Alligator’s Mondays New and Improvised : Experimental artists are featured in Santa Monica club’s New Music Monday series.

You might not like it. Not even the musicians who play it always like it; that’s a law of experimental music, “new” music, avant-garde , whatever you want to call it. Risking a kick from the classicist boot, you might even call it jazz. Why not? The word has been flexible enough to include ragtime, Dixieland, swing, be-bop, hard bop, modal, free jazz, jazz fusion. If they’re all jazz, they have only one thing in common: improvisation.

Improvisation is what Nels Cline, guitarist of the Nels Cline Trio, has in mind when he books the New Music Mondays he’s been hosting at Santa Monica’s Alligator Lounge for more than a year now.

And newness. Cline says what he puts on the Monday-night stage is about “a kind of skewed multiculturalism, the effects of people hearing a lot of stuff--how it changed them, and how they didn’t take the tried-and-true path and ended up with their own kind of music.” It’s a scene of individuals. At root, their music is what jazz always has been: change and challenge. It won’t accept models, and it won’t stand still.

For instance:

On the left side of the low stage, G. E. Stinson lets his fingers scratch out an almost funky guitar riff about three-quarters of the way to a standard realization before strangling it and beating it into a dissonant chord. He likes the effect, so he does it again. He’s come up with a rhythm out of this, and on the other side of the stage, bassist Steuart Liebig has picked up on it and starts inserting precise slides, pops and echo-effect digital washes into the spaces.

In back, Joe Berardi performs the opposite of standard drummer chores: instead of reinforcing the newly established beat, he plays off it with lopsided rolls, tinkles and crashes.

In the middle, seated on a high stool, Japanese vocalist Kaoru moans a word, cuts in a phrase. Her microphone is plugged into an effects machine; she twiddles its controls to sample and repeat her vocals for rhythmic input, or to cathedralize them for godvoice authority. Or, since the sounds of the rest of the band are also leaking into her microphone, she can amplify her associates, turn them back on themselves, or mash them into a new paste.

The mass gets denser. The in tervals between beats gets smaller and smaller, until everything blends into a roar. Stinson’s guitar starts feeding back; Liebig’s bass follows suit. Berardi is pounding and thrashing now. It sounds as if the roof has been ripped off of hell.

This New Music Monday performance is by Unique Cheerful Events, a name Stinson settled upon after getting tired of changing the band’s name for every gig. Typical? Here, there’s no such thing. Next up could be a neoclassical improvisational chamber trio of violin, flute and bass clarinet, or a steel-grip ‘90s version of a free-jazz quintet.

Format, doormat. What matters is the level of commitment, invention and skill, and the Monday Alligator crowd knows about those. Look: people are listening. Teeth fluorescent under the purple influence of black light (plugged in so you can appreciate the primitive black-light paintings that glare from the blood-red walls), the audience, except for that occasional leather fetishist, skinhead or orange-mop, doesn’t looks strange enough for the music.

Squinting at the stage, patrons tilt pint glasses of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (on tap), dressed in jeans, tennis shoes, faded plaid shirts or T’s, hair unfussed. Boho maybe, but more like post-hippie. Age range of 25 to 45. People who read books and listen to music.

Hunched on a bar stool, regular customer Andy Rotter says he used to be a business litigator, and came in contact with musical avanticians when his firm did some pro bono work for the Independent Composers Assn. in the early ‘80s. “People come here, and they can take some chances,” he says. “Some things bomb, but that’s one of the purposes of the series.”

Not to bomb, but to take a chance of bombing. No matter what, though, says another visitor, San Gabriel resident Shiroshi Goto, “It makes you think differently.”

The scene’s so-what intelli gence rules out faddism, and indeed the history of experimental music is too unglamorous, intellectual and obscure to make it a decent gimmick or dilettante fixation.

Twentieth-century European composers like Schoenberg, Bartok and Berg, bored with classical harmony, rhythm and melody, got the bomb rolling in the early 1900s. But they weren’t improvisation-minded. It took later theorists like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen to reshuffle concepts of what composition was, and the influence of ‘60s explorers confused things more.

Beginning in the ‘50s, Gunther Schuller and others merged classical and jazz elements into a “third stream.” Pianist Cecil Taylor made a unified message from thousands of flying bits of condensed information. In the mid-’60s, saxists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler pushed sonic/rhythmic abstraction as far as it could go. Anthony Braxton created a complex, static world of theoretical alienation and refused to swing.

