I’ve long been a big fan of Fareed Haque, from his beautiful, acoustic, classical jazziness to his wild rantings and supercharged funk with Garaj Mahal, but since that band’s demise I’ve had few opportunities to catch the Chicago based guitarist live. I was very pleased, then, to see a soundboard matrix of a recent show by Fareed’s current trio MathGames surface.

The show actually features a full jazz reading of CSNY’s Deja Vu in the first set – a recreation of the guitarist’s 1997 release of the same name for Blue Note – but this week’s Stormy Monday mix comes from the more open-ended second set, which is also loaded with covers, including a beautiful Fearless. There are also two very nice pairings: a deep, sprawling Slippery Magi > Grant Green’s Flood in Franklin Park, and Our House > a distinctly Fareed composition, Punjabi Soul. The music is full of funky beats courtesy of Greg Fundis on drums and Alex Austin on bass, and blisteringly fast guitar licks and slick grooves from Fareed himself; a real joy to listen to. As always, enjoy!

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It’s time to celebrate spring by turning our attention to the music of the good old Grateful Dead, specifically the 1981 spring tour. Early ’80s shows can be hit and miss, but when the band was on, it was really on, such as this complete first set from May 9th at Nassau Coliseum in Uniondale, New York.

It opens with a blistering Half Step > Franklin’s Tower > Stranger, and closes in similar form with a fantastic Looks Like Rain > China Cat > Rider. In between is a real nice version of Birdsong, an early Rooster and Candyman. It’s just about 90 minutes of vintage Dead to please your ears, so as always, enjoy!

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While Tim Bluhm may be getting more nationwide face time lately as one of his wife Nicki Bluhm’s Gramblers, thanks to that band’s constant touring schedule and sensational YouTube Van Sessions performances, in The Mother Hips he is still a rock star front man without equal. Trademarked as “California Soul,” the band’s slick songs about beaches, frustration, social awkwardness and the act of songwriting itself, served up with double guitar licks, driving backbeat and falsetto shouts, are pure pleasure – hard rocking and soothing in turns and entirely catchy. A Hips tune can get lodged in your brain instantly and stay there for days, all from just a lick or line from Tim or co-founder Greg Loiacono.

[Photo via The Mother Hips' Facebook Page]

So this week’s Stormy Monday is a mix of live material mostly from recent years. The opening sequence comes from the tail end of a show late last year (a especially fat, dense recording at that): a kicking Been Lost Once > Rich Little Girl, followed by Can’t Sleep at All > the Beatles-esque Singing Seems to Ease Me > Can’t Sleep at All. From early in 2011 we also have a big dose of more psychedelic Hips with a long take on Third Floor Story > Magazine, the pairing stretching well over 15 minutes. Another side of the band’s long-form approach is represented by the in and out, switch it up turns and twists of Chum, and to finish things out there’s a rockin’ version of Stoned On Up The Road. It’s about an hour’s worth of some truly great music from a truly great band. Make sure you check it out, especially if you’re not yet familiar with Mother Hips – you’ll be happy you did.

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Last Friday night, March 15, Charles Lloyd celebrated his 75th birthday at the Temple of Dendur at The Met in NYC – a truly stunning and ethereal venue for a saxophonist whose name is synonymous with spirit and integrity. One of the first jazz artists to sell a million copies of an album (Forest Flower featuring Jack DeJohnette and Keith Jarrett), Lloyd’s career is filled with peak after peak, especially when it comes to his now long-standing band that ironically goes by the name of Charles Lloyd’s New Quartet. With Eric Harland on drums, the prolific Reuben Rogers on bass and jazz ambassador for a new generation Jason Moran on piano, year in and year out the group produces amazing music that is confident but unassuming, both cosmic and earthy, often at the same time.

