Your Tuesday night plans suck if they don’t include catching The Chicago Plan at the Niles Gallery

 

There’s no letup with the great music coming through Lexington, KY in 2019.  Tomorrow night, it’s an excellent double bill with The Chicago Plan and Keefe Jackson‘s quartet both performing at The Niles Gallery on the UK campus.

The Chicago Plan is a quartet of trombonist Steve Swell, saxophonist Gebhard Ullmann, percussionist Michael Zerang and cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm (who also adds a dose of electronics).  This’ll be the kind of music that turns jazz on its head, but even flipped upside down, there’s a clear view of a familiar sound.  It might not swing like your classic jazz albums, and the bounce of its bop will take some sharp, unexpected angles and spins, but the quartet plays with the energy and enthusiasm and a nod to the blues that makes all the different sounding music not so different after all.

Here’s a track from their 2016 self-titled release (on Clean Feed Records).

You can purchase the album at the Clean Feed Records storeAmazon, too.

And last year, this site gave a warm reception to another album from the trombonist Steve Swell, but with a slightly different kind of sound.  His 2018 release Music for Six Musicians: Hommage à Olivier Messiaen is ten shades of fascinating.

Also performing this night is the quartet of multi-reedists Keefe Jackson and Christoph Erb, bassist Jason Roebke and percussionist Tim Barnes.  Jackson has contributed to a bunch of excellent recordings receiving praise on this site (and elsewhere).  While many of the albums representing Keefe’s body of work fall under the general category of post-bop, what he and his compatriots represent is the boundless creativity emblematic of the modern scene.  This show could pretty much sound like anything.

This is the 15-year anniversary, and Event #212, of Ross Compton’s Outside the Spotlight series.  Ross is one of those local music scene heroes who devotes a ton of sweat work bringing great music to his community.  There have been a ridiculous wealth of talent from the experimental and jazz pool that has performed in Lexington because of Ross’s efforts.  And most of those shows, like this one, is free to the public.

The show details:

When:  Tuesday, April 30th, 2019 at 7:00pm

Where:  Niles Gallery (inside the UK Fine Arts Library), 160 Patterson Dr, Lexington, KY 40506

It’s a free show.

The Facebook Event page-> LINK

The Chicago Plan’s site-> LINK

Keefe Jackson’s site-> LINK

And a shout-out of thanks to the local student-run radio station 88.1 FM WRFL for their part in helping bring this music to town.