In the process of loss of blood and Starlicker - review

Willie Davis for The New York TimesStarlicker (left), John Herndon battery, Rob Mazurek on cornet and Jason Adasiewicz on vibraphone, on Wednesday.

By the end of the 1990s, the dominant jazz extended was looking around you and worry. Occupies a flicker of interest from major record labels, anticipating the decline of the audience as the "downtown jazz" scene grew diffuse and indefinable, he left his parents and watched rear and East Research: Ornette Coleman, Lennie TristanoJimmy Giuffre, fusion of early and progressive rock, the Art Ensemble of Chicago and the music of the Balkans and Hazzans. A whole field of bands gravitated towards the intense polyphony, liturgical melodies and the clank: drums playing gross-up rhythmic, rushing in time and prevent your pleasure, you deliberately designs.

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The new jazz has since evolved. It is less jagged and shyly transgressive, more studied and applied. He went deeper into harmony and odd or modification of meters; It is more accurate in every sense. But jazz musicians tend to stay around, their profession, repping the sound of their years of training and two new bands, blood and refining in the process of disappearance and Starlicker, at the end radiate 1990s. Their concerts Wednesday and Thursday evening at Littlefield and issue project room, introduces the specific memory of the first years of the tonic, in the Lower East Side (1998-2007, R.I.P.). And in both cases, memories to is slightly updated.

Blood endangered, New York, two Horn players are on the front: Chris Speed saxophone tenor, clarinet, Oscar Noriega to the saxophone alto and bass clarinet. They play fast lines, loop, even dynamically and entwining, Ponte bebop over clanky grooves. (On Wednesday, they passed a version of Thelonious Monk "epistrophy" and their own "Uri Bird," a play incorporating some Tristano-like melodies, both a new namesake album on Skirl Records).

But the action on the back of the stage. He was drummer Jim Black, whose abrupt rhythms and cymbals dry holler 1998, and the extraordinary bassist Trevor Dunn. Mr. Dunn is anomaly of the group. It is about the same age as the rest of the band - early forties - but arrived in New York, later, after having played in the West Coast experimental rock band Mr. Bungle and Fantomas. The rest of the band felt light and volatile, play hide and seek with harmony and rhythmic, low of Mr. Dunn sound remained wide and deep and strong. He gives meaning and purpose. You were wondering where a rock aesthetic has improved jazz rather that undermine it? In this case.

Starlicker, a trio, comes from Chicago, the city of lack of pretention. Its members are Rob Mazurek, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz trumpeter and drummer John Herndon. They have a different aesthetic temperament, less joke and elusive, that blood endangered. Yet, they would have killed it at tonic.

As with the blood in the process of disappearance, rock is tacitly to the heart. Mr. Herndon is a member of tortoise, the instrumental rock group piles of language on the language: in 10 minutes of the game, you can hear jazz, funk, prog. (Elvin Jones, Clyde Stubblefield, Klaus Dinger.) He plays hard and sense loud, heavy-footed all built to the top of its share.

The music comes from "Double demon," album of the group, which will be published week next by Delmark; each room contained written lines, by Mr. Mazurek, who has finally been pushed to three lanes improvise eruptions. The Group built the continuous sound waves; Mr. Adasiewicz played chords presented four vibes, keeping the pedal to sustain down almost continually. He went to his instrument alternatively with aggression and actual softness, and its strings was long, overlapping as they hung in the air, producing beautiful and curious connotations. (He is the youngest member of the group, 33;) (It is the wild card in the deck, the update).

It was heavy work, and after each song, all watched three disaster: grave and silent.