Press
KMHD Jazz Notes
February 2010
The Return of the Andrew Oliver Sextet – A Night of Young Jazz Eclecticism
by John Pomietlasz
There’s a refreshing, youthful and modern edge emerging in the jazz scene. Well-educated 20-somethings who know and respect tradition are taking the music in innovative directions. Locally, the eclectic Andrew Oliver Sextet is a notable example of a band helping to define the new jazz generation. Two weeks ago, following several months on hiatus, the group played Portland’s jazz hotspot Jimmy Mak’s. The sextet treated the crowd to a terrific evening of their diverse brand of jazz, mixing a variety of genres from driving rock to swing to world influences. The individual musicianship of each player was artfully highlighted as they performed material from the upcoming spring release of their second studio album, 82% Chance of Rain.
Bandleader and composer Andrew Oliver directed the band from the piano with delicacy and ease. His clean and rhythmic lines established a base for the others to expand upon. Oliver plays a wide range of styles, linked by restraint and an understanding that less is often more. Instead of excessive fury, he dazzled with moments of subtle, calculated composure. Eight Hundred Sea Turtles, a standout song from the new record, featured an upbeat, snappy rhythm with saxophonist Mary-Sue Tobin and bassist Eric Gruber skipping around Oliver’s piano work. The whimsical feel showed off the band’s youthful vitality and ability to have fun. Oliver also displayed a flipside via a charming new ballad with soft and doleful notes that recalled the gray, rainy afternoon and quieter, more somber times he spent in a small French town.
For those who wonder about the future of jazz, the Oliver Sextet gives a brilliant display of what younger jazz musicians in Portland have to offer. Their experience, diversity and musicianship are clearly evident in their ability to meld instruments and genres into fine jazz albums and performances. You can catch the Andrew Oliver Sextet at the Tugboat Brewery on February 18. And be sure to check out 82% Chance of Rain, due out in early April, followed by a supporting tour.
Melophobe
Concert Review: The Sam Howard Band
Dec. 9, 2009
by Colin McLaughlin
“This is jazz for young people; a fusion project that frolicked in afrobeat rhythms, bluesy bar-rat solos and some country twang before returning home to a familiar jazz structure, as if they needed to remind you every once in awhile what roots grip the tree. And while Pemberton frequently took center stage, with his distortion pedal and tremolo tinkering, it was Oliver with his sneaky “maybe we should break into some funk” Rhodes lines that really stole the show.”
Seattle Weekly
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Listening to Kane Mathis’ kora playing brings to mind Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert. Their instruments are similar: in Mathis’ case, the kora is a 21-stringed West African harp that he learned in Gambia. Take the guts out of Jarrett’s piano, stand them up and pluck them, and you have the same idea. Both performers employ gorgeous improvisation on top of simple rhythms; their songs meander between chord and melody, creating a continuous, crystalline drone. Tonight’s show—which also features Portland jazz pianist Andrew Oliver—is enough to bring the comparison full circle. In a recent appearance on KEXP’s Best Ambiance, Mathis’ and Oliver’s duets blended together so seamlessly, it sounded as if one giant 109 stringed harp was being played by a four armed musician; not being able to see who was doing what almost made it more interesting.
Seattle Weekly
Wednesday, June 2, 2009
“Andrew Oliver Impresses with Just 4 U”
by Jonathan Cunningham
For those who enjoy the sweet sounds of West African music, the Northwest is a mini-haven for talented émigrés from Senegal, Mali, and beyond. Not only is there a small, tight-knit audience in these parts, but there’s a steady stream of players (if you know where to look) who either came from West or Central Africa or went there to study music.
In the case of the Andrew Oliver Kora Band, both are true. Based primarily in Portland, this five-piece got started when Oliver and drummer/percussionist Mark DiFlorio spent a month playing music in Africa. Upon returning home, the duo united with Seattle-based kora player Kane Mathis and began blending jazz with West African folk music.
Their debut album, Just 4 U, is an eclectic mix of 11 soothing West African jams with hints of jazz licks underneath it all. Much of the piano, drumming, and trumpet work is straightforward, but when mixed with the playing of Mathis on the 21-string kora, the music has a unique sonic texture that’s rarely explored. “Malinyea” straddles both genres in separate stanzas, but the two merge harmoniously. “Hidmo,” named after the Eritrean restaurant in Seattle, and “Fanta Groove” are album favorites due to the solid horn playing on each. There’s even a cover of the Congolese pop classic “Bini Na Ngai Na Respect.” All this helps make Just 4 U one of the better world-music releases to come out of the Northwest all year.
