Jeff Kaiser - 17 Themes For Ockodektet
(pfMENTUM)
What a birthday party... When Jeff Kaiser turned 40, he got together with seventeen of his closest musical friends at Ventura City Hall and recorded 17 Themes for Ockodektet, a seventy-three minute triumph that, at its best, offers some of the most successful large ensemble avant garde jazz heard by these ears. Writing and arranging avant garde jazz for an ensemble this large can be a gargantuan task, one that's surely proven difficult for more than a few jazz legends, but, here, Kaiser is up to the task.
A composer and trumpet player, Jeff Kaiser's long been a fixture in the Ventura area, and he's made a name for himself as both a performer and academic all over the world. Maybe this is why people like Vinny Golia, G.E. Stinson, Wayne Peet, and Ernesto Diaz-Infante all lent their talents to the night's festivities. Kaiser's compositions are far from simple, and there's a cohesiveness present in the recordings that suggests the performers had spent some time with the material before performing it. It would be far too laborious and needless to list each and every musician present on the recording, but the instrumentation utilized includes woodwinds, trumpets, trombone, tuba, guitars (acoustic and electric), electronics, organ, contrabasses, and, of course, percussion. Kasier's pieces do a great job of making the listener forget how many players are present, not because they ignore anyone or simply layer multiple performances of the same part, but because his writing is so economical and well-planned that sounds are rarely wasted, and even in 17 Themes... most crowded skronk-fests, there's very little in the way of errant noise or pointless posturing. The Ockodektet creates a lush, deep sound, with the basses of Jim Connolly and Scott Walton providing a perfectly produced low-end tone that acts as the ballast for much of the disc.
And though it seems every instrument gets a chance or two to solo, another surprising aspect of 17 Themes... is just how important every one of the seventeen musicians is to the overall product. Kaiser leads the group through delicate fluttering, cinematic crescendos, chunky rhythmic numbers, and hailstorms of tumultuous improv, all with an attention to detail that makes almost every moment of the album not only singularly original, but also totally arresting. The quality and depth of tone of the DAT recording of the performance are quite remarkable, and though its Jeff Kaiser that's rightly the disc's focal point, the music on 17 Themes... is the creation of seventeen equal parts that all play an integral part in the making of the whole.
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