Internet Collective Helps Artists Get Heard

As jazz labels consolidate and shrink rosters, more and more musicians are beingleft to their own devices when it comes to recording and distributing their music. The Internet has brought unsigned artists a measure of accessibility to the jazz audience, but getting noticed among the burgeoning number of commercial and individual Web sites, as well as the resulting expense of posting such notice, can be discouraging.

In a move that recalls the cooperatives formed in the 1800s on the frontier’s edge by farmers who pooled their resources to deliver their crops, a host of locally based musicians, all with reputations that far exceed the Los Angeles County borders, have joined together on the technological frontier to bring their music to the public. The venture, known as e-musicgallery.com, brings together a dozen musicians under one banner to record their own compositions and make them available on the Internet.

Many of the participants, including saxophonists Bennie Maupin and Bob Sheppard, pianist John Beasley, bassist Bob Hurst and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington, will gather tonight and Saturday at the Club Brasserie in the Bel-Age Hotel to launch the venture with concerts that will be recorded and broadcast over the Web beginning next week.

In addition to airing live concerts and providing MP3 samples of their work for free over the Internet, the Web site will allow fans to purchase songs from the various artists and construct their own compilation CDs.

“This is really the future of creative music,” says pianist Beasley. “For once the artist will be in control. It’s a chance to rewrite the rule book.”

Beasley says the idea came together with help from recording engineer Gary Denton, whosehotdigitaldog.com Web site offers downloads (with the artists’ permission) from Beasley, saxophonists Paul Carman and Kim Richmond, the USC Jazz Studies Department Big Band, multi-instrumentalist Vinny Golia and others (the hotdigitaldog.com Web site can be used to access e-musicgallery.com until the e-music site is fully available sometime next week). From there, Beasley says he just called his friends--those with “an artistic mentality,” he says--and the group held meetings to discuss royalty and intellectual property issues.

“They’re all great musicians and composers with impressive credentials,” Beasley says of his colleagues. “But because of the way the record business is today, they just weren’t getting any play.”

In addition to music, Beasley says the site will eventually contain biographical material, links to other jazz Web sites and interviews of big-name artists--not necessarily e-musicgallery members--by their fellow musicians. Information on the Club Brasserie shows: (310) 854-1111.

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Sacred Music: When drummer Louie Bellson takes the stage at USC’s Bovard Auditorium March 5 with a jazz band, jazz choir and string section to premiere his new jazz suite “Sacred Songs,” he’ll be acting on a suggestion made to him by Duke Ellington more than three decades ago.

Bellson was Ellington’s drummer in 1965, when Ellington premiered his landmark “Sacred Concert” at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

“That was quite an experience for me,” says Bellson, “something that really made an impression. And from that time on, Duke kept shooting these little things by me. ‘You should do a piece like this; you should do something like this of your own in the near future.’ And I’ve always kept it in the back of my mind.”

Bellson’s 12-part suite will be performed by the Thorton Studio Jazz Band (directed by John Thomas), the Thorton String Ensemble and the Thorton Jazz Chorus. The drummer will play and conduct at various times during the concert, as will his orchestrators Buddy Baker, Jack Hayes and Mark Lathan. The concert will also feature Bellson’s “Jazz Ballet,” a piece premiered by Dizzy Gillespie’s orchestra in 1962, and Bellson’s recent composition “Y2K Blues.” The ensembles are scheduled to record “Sacred Songs” in the week after the concert.

The 75-year-old Bellson, who admits to paring down his performance schedule in recent times, says he feels great. “When I sit down to play, any ailment that I might have disappears and the music grabs me. I’m smart enough to know that there comes a time when [a drummer] has to cut back and just play a few slow tempos. Thankfully, that time is not now.”

Information on the “Sacred Songs” concert: (213) 740-7111.

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L.A.CD: Drummer Peter Erskine and keyboardist Alan Pasqua, joined by bassist Dave Carpenter, make a case for intelligent melodiousness on the two-CD set “Live at Rocco” from Erskine’s Fuzzy Music label. Composed almost entirely of original music, the discs spotlight Pasqua’s lyrical sense of composition and Erskine’s holistic approach to drumming (https://www.fuzzymusic.com). . . . Bassist Todd Sickafoose fronts a thoroughly modern quintet in the manner of fellow bassist Dave Holland or M-base saxophonist Steve Coleman. His new recording “Dog Outside” is a collection of originals that mirror the pace and moods of contemporary life. It ranks as one of the best new discs to be released so far this year (https://www.evandermusic.com). . . . Guitarist Justin Morrell, who makes fine contributions to the Sickafoose CD, frames his play with trumpet, tenor sax, trombone and bass clarinet on his ambitious “Septet” recording (https://www.sonicfrenzy.com). . . . Multi-reed player and composer Vinny Golia has a new document from his 30-piece Large Ensemble, “The Other Bridges (Oakland 1999)” (Nine Winds). Some of the pieces on the two-CD set were aired at LACMA’s Bing Auditorium on Jan. 31, when the ensemble premiered additional music from Golia (https://members.aol.com/ninewinds/).

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Free Jazz: Pan American jazz and Latin band Tolu, with saxophonist Justo Almario and drummer Alex Acun~a, appears in the Grand Hall of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Performing Arts Center of Los Angeles County, Sunday at 2 p.m. in another of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz’s free “Informances.” Information: (213) 821-1500.