’s simple: We just love playing Monk.” It’s challenging music approached from an unusual perspective. As Scott notes, with just clarinet, bass and drums, “You have no chords, no chordal instruments, no piano. It’s about taking this music he wrote and deconstructing it to make it our own … We play swing grooves and include elements of traditional jazz, there’s definitely a throwback to that, but it’s mainly about deconstruction, making it a little more sparse, but dense in our own way, through whatever it is we do.”

This is a week of many choices: Elsewhere on Thursday, a house concert at Das Gasthaus with acoustic shoegaze by The Stragglers (from Sacto), Estereo (from S.F.) and Humboldt’s own Andrea Zvaleko .

Choose from music on two floors of HSU’s University Center Friday, Sept. 28. Downstairs: Midlake , a lush, melodic alt. folk/rock band from Texas, shares the bill with songwriter/vocalist Maria Taylor of Azure Ray. Things should be livelier upstairs in the Kate Buchanan Room with Afrofunk by Afromassive , plus WoMama ’s world fusion.

Fishtank Ensemble offers a different sort of world music Friday at Muddy’s Hot Cup: East-Euro folk mixed with gypsy jazz, flamenco, Swedish folk, klezmer and more, played on fiddle, accordion, guitar, bass, musical saw and Japanese shamisen, among other things. If you liked Vagabond Opera or Luminescent Orchestrii, you’ll love these folks. (Fishtank also plays Thursday at Beginnings Octagon.)

The original Sugarhill Gang is at the Red Fox Friday. The Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” was the first rap single to cross over to top 40: “I said a hip hop, the hippie, the hippie to the hip hip hop, a you don’t stop …” Were they hip hop originators? It’s debatable (and hotly debated), but they’ll tell you they were.

Joyce Hough from The Country Pretenders sent me a reminder that the band is playing deep country at the Jambalaya Friday, noting, “We’re hoping our more mature fans will notice the earlier time (9 p.m.). Most music at the Jam has been starting at 10 — a bit of a deterrent for some older folks.”

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