Kicking Out the Jams
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After Cap’n Jazz fell apart during a summer tour in 1995, its members regrouped in two bands: Kinsella’s current project, Joan of Arc, and the Promise Ring. The Promise Ring, based in Milwaukee, has grown increasingly popular by polishing up the pop facets of Cap’n Jazz’s hard-rocking sound. But Joan of Arc, which originally included Cap’n Jazz bassist Sam Zurick and still occasionally includes Kinsella’s brother Mike on drums, lit out almost immediately for the sometimes fascinating, sometimes maddening territory pioneered by elders like Tortoise and Gastr del Sol–the kind of stuff you might call pretentious if it weren’t your cup of tea. The 16-page CD booklet for Joan of Arc’s recently released third album, Live in Chicago, 1999 (Jade Tree), reconstructs Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend as an elementary school pageant, and Kinsella applies his Dave Grubbs-esque warble to lines like “We all know monogamy’s just a function of capitalism / And love its consequential construct of culture.”
While the first two records foreshadowed the new one in their liberal use of abstract electronics, bleary ballads, unusual colors, and impenetrable wordplay, they were still dominated by rock songs. But Live in Chicago, produced by Casey Rice, pretty much throws the rock out the window. Although keyboardist and guitarist Jeremy Boyle, the combo’s only other original member, and guitarist Todd Mattei round out Joan of Arc’s core lineup, Kinsella admits he conceived and recorded most of the new album on his own: “I think I was able to see the end result quicker than Todd, since he had never recorded before, and Jeremy was really busy with school. I was the one who had time to work with it.”
On Thursday, August 5, composer and saxophonist Ernest Dawkins will present the world premiere of Beltway to Bronzeville, a new large-scale work commissioned by the Jazz Institute of Chicago. The piece, intended to reflect the history of the south-side neighborhood where Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Ma Rainey, Muddy Waters, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, and other African-American artists and writers lived and worked in the first half of this century, will be performed by the South Shore Cultural Center Gallery 37 Youth Jazz Ensemble with guest soloists Ari Brown (tenor saxophone), Orbert Davis (trumpet), and Steve Berry (trombone). The concert takes place at 7 PM at Stateway Park, 3658 S. State, and admission is free. For more info call 312-747-1430.