The birthday concert featured the varied work from recent years, including an opening pair of songs with just Lloyd and Moran from the duo’s just released Hagar’s Song album, followed by the full quartet for a pair of extended explorations that made the most of the setting. Moran’s wife, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran, joined too, with an especially haunting Go Down Moses, before a full set’s worth of material featuring Maria Farantouri and Socratis Sinopoulos, music originally captured on 2011 live double disc Athens Concert. For our celebration of the master’s birthday, we’re also turning our attention to relatively recent years for a single track, nearly 40 minutes in length, Miss Jessie. It’s an engrossing performance full of the guts and grace and flow that marks Lloyd’s work – however, on this recording Geri Allen takes over piano duties for Moran, and absolutely shines. As always, enjoy!

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It’s been a long time since I’ve done a moe.jams edition of Stormy Mondays, but a recent gig inspired me to offer up some double guitar rock. One of moe.’s great talents is the ability to turn out what are essentially a classic album’s worth of music within a suite: 30-45 minute jams that act as complete pieces. There’s just something in the group’s pacing that allows for these perfectly digestible nuggets to shine time and again, and on a good night, they’ll play three or four such episodes. A recent case comes from the end of the first set on the second night of early February’s two night stand in NYC. (Special thanks to New York based taper Scott Bernstein, whose recording is featured here.)

[Photo by Alexandra Valenti]

The suite starts with a hot Smoke that opens up more than usual at the end for a driving jam and slowly morphs into the classic pairing of Not Coming Down > Wormwood, with the instrumental tune wandering and drifting and moving into some very cool spaces before landing in a bombastic Moth to close. A tight, engaging chunk of moe. for your Monday, so as always, enjoy!

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Here at Stormy Mondays we believe in recycling, and with that in mind, this week we present Steve Kimock’s free live album, LIVE 2012, from last year, featuring his current band of Bernie Worell on keys, Wally Ingram on drums and Andy Hess on bass, a group greater than the sum of its already great parts.

The album is a fantastic document, with a monster version of Thing One and a tight One for Brother Mike; Hey Man, a newer tune; and a must hear, wickedly funky instrumental cover of Come Together > The Thrill Is Gone. Now that the group, which is billed simply as Steve Kimock, has been together for a year, they’ve also expanded into some different grooves than aren’t represented here, including a large dose of dub magic in the form of 54-46, Congo Man Chant > Get Up, Stand Up, and Banana Walk, along with the soaring leads and driving rhythms one would expect from any Kimock project.

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One of the best kept secrets in improv music is hidden in Boston: the huge rotating cast of characters performing under the guidance of bassist Mike Rivard, the collective known as Club d’Elf. The music is earthy, rhythmic, hypnotic, spacey, groovy, funkydubnasty, but while various formations of drummers, keyboard players, guitarists, horn players, djs, and if you’re lucky, Oud player Brahim Fribgane, make short tours every now and again, for the most part, that music is only produced at The Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. Luckily, Rivard is generous with his ever-evolving experiment, which will celebrate its 15th anniversary later this year, as Club d’Elf is extremely well represented on archive.org, with hundreds of shows available for streaming and downloading, the vast majority of which are stellar recordings from on-stage microphones.

[Photo via Club d'Elf Facebook Page]

Going back to the earliest days, one of d’Elf’s best and most noteworthy collaborators, one for whom the band has always been a excellent and influential outlet, is John Medeski. In fact, to truly known Medeski’s style and sound and approach, you really need to understand the music he produces with the band. The long-form, open-ended material gives him room to open up, but also room to sit back for long stretches  comping and adding background effects, playing the role of the best sideman around. There’s great patience and texture in his work with d’Elf, as much as there are explosive, funky, hold onto your hat throw-downs.

With all that in mind, this week we have the opening 45 minutes of a show at Le Poisson Rouge in NYC from December of 2011. The setlist, Scorpion > Sand (for Mark) > Instar, is pretty classic for the band, but the performance is especially fluid and mesmerizing. LPR is a artier venue with jazz, singer-songwriters and even chamber music often booked there, so it has a nice baby grand on stage. Medeski plays wonderfully on it during the opening track – he’s almost always electrified when playing with the group. He also has a phenomenal organ solo half way through Sand. The rest of the show turns deeply toward North African sounds thereafter with a host of guests, but what begins the show is prime cut Club d’Elf. As always, enjoy.

