Water shed bassist regroups with another take on Avant-Jazz Rock

Friday, January 09, 2004

By Ed Masley, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Of all the recording he did as a member of Water Shed 5tet, Jeff Stringer's favorite is a live one done at Mr. Small's toward the end of his former group's decade-long tenure as Pittsburgh's go-to band for playfully eccentric avant-jazz-rock.

	' Cap Gun quartet' With: 3 Apples High, Thoth Trio. Where: Club Café, South Side When: 7:30 tonight. Admission: $5; 412-431-4950.

"With this kind of improvised music," the bassist/composer explains, "there is an element that if you're in front of an audience, it comes out in a way that just isn't there in the studio."

But that's not necessarily why "Out and About," his first release with Cap Gun Quartet, is a live recording (14 songs -- including one that sets Jimi Hendrix's "Fire" to "Venus De Milo" by Miles Davis).

The first word out of Stringer's mouth, in fact, when asked about his reasons for recording at the 31st Street Pub, the Quiet Storm and Pittsburgh Deli Company instead of, for instance, a studio, is money.

Then, he laughs and says, "No really. I got sick of going into studios and having to pay a lot of money and it coming out not necessarily as good as what you wanted. And with the technology the way it is, we were able, I think, to get a pretty good quality sounding recording just by playing shows. It was kind of like a freebie."

At some point, Stringer says, he'd like to try a studio recording with Cap Gun Quartet.

Then, with a laugh, he adds, "But I would have to win the lottery or something."

Cap Gun Quartet came together in either late 2000 or early 2001. He isn't sure.

But either way, it wasn't long after Water Shed called it a day.

"I guess 10 years is the limit on any sort of local band," he says, with a laugh, of Water Shed's demise. "You can't go over 10 years. If you do, you spontaneously combust. And we didn't want to spontaneously combust."

It wasn't hard for someone with Stringer's credentials and talent to get a new lineup of quality players together. Roger Dannenberg had sat in on trumpet a number of times with Water Shed. And Stringer worked with Boilermaker Jazz Band drummer Rich Strong, who contributed three of the songs on the album and suggested keyboardist Victor Garzotto to round out the lineup -- a move that Stringer feels became one of the primary differences between his new quartet and Water Shed.

"There's no guitar player, which is weird," he says. "I don't think I've ever been in a band without a guitar player. But the piano's a really nice instrument and since there's no guitar, it really forces me to turn on the distortion pedal every now and then."

Then, with a laugh, he adds, "Against my will."

Another thing that separates his new group from his old one is that Water Shed was noisier. Or more frequently noisy.

"In some ways, it's similar," Stringer says. "It kind of has a jazz element and a rock element and sometimes a noise element. But we kind of run more of a gamut between weird non-noisy pieces and weird noisy pieces whereas Water Shed, I think, was more on the weird noisy pieces side. I mean, that's just my take on it."

He's careful not come right out and call it jazz without the "kind of" modifier.

"Jazz is just one of those terms, you know, that people always get into arm-wrestles over," he says, with a laugh. "They have these fisticuffs and go home mad. What is jazz, really? I don't know. I looked up some hilarious Oxford dictionary definition of jazz and it was actually pretty concise in a kind of academic way. It said it had a driving rhythm and was based somewhat loosely around the blues with complex harmonies and improvisation. And that's a pretty concise definition of what we do. But if you talk to people who listen to Tony Mowod, for example, what we do is not jazz."

A purist might have trouble getting past the prog-rock/art-rock quality of several passages, for instance, but it's more their loss than Stringer's in the end.

"Purists argue with you," Stringer says. "They'll tell you, 'That's not jazz!' And I don't know, maybe they're right."

Like Water Shed, his new band has a playful -- some would call it comic -- side that comes through loud and clear in conversations with the bandleader.

"I don't know if I do it on purpose," he says, "but it's certainly part of my nugget of self. It's hard to get too serious about music, the way I look at it. It's hard to get too serious about anything, in fact."

As big a deal as Water Shed became, he doesn't see a lot of people from the old days in the audience at Cap Gun shows.

"Some people that used to go see Water Shed will come out every once in a while," he says. "But not really. And I look at the other offshoot groups -- Jay Matula's band, Matula Oblongata, OPEK, [Ben Opie's] new thing, and Daryl Fleming and the Public Domain, and you don't see as many familiar faces there either. I think it's that people are older now. They have kids and stay home and don't go out that much to see shows."

The Cap Gun show tonight at Club Cafe, part of the Sprout Fund's month-long AMP event, will mark the first appearance by new member Christopher McDonald, who's taken the place of Garzotto on keyboards.

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