Seattle Times
Friday, May 1, 2009
“Andrew Oliver Kora Band: A fresh, old sound breaks new ground”
By Jonathan Zwickel
Why are there no new musical instruments? It’s as if the electric guitar was the ultimate innovation, the last nail in the coffin of music’s social supremacy.
If fresh organic sounds are an endangered species, then Kane Mathis is Greenpeace. Mathis plays the kora, a 21-stringed West African harplike instrument made from a gourd wrapped in cow skin — and the titular instrument in the Andrew Oliver Kora Band.
While not new in the world — it originated at least a couple hundred years ago — the kora is new to Western ears (though jazz trumpeter Don Cherry has been known to play one). Its sound is bright like a harp and soulful like a guitar, less a cascade of notes than discreet, silvery drops.
The Seattle-based Andrew Oliver Kora Band sets it amid relaxed but intricate jazz, with Oliver on piano, Jim Knodle on trumpet, Brady Millard-Kish on upright bass, and Mark DiFlorio on drums.
While that quartet is talented enough on its own, Mathis’ kora adds a vivid sonic quality that transports the whole thing to lofty, unexpected realms. The band’s arrangements of original and traditional African tunes — as heard on “Just 4 U,” the just-released CD that they celebrate tonight at the Rendezvous — splice African melodic concepts and Western jazz structure.
Modest but mesmerizing, it’s as novel and agreeable a sound as you’ve never heard.
The Oregonian
Friday April 24, 2009
“Kora To The Core”
by Tom D’Antoni
First, a quick definition. The kora is a West African 21-stringed instrument, which sounds a little like a harp and is made from a large gourd cut in half and covered with cow skin. It is traditionally used by musicians and griots of the Mandinko people. Jazz folks like Don Cherry popularized it in America, although since the sound is so seductive, all it took was a little exposure for it to catch on.
Second, an explanation. Andrew Oliver is the young composer and keyboardist who burst upon the Portland jazz scene a couple of years ago and who leads and plays in more bands, spanning more genres, than there is room to list.
Although his interest in the kora began when he was in college, Oliver’s 2007 tour of West Africa, with saxophonist Devin Phillips’ band, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, made an indelible impression upon him. The title of his album, “Just 4 U,” is not a Prince knockoff but the name of a club in which Oliver found himself in Dakar, Senegal.
Surprisingly, he does not play the kora here; rather it’s Seattle’s Kane Mathis, who studied the kora in Gambia. (Mathis also plays guitar on the album.) Jim Knodle fills a huge role on trumpet, and Brady Millard-Kish on bass and Mark DiFlorio on drums are rock steady.
In the tradition of Cherry, Oliver, who either wrote or arranged most of the tunes, blends the swing and intellect of American jazz with the divine poetry of West African music.
Besides his own compositions, there are traditional Malian tunes arranged for this band, including one Oliver learned on the spot from an African musician in a club there. Plus, a tribute to Cherry on his lovely “Malinyea.”
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
[BRIGHT JAZZ] Long before pop songwriters like Paul Simon and David Byrne (and later Vampire Weekend) turned to West African music for inspiration, the jazz world went in full bore to discover its roots. But the Andrew Oliver Kora band meshes what the two musics love most—from upbeat, spiraling guitar plucks to that shuffling dance backbeat—to make a gorgeous, moving record with with Just 4 U. Despite the titular misstep—what is this, a teen bop record?—there is much to like on the Kora Band’s debut. Pianist Oliver delivers some beautiful playing that never oversteps into showiness, while spotlighted Kora player (the Kora, if you didn’t know, is a boulbus half-harp, half-guitar instrument from West Africa that sounds both sharp and airy) Kane Mathis is an absolute whiz. If Just 4 U is any judge, this won’t be a blaring straight-ahead evening, it’ll be the kind of atmospheric journey that sits perfectly in the cozy new Mississippi Studios. CASEY JARMAN.