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To start off the new year in style, this week we have a fantastic long medley from the Wayne Shorter Quartet late last year. Shorter will celebrate his 80th birthday this year with a number of interesting collaborations between the Quartet and chamber music groups, along with a new live album due out at the beginning of February, a follow up to Footprints Live! and Beyond the Sound Barrier.

The Quartet, featuring Danilo Perez on piano, John Patitucci on bass and Brian Blades on drums, has been together for over a decade and has long since moved beyond playing “songs” per se, favoring a type of dramatic free form improvisation that is beautiful and captivating; I call their music spontaneous scoring, in a nod to Shorter’s well known love of film and film scores–there‘s always a story being told when the Quartet begins to weave its spell. This particular 45 minutes of music is especially groovy early on and absolutely stunning at its apex just before it ends. Happy New Year, and as always, enjoy!

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After a year long hiatus, this week we have the return of the Acoustic Mix (Vol. X). We open with a live in-studio performance of To Ohio by The Low Anthem — a beautiful version of a beautiful song. Staying in the same vein, next is The Barr Brothers with The Devil’s Harp, and its infectious little shuffle step. Following that comes Steve Kimock doing a solo improv I’m calling WV Solo at All Good in the summer of 05, and then an early rendition of Tangled Up In Blue with alternate lyrics.

Jackie Greene offers a cover of Tom Waits’ great Heart of Saturday Night, and moving into the endgame moe. does Nebraska (with some great moe.banter following). Finally we close things out with 30 db and Susannah – a great, great song with amazing energy despite (or because of) the nature of the song. As always, enjoy!

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• PREVIOUSLY: Acoustic Mix IX, Acoustic Mix VIII, Acoustic Mix VII, Acoustic Mix Vol. VI, Acoustic Mixes I – V

From the ten years ago file, this week’s Stormy Monday features four tracks from Steve Kimock Band’s Japan 2002 run of 12/5 – 12/8. These are among the last shows with the incredible lineup featuring Rodney Holmes on drums, Alphonso Johnson on bass and Mitch Stein on guitar, and the band was playing like a finely tuned machine. That meant they could easily crush a groove and just as easily reach out into the stratosphere for a star-gazing journey. It should come as no surprise that every night has songs that stretch well beyond the twenty minute mark (the Elmer’s here is just over thirty).

Each member is featured prominently here: Rodney’s body shaking, concussion bomb drumming on Elmer’s Revenge; Alphonso’s rich, lively bass on the quartet’s cover of Bruce Hornsby’s Rainbow’s Cadillac; Mitch’s super-slick, slightly twisted guitar work on Long Form Part I (my all time favorite version of the song). And of course the transcendent Steve Kimock, who floats and shines and scorches and burns across it all (including the Kissing the Boo Boo opener). It’s about 80 minutes of music this time around, so settle in, and as always, enjoy!

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As a companion to Eric Wilbur’s Twenty Years Later piece, this week’s Stormy Mondays column also pulls from Phish’s magical year of 1992…

From the twenty years ago file, this week we have a pair of great Colonel Forbin’s Ascent > Fly Famous Mockingbirds. The first is from New Year’s Eve in Boston at Matthews Arena, a version with fantastic narration that draws the audience up into the atmosphere and down in the icy depths of the ocean. The second is from the Thanksgiving shows at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, which much more disturbingly has the audience travel into Fishman’s ear.

Those two nights are simply fantastic, two of the best of the era—surely they’re candidates for an archival release. I actually wore out my old Maxell XL II’s listening to those shows throughout my college years and had to hunt down my original first gen source to get new versions. Love ‘em. As always, enjoy!

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On October 18th, David S. Ware passed away just before his 63rd birthday. Ware was known as a vanguard free jazz sax man, but that label doesn’t communicate the passion and brilliance of his work as a player or band leader. The label seems to connote uninhibited blowing, but Ware was a strong, focused and emotive player of exceptional material.

