Western Edge

As the ongoing history of West Coast jazz is being written, the details are getting confusing, but in a healthy way.

On the surface, we’re saddled with the reputation of the West Coast Cool school, which took hold in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

There are also plenty of polished mainstream jazz players making their home on the left coast, many of whom find ripe day-jobbing in the studios.

But beneath the surface, the West Coast has also made, and continues to make, potent contributions to the experimental and avant-garde end of the spectrum.

From the Bay Area, for instance, comes saxophonist and scene-maker Dan Plonsey, who will make his Ventura debut Saturday night at City Hall.

Expect nothing sacred or straight-ahead from the aggregation he calls “The Human Behavio Orchestra and Chorus.”

Onstage, we’ll hear Plonsey’s wife, Mantra Ben-Ya’akova, Vinny Golia, Steuart Liebig, Michael Vlatkovich, Billy Mintz, Supermarky and the concert’s co-sponsor, Ventura trumpeter Jeff Kaiser.

Plonsey is a Cleveland native who made a happy landing in the Bay Area scene several years ago and has been both a maker of music and of music situations there, leading the weekly new music/jazz series of shows under the name Beanbender’s for the past four years.

He has produced a large body of compositions, including a piece performed last year by the respected New York new music institution Bang on a Can.

And, not incidentally, he plays a mean saxophone. Of his many recordings on assorted small, arty labels, his 1997 album Ivory Bill, on the Music & Arts label, is a sonic and saxophonic joy ride.

It’s a solo project of multiple dimensions, with no less than 22 tracks, many of which have been thickly layered with overdubbed sax parts.

Humor abounds, and so do moments of lustrous beauty (as in “Wedding Music for Mantra and Dan”) and wild atonal assaults, sometimes recalling another Cleveland-bred sax wild man, the late Albert Ayler. Plonsey’s conceptualist tendencies, honed in studies at Yale and Mills College, also show up, in compositions that make their own rules and, as he has said, “arise from the drama of conflict: at least two ideas, one sensible and one absurd, set in motion together or against one another.”

On the album, Plonsey pays tribute to his acknowledged heroes, such as left-of-center legends Anthony Braxton (with whom he studied at Mills) and the late Sun Ra, but also bebop icon Charlie Parker, with keening, Braxton-esque versions of the Parker tunes “Merry-Go-Round” and “Ah-Leu-Cha.”

From the standard repertoire, we also hear dry comic relief in the form of Vernon Duke’s “I Can’t Get Started,” sung badly and blandly by the artist, segueing into the delirious, multiple tenor sax cascade of scales that is “Solaris.”

West Coast jazz rarely sounded so raucous and smart. No doubt, he’ll bring a new brand of fervor to City Hall.

DETAILS

Dan Plonsey, Saturday at Ventura City Hall, 500 Poli St. in Ventura. Tickets are $7; 676-9660.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.