Taking Little for Granted

When the MacArthur Foundation tracked down Ken Vandermark by phone last June to inform him he had won one of its “genius grants,” the Chicago avant-gardist was in no mood to talk. Midway through an East Coast tour, he and his Vandermark 5 had just driven for hours through torrential rain to a show in Chapel Hill, N.C. His nerves shot, he was busy unloading equipment--and perhaps dreading another night sleeping on someone’s floor, a common arrangement for the band’s self-financed jaunts.

Warily accepting the call, he heard an officious female voice ask him whether he was alone. When he said yes, he was informed of his no-strings-attached award of $265,000--and instructed not to share the news with anyone. Usually, Vandermark plays the tenor saxophone with a feverish, full-throated intensity. That night, he performed in a daze.

“A third of me was there, a third of me was tired, and a third was thinking this can’t be,” Vandermark said recently, sitting in his cluttered walk-up across from an elevated train line on the city’s North Side. The money, part of which he has invested for the future, hasn’t visibly changed his life beyond a batch of new bookcases, which are filled with CDs. But it has given him the wherewithal to record and tour with large groups he couldn’t otherwise float, pay his bandmates closer to what he thinks they deserve--and, you can be sure, improve their travel accommodations.

People outside Chicago were surprised and, in some cases, put out by the idea of a 34-year-old unknown, whose hard-working, self-deflecting ways don’t attract a lot of attention, joining Max Roach, Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor as a MacArthur fellow in jazz.

But for those who know his prolific efforts, the choice made sense. Chicago has long been a haven for free jazz, an improvisatory style that avoids conventional chord progressions and embraces atonality, frequently to screeching effect (cosmic visionary Sun Ra pioneered the genre here in the ‘50s). Vandermark has played a major role in boosting the city’s avant-garde activity to a level it hasn’t attained since the heyday of the venerable South Side collective the Assn. for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which recently celebrated its 35th anniversary.

Vandermark, who expresses his more mellifluous side on clarinets, has made the most of opportunities to perform two and three times a week in local clubs--an unheard-of situation in most cities, especially New York. He has led more than a dozen bands and documented most of them on record. In 1999, he released seven CDs on independent labels, including one by the Vandermark 5, a rock-friendly unit powered by electric guitar and thrusting horns, and two by his other working band, the propulsive DKV Trio.

His most thrilling 1999 album was by one of his special project bands, the Sound in Action Trio, an unusual unit featuring two complementary drummers that specializes in songs by Coleman and “energy music” avatar Albert Ayler. Another strong effort, by his Joe Harriott Project, features compositions by a forgotten saxophonist of the ‘60s who broke away from conventional restraints in London at the same time Coleman was introducing his “new thing” in New York.

“Ken is constantly looking to find new sides of his talent,” said saxophonist Mars Williams, leader of the popular acid-jazz band Liquid Soul, who has teamed with Vandermark in many groups. “There is no one who is more open-minded to different styles of music. His ability to fit into them and fuse them together is pretty amazing.”

But Vandermark’s contribution to the rising Chicago underground goes beyond his music. With John Corbett, a critic, record producer and experimental guitarist, he founded and programs a Wednesday night music series at the Empty Bottle, a scruffy bar on the Near West Side. Now in its fourth year, the series has appealed to younger listeners seeking alternatives to the alternative rock presented there the rest of the week.

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In addition to featuring a communal crop of local players ranging from the chamber-cool Chicago Underground Orchestra to the earthy 71-year-old tenor hero Fred Anderson, the Bottle has hosted a widening circle of European legends, including British saxophonist Evan Parker, German saxophonist Peter Brotzmann and Dutch drummer Han Bennink. The club’s rising profile is reflected in the deal it recently struck with England’s BBC Radio 3 to air delayed broadcasts of several shows a year and French MTV’s plans to document the fourth Empty Bottle Festival of Jazz and Improvised Music that concludes Monday.

Vandermark has been strongly influenced by the Europeans, whose use of multi-phonics, circular breathing techniques (which facilitate uninterrupted streams of notes) and other “extended techniques” has found receptive ears here. “The Chicago guys are much more oriented toward European improvising than any others I’ve met in the States,” said Brotzmann, whose appreciation for Chicago players led to the formation of his brazen, massive-sounding Chicago Tentet.

Naturally, it includes Vandermark, who will spend a chunk of his MacArthur dollars to take an expanded edition of the band on the road. Featuring New York bassist William Parker and Japanese trumpeter Tandori Hondo of Brotzmann’s Die Like a Dog band, it will hit the West next month with dates in San Francisco, Seattle and Portland and the Vancouver International Jazz Festival. Vandermark also will lead two of his groups.