Willamette Week
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Andrew Oliver Sextet, Blue Cranes
[NONCONFORMIST JAZZ] By playing in various ensembles, alto sax man Reed Wallsmith and pianist Andrew Oliver must be two of the busiest musicians in town. Oliver’s rhythmically vital originals incorporate rock and world-music influences in a decidedly non-superficial way that appeals broadly to jazz and other music fans. Maintaining the restless spirit of past pioneers, the colorful avant-jazz of Wallsmith’s Blue Cranes looks forward to the music’s future.
Jazzscene Magazine
February 2009
“The Portland Jazz Composers’ Ensemble: A Conversation with Co-Directors Andrew Oliver and Gus Slayton”
by Lynn Darroch
Two Portland-based large ensembles will be on display during the Portland Jazz Festival. In addition to the festival’s resident big band, the Portland Jazz Orchestra, which will perform a “Blue Note Legends” concert on February 19, the Portland Jazz Composers’ Ensemble will present new work by local jazz composers on Tuesday, February 17, at the Old Church (7:30 pm, $12).
The Portland Jazz Composers’ Ensemble is a 14-piece group which performs original compositions by its members and other jazz composers in the Portland music community and beyond. The goal: to give them a platform for large-group composition and arrangement which is lacking in the city’s jazz scene.
Band members for the February show will be: Mike Hankins, Paul Mazzio, Tree Palmedo (trumpets); John Moak, Lars Campbell, Doug Peebles (trombones); Mary Sue Tobin, Gus Slayton, Willie Matheis, Mieke Bruggeman (saxophones); Andrew Oliver, piano, Kyle Williams, guitar, Bill Athens, bass, Kevin Van Geem, drums.
The concert — the group’s fifth — will feature new pieces by Sam Howard, Ken Ollis, Andrew Durkin (of the Industrial Jazz Group), Dan Duval, Reed Wallsmith, Andrew Oliver, Gus Slayton, Kyle Williams and Randy Rollofson.
We recently talked with co-directors Andrew Oliver and Gus Slayton about the band and its role in the jazz community.
Why is it important to write original big band jazz music?
Gus Slayton: It’s useful to study and play the old music, and that’s what most young musicians do – they don’t come in playing original music, they play the classics. There’s a school of thought, [expressed by] Wynton Marsalis, that you should do only that until you have mastered it, play Duke Ellington and Count Basie until you are a virtuoso, and then you can put those elements into original big band music. We may not all be virtuosos, but we have studied enough, we have played enough, to not just play standards anymore. We’re not just young musicians playing jazz in the style of previous groups. We’re pushing ourselves not to fall in stride. This is exciting for the writer as well as for the player.
Oliver: A lot of younger musicians are reflecting the musical climate of today’s world. These days, whatever you want you can get hold of. People walk around with their ipod on shuffle. Even non-musicians may have a variety of indie rock, hip-hop, whatever. For jazz music to remain relevant to those who don’t know the tradition as well as those who do, it has to go beyond just a logical extension of the tradition. It’s important to preserve the traditional big band repertoire. But if you are going to have a modern big band that’s relevant to audiences of all types and ages, you need a blend of things that sound like an extension of traditional big band repertoire as well as things that come out of modern classical music or blues or Americana. To have a modern big band, you have to have music that reflects what’s going on in the current musical climate.
What do you get out of writing for a large ensemble rather than small groups?
Slayton: The most satisfaction for me comes from the first rehearsal, when you bring the chart in, pass out the music and play it start to finish, and you hear the band adding their own personal touch, because you want them to interpret it. That’s the best, when they’re creating and improvising and playing off each other. That’s what jazz is all about.
Oliver: One of the things I like about writing for a large group is, it’s a more interesting puzzle. It’s even harder for people to improvise together without sounding dissonant. So that’s a challenge. On the other side is the ability to utilize all the textures available with more instruments to create … a longer piece with interesting sections that contrast with each other, or have a wider volume range. So many more harmonic texture and instrumental combos are offered to you with large group.
How does the process work?
Slayton: The main goal of the group is to promote new jazz compositions by local composers. To provide a forum to try out whatever pieces they have, and to provide an audience for that new work.
Oliver: We schedule a concert and say, “Now we need to come up with some material!” One of the things that’s distinctive about this band is it’s smaller at 14 pieces than the normal big band. One of the reasons we did that was to have a distinctive sound.