Here in Los Angeles, Charles Mingus experimented with European neoclassical forms and harmonies in the mid-’50s. Later in the decade, Texan Ornette Coleman formed a band here to perform his free, non-chord-based conceptions. Coming out of the mold-breaking bands of Chico Hamilton and Mingus, L.A. windman Eric Dolphy superimposed atonality onto the rhythms of Charlie Parker and worked tough new meters and ensemble colors into his compositions.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, the local focus for experimental music slid down to Long Beach, where the California Outside Music Assn., organized by Titus Levi and currently helmed by Walter Zooi, lobbied Long Beach clubs for rare gigs for its members--many of whom play the Alligator Mondays--and hosted a yearly Day of Music that showcased the outest of the out. Until May, 1993, when Cline shoehorned his trio into the Alligator slot and took on responsibility for filling the rest of the bill each week, no L.A. venue regularly booked the weird stuff.

But Cline doesn’t think his own music is especially weird. “I don’t think of myself as an avant-gardist,” he says, “I think of myself as kind of a convoluter of tradition.”

He and his twin brother, drummer Alex Cline, grew up listening to rock bands like the Allman Brothers, Jimi Hendrix and Quicksilver Messenger Service (“I liberally rob John Cipollina”) and then ‘70s fusioneers such as Ralph Towner, Tony Williams and Miles Davis’ electric groups (“We know every note on ‘Live/Evil’--I bet we can sing every solo”).

After a time spent playing “noisy, drony” rock, the brothers started taking themselves more seriously as musicians and improved their technical and theoretical chops. In the ‘80s, their atmospheric, inventive chamber band with violinist Jeff Gauthier and bassist Eric von Essen, Quartet Music, was one of the few projects that couldn’t be dropped into an easy file of jazz, classical or fusion.

Sometimes concurrently, Cline worked in the critically loved pop/rock/funk band Bloc with guitarist Nick Kirgo, bassist Liebig, drummer Chris Mancinelli and vocalist Camille Henry. They made an album for A&M;, but never caught fire commercially.

Closing each New Music Monday (unless Cline goes solo or duo), the Nels Cline Trio, Cline’s current workshop with drummer Michael Preussner and bassist Bob Mair, shows all the guitarist’s background. His playing can be delicate, melodic and meditative, the qualities that fit in best in Quartet Music.

Other times, his twisting modern-bop flair could stack him alongside John Scofield. But he’s most entertaining at the extremes of rock noisemaking where Hendrix once ruled, using his guitar as a direct emotional vehicle.

“Some people have suggested that it’s because of my frustration and bitterness that I’ve become a more interesting guitar player,” says Cline. But he wants his feelings to translate into something more universal. “Beauty is what I want to do. Though my conception of beauty these days is something pretty raging.”

At the other two corners, drummer Preussner and bassist Mair display the kind of instant communication that comes only from playing together a lot. They shift from one edge of the sonic scale to the other without seeming even to think about it. And that’s especially remarkable considering they have no fixed repertoire. Cline is writing all the time, and he’ll often declare a given Monday a “tribute” night, wherein the trio will perform the music of another artist he likes--Wayne Shorter, Polly Jean Harvey, Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon--or focus on the ineffable qualities that define some iconic personality such as Charlotte Rampling or Anjelica Huston. These tributes may also come with visual mood enhancers--one night, supermodel posters. “That was pretty undignified. I had a great time,” Cline says.

Cline has released a couple of fine CDs on the German Enja label as well as a pair of collectible chaos-intensive 45s that you’d probably be able to find only at Rhino Records, where Cline used to work. (These days he pays the bills by working at a bookstore.) Good as the records are, the sight of Cline onstage, davening over his strings, stomping his effects pedal or wiggling his whammy bar, is something to remember.

The experimental-music com munity is tight. Many of the same musicians reconfigure to form different entities with entirely different sounds.

One New Music Monday regular is Other Parts, a trio featuring flutist/vocalist Emily Hay (a member of U-Totem and one of three rotating hosts of the Wednesday-night experimental-classical KXLU radio show “Trilogy” along with NMM perennials vocalist Bonnie Barnett and saxist Kim Richmond). Along with the group’s instrumental interplay, Hay improvises ministories and melodies vocally. Like many of the scene’s most versatile artists, she’s classically trained but not classically constrained.

