Chicago nearly lost a unique and multivariate musical force when James Falzone left town for Seattle in 2016. He cast a wide creative net as a clarinetist, composer, improviser and bandleader, mixing Western and Middle Eastern classical forms, North American and Breton folk songs, and ritual trance practices into the jazz-rooted music he played on his own and with Allos Music Ensemble, Renga Ensemble, Klang, and Wayfaring. He was also the music director for Grace Chicago Church and an instructor at several area colleges until he took a position as the chair of music at Cornish College of the Arts. Since he still has family ties here, he comes back to visit on occasion, and sometimes he makes time to play some music while he’s here. This Sunday night he’ll bring two bands to one of his old haunts, the Hungry Brain. Wayfaring is a duo with the similarly eclectic singer and double bassist Katie Ernst. They first convened in 2015 and continue to gig sporadically despite the geographical distance between them, most recently in November 2017 to celebrate the release of You Move, I Move, a collection of originals, poetic recitations, and old spirituals and folk songs on his Allos Documents label. The album’s title aptly describes the give-and-take of their collaborative style of playing, which is so intuitively supportive that the austere duo setting never feels incomplete.
The second set will be the first performance by Klang—which includes vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Tim Daisy—since 2013. The quartet, which originally formed in 2006, never broke up, but the burgeoning careers of its other members ultimately made scheduling impossible. Klang’s music shifts fluidly between lyrical swing and jagged discontinuity, and the three albums they recorded for Allos Documents stand up as paradigms for jazz that embraces the lessons of the past while pointing toward the future. v
Sun 9/30, 9 PM, Hungry Brain, 2319 W. Belmont, $10 suggested donation
