[Moshe]

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/20.../over-the-line

Over the Line

Jazz experimentalists Borbetomagus are not going to make this easy on you.

by Shaun Brady

Published: February 28, 2007

Remember those old Warner Bros. cartoons where Bugs Bunny would drag his paw across the dirt, challenging Yosemite Sam to cross one line after the other? Well, the jazz/experimental music continuum has a similar series of lines in the sand, each one narrowing its audience until only the most adventurous-eared remain. There's Ornette — opposition to whom seems almost quaint by now — then post-Ascension Coltrane, followed by Ayler, then the AACM, European free improvisers, and so on.
The punch line in those cartoons was that Sam would always blindly step over one line too many, finally plunging off the edge of a cliff.
That doozy of a last step? That's Borb-etomagus.
The trio of tenor saxophonists Jim Sauter and Don Dietrich and guitarist Donald Miller overwhelms with sheer brute force; it's a true wall of sound that makes Phil Spector's look like cheap plywood. Live, the effects can be disorienting. The music surrounds your head and burrows underneath your skin, howling, screeching and clanging, with sudden piercing shrieks emerging that feel like a dentist's drill operating from the inside out.
But if you can brave the in-your-face physicality of it all, there are subtle rewards to be had, swirling eddies of interaction and communication that reveal, buried somewhere underneath the abrasive outer shell, the nearly three-decades-long working relationship of Borbetomagus' members. It may be kind of like getting hit by a bus while drowning, but oh, the gorgeous sights you can see while you're down there.
Even after so long, saxophonist Jim Sauter struggles to define Borbetomagus' music. "Freaked-out jazz or jazz on the edge or jazz extreme," Sauter offers over the phone from his upstate New York home. "People have come up with expressions like 'snuff jazz.' It's monumental electro-acoustic music, monumental in its sound and in its physical impact, and in the range of what three instrumentalists can create."
The surprising thing is that Sauter uses "jazz" in so many of his descriptions, given the lack of obvious links between Borbetomagus and the tradition. But the band started, like so many others, in a classroom. Sauter and Dietrich met in grade school, played together in jazz and marching bands in high school, and later began performing together while in college, being introduced to free jazz and experimental music via the school's radio station.
It was through another college station that the trio was completed. Donald Miller had a show on WKCR, Columbia University's station, where he played "Evan Parker and Brotzmann and Velvet Underground, all sort of woven together." Sauter called Miller at the station and his suspicions of kindred spiritship were confirmed when the three met for a jam session at Miller's apartment.
By that time, all three were already using some of the techniques that generate Borbetomagus' signature sound. Those include Sauter and Dietrich pressing the bells of their saxes together, so that, as Sauter explains, "you get a lot of unusual overtones and different sounds, because you have the two instruments playing into what is really one sound chamber."
The two also use hoses attached to their mouthpieces to lower the range of their tenors, or mics shoved down their bells. Miller uses files, bowls, even wind-up toys on his guitar. But besides those physical aspects, the trio never prepares material prior to a gig.
"Sometimes you forge something out of what you're working with that you never imagined would have emerged," says Sauter. "Sometimes when those things happen they're more dramatic because they just seem to rush forward out of the din."
While Sauter and Dietrich still live in New York state, Miller relocated to New Orleans in 2001, so gigs, already rare in recent years, are even scarcer. The trio hasn't played Philly in 10 to 15 years, by Sauter's accounting. But he says that while the downtime does help the trio stay fresh, they've always managed to find new aspects in one another's playing.
"I think we always try to reach some musical place that we haven't been to before," he explains. "One of the beautiful things for me, playing with these guys all these years, is that we have such a comfort level with each other, and we know what each other is capable of doing, but we're still able to push it to a newer realm. That's at least what we're trying for. It doesn't always happen. But when it does it's phenomenal to think that we could keep finding new doors to kick down."

[Tokolosh]

I haven't heard anything by them yet. Sounds interesting. Thanks.

[whorefrost]

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