“A lot of it is imagery inside my head,” says Hay, who works as a paralegal. “And now that I’ve been singing for a few years, imagery that comes out of words, experiences, or maybe a feeling I’m getting from the audience. It’s also interacting with the other musicians sonically, and whatever their mood is. And it’s being able to be on your feet and answer someone else’s instrument or sound.”

Going outside is a choice; it’s not like these people can’t do anything else. Unique Cheerful Events’ Kaoru: “I was doing music business in Japan for five years--that R&B;, Top 40 kind of thing. I released, like, five albums, and I wanted to change direction, but all the record-company people hated it, because they wanted me to stay on the same kind of thing. So I just came here.”

Here, she could break rules.

“I didn’t like the idea of the singer being in front of the band--I always wanted to interfere with the other instruments, and I could get different kinds of tones using the effects box.”

After his hitch with Bloc, Liebig also felt he had used up what interested him about popular music. He now plays with violinist Gauthier and trumpeter John Fumo (the excellent drummer Jeff McCutchen recently died) in Quartetto Stig, a composed/improvised project whose 9 Winds CD, Hommages Obliques, is one of the music’s most fully realized artifacts.

“There’s this thing about moving forward and trying to find out what you find attractive,” Liebig says. “I got into music-history classes at Northridge. I went nuts, hearing all this stuff that I’d never heard, and some of it I hated, and some of it I went, ‘Wow, this is really great.’ ”

No discussion of L.A. edge music can omit Vinnie Golia. Like Kaoru, he started as a painter. One by one, he began to pick up woodwind instruments; he’s now proficient on 20 or 30. Studies with Anthony Braxton and a careful ear to early Charles Mingus and a variety of modern classical music pushed him to become the scene’s most prodigious composer and most traveled ambassador. He’s also its greatest promoter, through his 9 Winds label, on which he has released recordings by many whose music is too extreme for the major labels and most of the minors.

Asked to point out someone in the club who might serve as an impartial observer untainted by his acquaintance, Golia looks around doubtfully. “I don’t know,” he says. “I’ve been around a long time. I’m a pretty big stain.”

Naturally, Golia is a regular New Music Mondays performer, often in ad hoc duos or trios.The Alligator is hardly big enough to display one of his acclaimed Large Ensembles of about 20 musicians, but any venue can be made to fit Golia, who, as one of his album titles says, is “worldwide and portable.” Echoes of his jagged, intense compositional/improvisational style can be heard in the music of many Alligator habitues, many of whom he’s employed in one context or another.

In addition to the L.A. army, Cline sometimes books outsiders of national stature. Mark Dresser awed the assembly with his compositions for solo bass--no one expected to be nailed to the floor by one guy with a four-string. And maybe the most uncompromised performer was saxist Charles Gayle, who has made a media minisplash by getting his total-obliteration spiritual music heard despite being homeless on the streets of New York.

Says Cline of Gayle, who stayed with him when he was in town, “His mind was exploded by Coltrane. He carries everything he needs on his person. Even the food he was planning on eating, he already had with him when he stayed here. He had a special way that he ate it. And we gave him a Diet Pepsi. He liked that Diet Pepsi--he was very excited about it. He drank half of it one morning, and half of it the next day.”

These are the rewards of being your own person. Small, but savorable.

So why do they do it?

Hay: “I think that it arises out of abstract reasoning and thought. I think that to be able to open yourself up to hear sound abstractly is an unusual thing.”

Liebig: “Overamped, hyperthyroid curiosity. Sometimes the music is really annoying, and sometimes it’s, like, godhead. And it’s an eye-of-the beholder thing--you and I can look at the same thing and it’s totally different.”

And who are they?

Cline: “Seekers--people who want to be enlightened in some way, or challenged. The spirit of challenge in art is not something that one things of when one thinks of America.”

Especially Los Angeles.

Liebig: “People tend to think that L.A. is sort of the Motley Crue town, and they don’t think that anything real is happening.”

But who cares what they think?

Cline: “I still think that people are gonna find out about this music and dig it. I know that seems really dumb. I sense the interest in people 10, 15 years younger than me. I sense a lot of interest.”

And what makes him keep doing these shows?

“I’m astounded and humbled by hearing people who will confidently set things on their ear.”

* The Alligator Lounge is located at 3221 Pico Blvd, Santa Monica, (310) 449-1844.