Bop Shop Concert Season Closes w/ Dave Rempis-Frank Rosaly Duo

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The first half of the 2009-2010 Bop Shop concert series comes to a close Wednesday night with an appearance by saxophonist Dave Rempis and drummer Frank Rosaly, who have played together since 2001 in several groups – including The Outskirts, the Thread Quintet, and the Ingebrigt Håker-Flaten Quintet – and have been performing as a duo since 2004.

The sky’s the limitless: the Rempis-Rosaly Duo create weightless free jazz. Left to right: Frank Rosaly and Dave Rempis. (Photo: J. Crawford)

Rempis will be familiar to Bop concertgoers who caught the Vandermark 5 in the atrium earlier this year, and both players surface with great frequency within the myriad pockets of Chicago’s fertile music scene – not to mention throughout Europe and the States in their countless other gigs. Rosaly in particular crosses the threshold between jazz, indie, experimental, and post-rock and makes a compelling case for the continuing disintegration of musical boundaries with his work in the Jeff Parker/Nels Cline Quartet, Matana Robert's Chicago Project, and Fred Lonberg-Holm’s Valentine Trio (to name just three out of a very long list that also includes work with Peter Brotzmann, Ken Vandermark, and Walter Weirbos). Rempis, meanwhile, provides further evidence that the saxophone, though it remains the signature go-to instrument of jazz, can still act as the gateway to unimagined languages just to be discovered, unlocked, and unleashed.

Rosaly and Rempis derive much inspiration from the European tradition of improvisation, and their duo work, which is captured on their new album Cyrillic, highlights their intention to chart a crossroads where abstraction, swing, and melody all intersect, albeit in inverted and decidedly off-kilter ways. With his frothing rhythmic calculus, Rosaly reaches far beyond the concept of the drumset as mere beat-making tool. Instead, he thoroughly re-imagines the instrument as a highly expressive, multi-faceted, and ongoing conversation with itself. Rosaly creates a dense thicket of sound for Rempis to hack through, and surely enough the pair manages to stir up a great deal of chaos as their trains of thought rub, collide, and burst in the squall. At the same time, the listener never loses the sense that theirs is a true conversation, and the chaos proceeds with an almost well-mannered cadence that recalls the feeling you get when overhearing an engrossing back-and-forth between old friends who know when it’s okay to shout and when it’s imperative to read between the lines and leave certain things unsaid.

Until the Bop Shop series resumes again in February, this will be one last chance to catch music that is so cutting edge that its freshness overwhelms the senses and your reflexes don’t have time to react. As you listen, free of the burden of having to define what the music is, or what its context will mean for the future, the atrium itself becomes the crucible where jazz is being formed right there in the moment as the weightless and shapeless living entity that it was always intended to be.

Where and When:

Dave Rempis-Frank Rosaly Duo
8pm Wednesday, December 2nd at the Village Gate Atrium
274 North Goodman Street
$10 suggested donation
For information, call the Bop Shop at: (585) 271-3354

http://www.bopshop.com/bopEventsList.php
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=184712450957&index=1

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Rempis Percussion Quartet 1