POP MUSIC REVIEW : East Village Improv From the Ordinaires

At a sound level more appropriate to Motley Crue at the Forum than to fiddle players in the tiny Cafe Largo, the Ordinaires’ show on Tuesday seemed to be in the classic jammin’ amateur mold of second-level East Village improvisation: eight bars of fake Schubert leading into 24 of something that sounds like--but isn’t--Hendrix’s “Manic Depression”; fake Indian film music with fake Cab Calloway breaks.

The all-instrumental New York nonet (a couple of violinists, a cellist, two reed players, two guitarists, a bassist and a drummer with a deep Mitch Mitchell fixation) inspired the kind of frisson in the audience that the Kronos Quartet usually gets with its version of “Purple Haze.” The Ordinaires are famous for their screeching version of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir,” which got some MTV play last year and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that real strings can indeed sound like a Mellotron instead of the other way round. (The band sounds a lot better on paper than it does in concert.)

But somehow, for all of the Ordinaires’ willful, record-collector eclecticism, the band usually sounded like the score to a quickie European sex flick . . . when it wasn’t mired in the noisy Captain Beefheart surfisms common to any art band anywhere.