At first, for our second concert, it was pretty stress- ful to come up with enough music for the whole concert. Now that we’re on our fifth concert, more people have approached me [with new material for the band] than I’ve had to approach. That’s been really cool.
What about the audience?
Oliver: We don’t put restrictions on what the composers write. The whole point is to let them write what they want. But because they are so many people with diverse tastes and styles writing for the band, it’s turned out so far that there’s been a great mixture of easily accessible music and more difficult music. The challenge becomes how to program it at the concert so the audience is not challenged the entire time. We’ve had some really challenging pieces, but we’ve been able to put them in the context of pieces that are easier to listen to.
Slayton: In our last concert, Reed Wallsmith had a piece that sounded like Phillip Glass, Sam Howard had a down-home, bluesy piece, and Charley [Grey] wrote this hard-swinging piece, so we had a wide variety of different things. We’ve also had a pop tune, a gospel tune ….
Oliver: It’s like this super post-modern world now – anything is available to any musician. So between all of our composers, we have the same thing – people are used to having their ipod on shuffle. So if they go to a concert of ours, they’ll find that variety.
This band is a representation of what’s going on in the younger local scene. There’s a lot of stuff going on in Portland. For people who are interested in the local scene, this is a fantastic window into it, because you get a wide range all at once.
The Oregonian
Friday, December 12, 2008
Lynn Darroch’s Holiday Gift Guide
CD:Andrew Oliver Sextet, “Otis Stomp” (Diatic Records, $12 retail)
The future of jazz is now withyoung Portland pianist Andrew Oliver’s first CD. It’s full of tight ensembleplaying, memorable melodies, and catchy rhythms, ranging from West African soukous to the pretty waltz, “Le Fille Russe.” Available at Diatic’s online store, this multimedia disc includes video as well as liner notes and several lead sheets.
The Oregonian: Arts & Entertainment
Fresh Faces in Jazz
June 13, 2008
by Tom D’Antoni
The explosion of young jazz musicians in Portland has transformed and enriched musical life for those of us who sit facing the band. Pianist/Composer Andrew Oliver is twenty-four and spent three years at Loyola University in New Orleans. After getting washed away by Katrina, and coming back home to Portland, he graduated from Portland State University in 2007 with degrees in jazz performance and French. He leads a sextet which plays at drummer Alan Jones’ wonderful new club, “The Cave” tonight. His numerous other projects include co-directing the Portland Jazz Composers’ Ensemble, a big band. He is also a member of Devin Phillips group.
Q: You young cats have really burst on the scene, haven’t you?
Oliver: It’s been really quick. I would come back from college in the summers and I started to notice what was happening but since I’ve been back I’ve feel it’s gone really fast. This is a good time. I don’t’ know if there’s a mission statement. People are less afraid to break genre boundaries.
Q: Your sextet has had a year or so to develop, how are things going?
Oliver: It evolved into a sextet because in my composition I kept hearing an extra harmony voice. Now that we’ve been playing together for some time we’ve built a nice musical relationship. It’s easier to write for the band knowing who I’m writing for, having an idea of their strengths. It’s become easier for us to learn the music, too.
Q: How have you developed as a leader?
Oliver: I try not to be overly demanding. It’s more effective to hire people whose sound complements what I already hear in my head. We’re all friends and it’s not too big of a deal if I say, “Well, maybe this section should be more this or that.” I like to let things develop. If something sounds a little rough, after we play the song for a couple of months, then it’ll work itself out.
Q: You co-founded the Portland Composers Orchestra. What’s the goal?
Oliver: I started that last year with Gus Slayton. We both were getting more and more interested in composition and we were writing for the Portland State Big Band. We got together a few times with twelve or fourteen people and it just developed. We try to gear it to Portland Composers. We present a lot of new music. We’ve doubled the size of our book.
Our goal is to have four concerts a year. There’s been a great response from the audience but also from composers who have ideas about writing for a large ensemble but don’t have a group to write for. That’s why we created it.
