Ventura’s Crusading Improviser Gets Back in the Groove

For most of the ‘90s, Jeff Kaiser, with horn in hand and a crusader’s zeal, has done more than his share to charge up the local new-music scene. He has presented his own music, straddling jazz, classical and pure improvisation, while also fulfilling an avant-impresario function, promoting performances from out-of-towners.

Now, after an almost two-year hiatus from the scene he spawned, Kaiser is returning to action.

This Saturday night, Kaiser will present his own work for a double quartet, and plans to resume the new-music concert series he began in 1989. With collaborator and co-conspirator Keith McMullen, Kaiser has also started a newsletter called “phMENTUM.”

Saturday’s concert finds Kaiser showcasing some of the finer improvisers in Los Angeles and beyond, including multi-reedist Vinnie Golia, reed player Gene Doi, trombonist Michael Vlatkovich, vibraphonist Brad Dutz, bassists Jim Connolly and Hannes Giger, and drummer Rich West.

As with many of Kaiser’s works, the concept began outside the musical realm, with the study of the Greek myth of Marsayas, who was flayed. The narrative germ, though, has been thoroughly processed and abstracted, he said, almost beyond recognition.

After writing the music and securing a Ventura City grant for the project, he approached poet Marsha de la O to provide a text element, and her poem supplied the work’s title, “Nothing Is Not Breath.”

Although improvisation and the tools of jazz are used, Kaiser is uncomfortable describing the piece as jazz.

Is he saying that jazz has become a dirty word?

“I don’t know,” he said, laughing. “There are people in creative improvised music who refuse to have the tag jazz applied to their music. They consider themselves more in line with the academic tradition. It’s funny sometimes. All these definitions create splits, like in the church.”

Kaiser is happy living and working in his native burg of Ventura. Here, in the cultural outskirts, he said, “It’s easier to fall between the cracks of the isms. It’s OK to perform what we will here.”

* Jeff Kaiser Double Quartet, Saturday at 8 p.m. at Ventura City Hall, 500 Poli St., Ventura. Tickets are $6; 654-4082.

*

Local Hero: Internationally renowned composer Henry Brant, going strong at 84, has lived in Santa Barbara for more than a decade. Although he periodically presents music in the area, more often he’s heading out of town, places like New York and Vienna.

Last week, Brant could at least be found in the extended neighborhood, premiering a new piece in San Francisco as part of the fourth annual new-music oriented “Other Minds” festival. For his new piece “Homeless People,” Brant himself was the only one onstage, playing piano with mallets and other extended techniques, while members of the fine Onyx String Quartet were sent to the corners of the Cowell Theater, and accordionist Richard Yaus--the voice of the street--was perched in the middle.

The sum effect of the intriguing score, with its intentional loose ends and mobile structure, was that of simultaneous conversations and strained communication. Brant used homelessness as a social and existential reference point, in a musical setting and in real space.