Are You Ready for Some Indie Music?

NEW YORK--In Midtown Manhattan, a party the size of several city blocks was in full swing, celebrating three of the great American pastimes: arena rock, football and making money.

Bon Jovi was on a huge makeshift stage in Times Square, where 500,000 revelers gathered and brought traffic to a standstill as the National Football League kicked off its season with a multimillion-dollar display of chest-thumping. It contrasted sharply with another, smaller party underway 35 blocks to the south, marking the 10th anniversary of the Chicago independent label Thrill Jockey Records.

Over three nights that concluded early Sunday, 18 of the label’s acts performed at Union Plaza and the Bowery Ballroom to a total audience of about 2,500--the last two nights sellouts. This was not a smashing success by the standards of Bon Jovi, the NFL or any major record label, but in an independent scene that thrives on a small but discerning and intensely committed audience, it was a rousing success.

In 1992, Bettina Richards, 37, quit a cushy job as a major-label talent scout to run Thrill Jockey out of her New York City apartment. Soon after, she moved to Chicago, because the cornerstone acts of her label--Tortoise, the Sea and Cake, Freakwater, Eleventh Dream Day--were based there. She now runs her operation out of an office on the south side of the city, and her operation is emblematic of a Chicago music scene with a long tradition of doing things differently than the multinational conglomerates that dominate the record industry.

Even in a city where indie labels rule, Thrill Jockey is something of an oddity, its mishmash roster encompassing everything from free jazz to hip-hop. The New York shows put that mind-blowing variety on display over three nights, quietly challenging the belief proffered by commercial radio and big record labels that consumers like their music in narrow, easy-to-comprehend slices. If that’s true, the opening-night juxtaposition of Bobby Conn and Fred Anderson bordered on the absurd. And what to make of a bill that included both 8 Bold Souls, a brass-heavy octet that straddles the worlds of Duke Ellington and Sun Ra, and the German electronics duo Mouse on Mars? Yet it all somehow worked, the audience respectful of even the subtly articulated ambient soundscapes of Vienna’s Radian, and the one-man-band novelties of the Lonesome Organist.

Conn and his violin-playing sidekick, Monica BouBou, came dressed in drag for the occasion, the mascara dribbling down the singer’s cheeks providing visual counterpoint to his mock-opera tales of decadence, drugs and misguided dreams. He was a glam-rock Sammy Davis Jr., his falsetto dramatics evoking Iron Maiden, “Soul Train” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” The regal Anderson followed, hunched over his tenor saxophone with an intensity that at first seemed to cow his young accompanists, guitarist Jeff Parker and drummer Chad Taylor. When Parker took a solo as if he were carefully threading his way through a minefield, Anderson swept underneath him with a well-timed series of low notes, throwing a protective sonic bearhug around his protege.

If Parker understandably deferred to the legendary Anderson, he was very much at home in Tortoise’s two headlining shows. The guitarist brought a sense of play to the tight arrangements, his dissonant incisions and oblique chord choices frolicking over John Herndon’s complex yet enthusiastically insistent time signatures. Backing singer-songwriter Sue Garner on a tumultuous version of Yoko Ono’s “We’re All Water,” Parker morphed from Chet Atkins-style country licks to James “Blood” Ulmer-style note clusters.

Taylor was mesmerizing in tandem with Rob Mazurek as the Chicago Underground Duo, which stands at the nexus of free jazz and avant-garde electronics. The drummer tapped out melodies on vibraphone even as he kept the groove rolling on his trap-kit, while Mazurek played trancy cornet patterns over funhouse rhythm loops generated on computer.

The category-defying approach reached its zenith with 8 Bold Souls, which blended the melodicism of traditional big-band jazz in the ensemble passages with a futuristic, experimental zeal in the solos. Isaiah Jackson’s staccato bursts stretched well beyond the be-bop cliches associated with the trombone, while Harrison Bankhead brought a thundering authority to his contra-bass lines that kept the volatile ensemble swinging madly.

Mouse on Mars exuded a similar charm and virtuosity, albeit with a different set of tools. Andi Toma and Jan St. Werner stood behind a mass of wires, samplers and computers, generating beats and then mutating them on the fly. They improvised a 30-minute psychedelic collage of beats, tones and sound effects, from bullfrog croaks to backfiring vacuum cleaners, all the while rocking the house with a set aimed at both rearranging heads and realigning hips.

“I did not know what to expect,” St. Werner said the next night of the audience’s roaring response. “But it was good. The audience seemed ready for anything, even us.”

St. Werner was attending the festival’s final night as a fan, not as a performer. The computer guru from Germany applauded Prewitt, the Chicago guitarist who paid tribute from the stage to the label that the two artists from different musical worlds improbably share.

“Good things endure,” Prewitt said. “So see you through the next 10 years.”

Greg Kot is rock music critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.