JSO Jazz Scene: May 2008 CD Reviews
Otis Stomp, Andrew Oliver Sextet
by Don Campbell
A student of Randy Porter, Andrew Oliver is a post-bop composer of considerable talent. He leads a young-lion sextet that includes Mary Sue Tobin on alto and soprano saxes, Willie Matheis on tenor, Dan Duval on guitar (and composer of two cuts), Eric Gruber on bass and Kevin Van Geem on drums. The title is a paean of sorts to the coastal Otis Café, and this powerful unit covers eight Oliver compositions, two by Duval and a traditional cut, with remarkable style. On the title cut, it’s a classic sextet sound with tight arranging and stellar soloing throughout, very old school. [Duval's] “How the Moon Broke” is a Coltrane-style ballad in an inventive mode established early by Duval’s electric guitar. “Bam! Made In France” features watertight ensemble playing in 7/4, with a ridiculously fun and outside solo from Duval. Throughout, each musician’s contribution helps create a sum bigger than its individual parts. Gruber and Van Geem are the strong spine for this group (and Van Geem’s drums and/or the room are tuned to perfection for this recording – the right amounts of kick-drum ambient boom, snappy snare and crisp cymbals). Tobin and Matheis are truly inventive as soloists, and can cop a mean melody in the arranged sections. This record is a delight, the playing outstanding, and the fact these guys are young doesn’t hurt either. They tip the hat to the masters, yet never play it safe. They’ve gone to school, but still bring something new to the party. These kids are dangerous. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
A quick word about Diatic Records. They not only produce standard CDs, but also release enhanced data CDs replete with video cuts, liner notes and covers, photos and song tracks, all in a “green” package. www.diaticrecords.com.
Portland Mercury
May 8, 2008
“Our Town Could Be Your Life”
Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble
by Cary Clarke
The most strikingly punk show I’ve seen this year did not go down in one of the many colorfully named, slightly foul-smelling residences that collectively constitute the Portland house show circuit, but rather in the cavernous front showroom of the Hollywood Music Center, a piano retail emporium on NE 42nd and Sandy. In spite of its ample size, the room felt as excitingly full as a packed basement, the premises being simultaneously enjoyed by dozens of baby grands, scores of uprights, a smattering of keyboards, 75 or so audience members, and 10 or so of their toddlers.
Oh yeah, and the 14 members of the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble, ingeniously positioned in what must have been the only possible configuration that could satisfy both Dave Sprando (Portland’s fire chief) and Alexey Pajitnov (the inventor of Tetris). The building had clearly not been designed with this ensemble’s debut concert in mind, but the very unorthodoxy of it, the sense that a collective of young musicians had simply found and made use of a space in their community that they could get donated, and that could accommodate their numbers and volume, cast the January night in a wonderfully DIY light, one that shines on everything that the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble touches.
As much as many of us like to think of our town’s rightly beloved rock, folk, and noise house shows as the definitive models of punk resourcefulness, they do belong to an established tradition, and cater to the dominant musical tastes of our region. On the other hand, the infrastructure for independent jazz in Portland is far less developed, in terms of both audiences and venues. After all, the path from picking a name, to practicing in your basement, to performing in someone else’s is well mapped for a fresh-faced local singer/songwriter. But the road for young jazz composers who want to write for big ensembles more or less comes to a sudden end with the conclusion of high school or college. And this is why we must tip our trucker hats and Crass beanies to the men and women of the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble. There was no system for making the kind of music they wanted to make, so they built one—a group explicitly conceived to perform original large-ensemble works by local jazz composers. To date, fully half of the group’s pieces have been written by its own members.
Andrew Oliver—the well-regarded 24-year-old pianist and composer who founded the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble last spring with saxophonist Gus Slayton shortly before graduating from PSU—summarized the group’s ethos: “There are many talented jazz composers in Portland, and we aim to give them a platform for large-group composition and arrangement, which is lacking in the city’s jazz scene…. We feel that if someone takes the time to write a piece, we ought to take the time to play it.” How punk is that?”