An intellectual, he created smart, challenging music that was at the same time grounded and earthy in its explorations; it’s no coincidence that his phenomenal live album with his long standing David S Ware Quartet (featuring his perfect foil, Matthew Shipp on piano; Guillermo Brown on drums, with his big, spacious sound; and the rich, vibrating bass of William Parker) is called Live in the World. That double disc is required listening for anyone at all interested in this modern golden age of jazz that we live in. The music is stunningly intense and vibrant, with the band members listening and responding to each other so deftly, you can almost see them as the music plays. Together, those four musicians formed one of the great jazz collaborations of the era, a quartet in a league with Charles Lloyd’s New Quartet and the Wayne Shorter Quartet (a comparison that is still valid, even if Ware himself rejected it).

To mark his passing, this week features a trio of songs by the Quartet drawn largely from turn of the century performances, starting out with Muriko’s Blues, a moody, sparse rhythm with a fantastic sax solo over it; followed by Yesterdays from a recent BBC Jazz on 3 remembrance, essentially Ware’s response to Trane’s I Want To Talk About You. And finishing up is a spectacular Aquarian Sound show opener from August of 1999. What you’ll hear in all this material is just how full and potent this group was, how much balance and mutual respect was communicated through every bar of music. Chances are, unless you’re an invested jazz fan, you don’t know Ware’s music. Do yourself a favor and give it a listen. As always, enjoy!

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This week we celebrate the end of Rocktober with a mix filled with foot-stomping, guitar-gnashing, fun, fun, fun rock tunes. Kicking things off is The Mother Hips with a fantastic, explosive version of Two River Blues, followed by a recent recording of Anders Osborne doing a big thumping Black Tar. The opening suite ends with a ’98 version of Character Zero by Phish, and then we head back to NOLA for a new track from Brian Blade.

The drummer extraordinaire is best known in the jazz world for his Fellowship Band and decade plus as part of the Wayne Shorter Quartet, but a few years back he released a gorgeous, largely acoustic singer/songwriter album called Mama Rosa. In the recent years, he’s reinterpreted much of that material with his Mama Rosa Band, a sublime unit that hits everything just right. The guitar work on this one is amazing. And finally we finish off with Zep doing What Is and What Should Never Be.

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This week we turn our attention to Neil Young, whose new album with Crazy Horse looks to be an odyssey through some very long-form material. An open ended take is nothing for Neil, however; or at least on stage anyway. Featured here is a twenty plus minute Down By The River from 1984 when Neil was playing with The International Harvesters. It has a rambling, amusing talk intro that precedes some very hectic playing. I’ve also included a really up-tempo version of Tonight’s the Night from earlier in the same year, a truly great rendition of the song. As always, enjoy!

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Earlier this fall two of the best jazz trios out there, The Bad Plus and Medeski, Martin & Wood, released new albums. The former’s studio effort, Made Possible, finds the band cutting through the sharp passages and beautiful moments we’ve come to expect from them, along with some branching beyond the purely acoustic aesthetic for the first time. The latter’s live album, Free Magic, is culled from an ’07 tour that found them eschewing their electric arsenal (or John’s anyway) for an all-acoustic show for the first time (for a full tour). Both releases are busy characterizing this autumn’s aural memories for me, and so we’ll turn to two full sets this week, one from each band, one new and one properly aged.

The first night of the relatively short tour in support of Free Magic found MMW in Fall River, a rather gloomy city perched on a hill, a city that boasts my favorite venue ever: The Narrows. The second floor of an old mill building, the Narrows is a warm, open, wooden space with pews for seating, views of the pier and an arching bridge above, and artists’ galleries in the back of the room. It is simply the coziest, best feeling room around, and as such it draws out spectacular performances. And recordings, like John Lynch’s capture of the night. Featured here is the first set, with its loose, open beginning, incredible versions of Illmoan and Down on Me, and a stunning take on Suspicious Minds to close.

From The Bad Plus comes a great set from a great tour: Paris from their first European outing. From the enticing lull of Film’s opening notes to the rollicking groove of Everywhere You Turn to the awesome Iron Man encore, it’s quintessential Bad Plus. The material and playing are so fresh and bright.

It’s a long one this week, so settle in and as always, enjoy!

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