January 18–25, 1996

critic pick|jazz

Jimmy Stewart & Kuntu

"If the people who come to this concert are expecting to hear standards, they're in the wrong place," says alto saxophonist/composer Jimmy Stewart of his upcoming concert by his band Kuntu at the Community Education Center this weekend.

There will be no renditions of "Stella By Starlight" nor any other time honored chestnut.

What should folks expect from Kuntu, which features Jeffrey Reed and Lamar Prince on percussion, Bruce Eisenbeil (guitar), Todd Margasak (trumpet and cornet) and Umar Hakim (tenor sax)? At it's most basic their gig is jazz, where sections with structure lead into long-form improvisation. Stewart says, "They should just be prepared to go along and perceive the music as sounds, quarter-tones, non-tempered music. The music is conceived as densities and cascades of pitches."

Stewart is a stalwart of free jazz, a sound born in response to musicians having grown tired of the structures and strictures of bebop. Stewart got into free jazz in the '60s when the freedom principle was a nascent concept in America.

"The idea was to stop using chord changes," he says, "We kicked out the underpinnings. Think of free verse, when all that's cut loose you have to come up with a set of different parameters."

The resultant avant garde music, which frequently featured squealing saxes and smashing drum passages, struck some as just going every which way with no apparent direction. Stewart begs to differ.

"It was never just that you let the guys go crazy and do whatever they want... Organization is the centerpiece of freedom. It sounds like an oxymoron, but that essentially has been the idea."

Many of the original free jazz crowd have left the movement and fallen back on more mainstream and commercially viable modes, but Stewart is forever transfixed by artistic expression of the free and the brave. Still, the saxophonist admits he's changed the way he approaches things.

"It's a constant creative process. As I get older I'm less frenetic and working toward codifying my ideas."

Jimmy Stewart & Kuntu: Fri. and Sat., Jan. 19 & 20, 8 p.m., at the Community Education Center, 3500 Lancaster Avenue, 397-3701.

— Deni Kasrel