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Sound for the Organization of Society
Exclaim! Canada’s Music Authority
July 2009
Sound for the Organization of Society: Poem of the Underground
by Glen Hall
Founded in New Orleans and geographically scattered after Hurricane Katrina, this ten-piece ensemble, like their place of origin, is a melting pot of divergent styles, approaches and music. Dedicated to sustaining a “hierarchical equality” amongst its members, Sound for the Organization of Society’s musicians contribute and maintain a “pool of compositional forms” that’s the alphabet of the group’s musical language. The title track has shape, melody and orchestration from Indonesian gamelan music, but with some NYC downtown jazz blowing and Bach-like flourishes. The intensity in the unison declamation of “Darrell’s Ellipse” has a Zorn-ish resonance but Chris Mosley’s fretless guitar uses its elliptical logic to take the piece in an entirely different direction before returning to its muscular theme. “Research of an Aesthetic” starts with a Brotzman saxophone assault, yielding to pointillistic pianisms before returning to flat-out blowing that’s interrupted by mysterious electric piano and fluttering drums. “Constanence” has an engaging ensemble opening, with a repeated line and drum backing that yields to a lyrical soprano sax solo with intermittent intonation issues. “Ode to 89″ is perhaps the strongest track: hypnotic, celebratory and wholly uplifting. Short poems of socio-political, philosophic gambits punctuate the 12-track, hour-long CD. Sound for the Organization of Society are an intriguing social/musical aggregation and their music is engaging and thoroughly listenable. (Circumvention)
Ragazzi – Website fur erregende musik
July 2009
Sound for the Organization of Society: Poem of the Underground
In the booklet there is a photo and they look amazingly normal and well behaved, as if their sound for which they got together would not fit their pretty, young and smart faces, which makes them look like laid-back, mainstream all-world-types (dude from next door/common joe). Nothing freaky or artistic in their looks und they smile as if they would be taking a class picture. Musically on the other hand they are more flipped out, turbulent, extravagant and atonal than most bands playing the well established and known fields between Jazz and rock. Sound for the Organization of Society….as weird as their name, so is their program. Two drummers, three horns, bass, guitar, keyboards and voice talk and play harmonically smoothly arranged, I want to say, never out of the ordinary harsh composition that are more Jazz than rock, free form than modern, avant-garde and new music in a tonal jazz wrapping than jazz. ”Rocktypical” and jazzrock harmonies play a role, NO Wave, Henry Cow, Indonesian gamelan music and blues, as Albert Ayler played it. SOS reflects the vitality of New Orleans as mentioned in their press latter and the ongoing importance of the crescent city.. The band dedicates it’s music to the city, which lost most of it’s jazz places after Hurricane Katrina, and the musicians that lived or are still living in the city. Astonishingly even the craziest and harshest sounds are in some ways still harmonic. The ensemble doesn’t break the open scale in loudness, atonality or improvisatory freedom. As well behaved as they look, so soft is the wildness of their radical pieces. That doesn’t man that the compositions are weak or mainstream, it is the opposite. Looks like the band tries to combine, in a harmonic and easy to follow way, alternative, disharmonic and radical melodic structures. Surely this is not, and the term itself is already stupid: Nu free jazz. The 12 songs always have, and the scale reaches from folkrock with melodic structure to atonal freejazz with turbulent scale passages, a contemplative and comprehensible arrangement that feel inviting, even so at first confusing.
Even Pop music doesn’t happen with just one tone. Urgent (absolut) Recommondation!
(translation: Ingo Deul)
Eugene Weekly
April 2, 2009
This Thursday, April 2, Sound for the Organization of Society brings its rich, sometimes raucous sound to Cozmic Pizza. The collective improv approach of aggregations like the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Weather Report echoes through the septet’s music, and its members’ diverse backgrounds (they live across the U.S., including a couple in Portland, and have studied with mentors as diverse as Charlie Haden, Wadada Leo Smith and Darrell Grant) add up to a wide range of material that embraces contemporary postclassical, various jazz fusions and more. Definitely a show for listeners who like their jazz adventurous.
Willamette Week
July 30, 2008
Sound for the Organization of Society, Blue Cranes
[AVANT JAZZ] Keyboardist-cellist Andrew Oliver left Portland for New Orleans in 2002, but he was blown back home by a certain stormy lady named Katrina in 2005. While in the Big Easy, he formed the exceptionally accomplished nonet whose highly credentialed members now live around the world and are reconvening for a West Coast tour. With two drummers, two saxes, two keyboards, guitar and more, the group performs stylish, progressive jazz written by all its members. With the fab local jazz crew Blue Cranes opening, this is one of the best jazz shows of the summer. BRETT CAMPBELL