Earlier this year, Vandermark dipped into his prize money to fly to Chicago esteemed British drummer Paul Lytton and standout young German trumpeter Axel Dorner for his new nine-piece Territory Band. In the space of two weeks, he wrote new songs for the ensemble, rehearsed it, led it at the Empty Bottle and took it into the recording studio. Characterized by seductively off-center swing harmonies, eerie breath tones, captivating dual drumming and shocking silences, the music couldn’t be more different from the Tentet’s--or just about anything in the Vandermark canon.

For all his ties to Europe, Vandermark is stylistically rooted in home soil. “Ken has thought a lot about what it’s like to be an American saxophonist,” Corbett said. “Just as Europeans reached a point years ago where they didn’t want to be like the American jazz musicians who influenced them, Americans are coming to terms with who they are by their contact with the Europeans.”

Vandermark is a passionate student of jazz tradition. He gives equal attention to albums by lesser-known figures such as Curtis Amy and Sonny Criss and legends such as Coleman Hawkins (whom he idolizes for remaining open to new styles) and Art Pepper.

Rhythm is a crucial element in Vandermark’s approach, as is reflected in his fondness for wide-open trios and his ongoing involvement with great drummers, including Hamid Drake, whose international connections also have contributed strongly to the elevation of Chicago’s avant-garde profile; former Sun Ra associate Robert Barry; and young Tim Mulvenna. “The way that soloists and drummers interact is overlooked a lot of the time, but that’s always been my focus,” Vandermark said. “If things are happening rhythmically, you can get away with a lot of stuff.”

Without formalizing the relationship between bebop and funk the way Brooklyn innovator (and native Chicagoan) Steve Coleman does, he makes those styles sing to each other across the open spaces of free jazz. Yet another of his recently recorded albums is a trio effort divided between songs by Funkadelic and Sun Ra.

“People put down funk,” Vandermark said. “They say playing those riffs is easy. Well, you try playing that stuff. It requires so much discipline. The music of James Brown is one of the highest achievements of the 20th century. What he did with rhythm, with those pockets of sound, was astounding.”

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A native of the Boston area, Vandermark was first exposed to free jazz during his teens by his father, a musicologist and music writer. But it wasn’t until later, when Ken heard a solo saxophone album by cult artist Joe McPhee, that he became hooked. “I heard this ballad, ‘Goodbye Tom B,’ and literally said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ It was so utterly beautiful and melodic, with these amazing multi-phonics. It was like an epiphany.”

Vandermark cut his teeth on Boston’s alternative scene, avoiding the leveling influence of the city’s standard-bearing Berklee College of Music. “Never in a million years would anyone there consider playing a note that is wrong,” he said dismissively. After studying film and music at Montreal’s McGill University, he moved to Chicago in 1989, impressed by the many venues musicians at his level could play.

His first important association was with eccentric, white-bearded multi-instrumentalist Hal Russell, whose NRG Ensemble drew attention to Chicago’s recharging avant-garde when it toured Europe and got signed to Germany’s prestigious ECM label. He took his place in NRG alongside Williams after Russell’s sudden death in 1992.

The exceptionally well-matched Vandermark and Williams retooled NRG into a more sharply focused, hook-driven, rock-friendly band without sacrificing its spontaneous edge. “If you can start to guess what someone’s gonna do onstage, you may as well stay home,” Vandermark said.

A plain-talking guy who fights fashion with his pre-Beatles look--crew cut, vintage camp shirts, cardigans, high-top sneakers--he boasts a dry sense of humor that eases the pressure of playing and performing some exceptionally difficult material. But when the new NRG lost some of its freewheeling fire--and found itself performing less and less, owing to Williams’ investment of time in Liquid Soul--he quit the band.

Now 35, Vandermark is impatient with the jazz press for giving his MacArthur fellowship so little coverage.

“Rock magazines picked up on it, which was really cool, but it was like a blip on the radar screen of the jazz media,” said Vandermark, who now has a rock-seasoned manager. “That was absurd. This was a big deal, not because of anything having to do with me, but because of its recognition of this music as a viable art. We’re constantly being told it’s not viable.

“People think that improvising is about a guy picking up his horn and just blowing whatever is in his head. Well, this music requires an immense amount of preparation and thought and concentration.”

And also plenty of moxie. At one point during the taping of the Territory Band, Lytton, a pioneer of European free jazz who tosses objects beneath his sticks to add incident and texture to his sound, poured water into a glass during a quiet stretch of music. Caught by surprise, his bandmates were challenged to make sense of it.

“I’m fascinated by the ways these guys create different routes for themselves every time they play,” Vandermark said. “Here he was, throwing a wrench in his own thing. It was so disruptive, and yet, it opened up so many things. At times like that, you just have to say to yourself, [screw] the skills and let’s see what happens if I do this. Playing this music is about more than letting go. It’s about jumping off with your eyes closed. The possibilities before you are infinite.”