Cleveland Free Times • May 16, 2001
Birthing
the
Avant-Garde
How Josh Smith and Birth
created a local
audience
for the cutting
edge by Harvey Pekar
At 21, Lakewood’s Josh Smith has achievements to his credit that many of his peers won’t attain in a lifetime. He already plays jazz soprano, alto and tenor saxophone on a world-class level, and he’s sparked an interest in experimental music in Northeast Ohio that may be modest in scope, but is still nearly unprecedented.
Smith appears with the co-op trio Birth, also containing bassist Jeremy Bleich and drummer Joe Tomino, at the Happy Dog on Friday along with the band of trumpeter Cuong Vu, a highly regarded figure in New York’s downtown scene.
Over the past year and a half, Smith has worked with local club owners to bring to Cleveland some of the finest avant-garde musicians on the planet: Joe Maneri, the Other Quartet, Tim Berne, Chris Speed, Chris Jonas, Brad Shepik and Cleveland Heights native Dan Plonsey. And, due to his efforts, these shows have done quite well. Over 200 people came to see Speed at his first Happy Dog gig, while Berne had an audience of 135 at Lakewoods Blind Lemon. This is amazing: as great as these musicians are, these bands don’t even draw that much in most New York clubs. And elsewhere, well, the night before the Other Quartet pulled in 150 at the Happy Dog, they’d drawn two customers in Pittsburgh, and then went on to get 10 in Chicago.
Not that Speed, Berne and the Other Quartet are household names in Cleveland, but they appeared on the same program as Birth, which has a few hundred devoted fans who keep in contact with Smith through his e-mail newsletters (get on the list at www.birthsound.com). When called, they often show up at these unique gigs, even if they consider Birth the main attraction. As Smith notes in a phone interview, "Once people have been turned on to our music, I want to open up the listening audience to creative music they wouldn’t otherwise have discovered."
No doubt he’s right that they could use the guidance. Birth doesn’t seem to attract many traditional jazz fans; instead, their audience here consists mainly of young people interested in new musical experiences. Many are into alternative rock and electronica. They get off on the exciting, kaleidoscopically changing drum and bass rhythms of Tomino and Bleich, and the fact that ‘Birth uses electronic equipment and effects such as loops, pedals and a pitch shifter. But Birth’s music is advanced and sophisticated in other ways as well. The group employs multisectioned compositions, metric modulation and polymeters. Most of their music is based on sparse, preset foundations such as basslines or tonal centers. Smith has aiready evolved a unique saxophone style, rooted in the work of John Coltrane, Dewey Redman, Joe Lovano, Tim Berne, Chris Speed and, most recently, Joe Maneri, a master of microtonal improvisation. An excellent technician with a penetrating tone, Smith plays lines that are both complex and logically constructed.
The artists who Smith has brought to Cleveland clearly appreciate this skill. Smith brought them here simply because he was a fan and wanted to work with them. But after hearing Josh’s work, they were excited about him, and as a consequence, he’s toured with Maneri, Jonas and Plonsey. Currently, Smith seems to be on the verge of attaining national and international attention. Aside from impressing these highly respected artists, he’s also impressed New York audiences. Soon, Birth will record their second album, scheduled for fall issue. After its release, the band plans to tour the Northeast and make their appearance on the West Coast. Right now, Cleveland works well for Josh as a touring base between New York and Chicago. But, he notes, "New York is on the horizon. The question is when. There’s always a community of creative musicians in New York and the scene there is consistent on its own. I would like to tap into a community of musicians who are pushing themselves and experimenting. Being in Cleveland, I feel I’m always the one doing the pushing, but in New York I would be stimulated in ways that couldn’t happen here."
Josh, Tomino and Bleich are not the only talented avant-gardists to emerge from Northeast Ohio recently. Others include alto man Aaron Au Shaikh, bassist Kurt Kothheimer, guitarist Dan Dockrell, and the older but very modern drummer Scott Davis. But they come and they go. The problem facing all is the lack of support that avant-garde artists have been facing throughout much of the past century. The public was eventually able to catch up with 19th-century visionary artists such as Van Gogh, Beethoven and Baudelaire. However, the works of 20th-century groundbreakers from James Joyce to Arnold Schonberg to Jackson Pollock still confound readers, listeners and viewers as they did 50 to 100 years ago. Perhaps it’s beyond the interest or ability of most people to ever understand, say, Schonberg’s 1906 Chamber Symphony. Retro art has been popular for some time, after all, and Ken Burns was able to get away with ignoring the last 35 years of jazz development in his PBS series Jazz.
In any event, gifted. innovative people like Josh Smith continue to emerge, and the avant-garde continues to inch forward. One can only hope that these artists will somehow find enough of an audience to support their inspired efforts. For the moment, in the most unlikely place, Smith has.
The Cuong Vu Trio and Birth
The Happy Dog
