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Alash Ensemble, Marshall Allen
Written by Chris Richards
Washington Post, June 21, 2007
If you weren't at Warehouse Theater on Tuesday, you missed one of the most surprising and breathtaking double-bills to blow through Washington this year. Tuvan throat singers the Alash Ensemble and legendary avant-jazz saxophonist Marshall Allen offered so many feats-of-breath, the gig should have been sponsored by the American Lung Association.
The Alash Ensemble's opening set was utterly stunning. The young quartet specializes in an ancient vocal style cultivated by the shepherds and horsemen of central Asia who discovered ways of singing three or four notes simultaneously. Imagine a subsonic growl, a bullfrog's croak, some electric barber's clippers and a high-frequency whistle -- all reverberating out of a single larynx at once.
With a single, sustained breath, each member's voice would glide over the music's loping rhythms as they plucked and bowed an array of stringed instruments, one of which was made from a horse's skull. There are plenty of recordings of Tuvan throat singing out there, but they can't compare to witnessing such sonic magic in real time.
Once audience members picked their jaws up off the floor, 83-year-old Allen shuffled onstage and led his quintet into a righteous racket. Clad in a shiny gold baseball cap, the octogenarian -- who spent most of his career performing alongside the late jazz pioneer Sun Ra -- swiped at the keys of his sax like a petulant teenager slashing away at a guitar. He blew his horn into a soulful frenzy, then seemed to delight in slowing things to a crawl before erupting into another fit of squeals and squawks.
The two groups crammed onto the stage for a final set, but Alash's steady gallop didn't leave much room for Allen and company to find their footing. Maybe that was for the better -- it gave everyone in the audience a chance to catch their breath.
[alash ensemble with:
marshall allen - saxes, flute
elliott levin - saxes, flute, vocals
dave davis - trombone
howard cooper - bass
scott verrastro - drums, percussion]
The Homes of Rock
611 FLORIDA AND CLAVIUS PRODUCTIONS
Written by Joseph Riippi
OnTap Magazine, August 2006
The term avant-garde derives from French military vocabulary, and refers to those guerilla soldiers self-separated from the bulk of infantry and cavalry, covering dangerous and untested terrain. In art, particularly in music, an object or sound can often be labeled avant-garde just for lacking a certain amount of accessibility.
By definition, therefore, the avant-garde can only be enjoyed by a small niche of a community or society.
Scott Verrastro believes in that small group: three and a half years ago he founded Clavius Productions (named indirectly for Gyorgy Ligeti, an avant-garde composer featured in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey), a booking company devoted to showcasing and promoting bands of the avant-garde. Verrastro often books shows in his own living room, at an enormous row house on Florida Avenue.
“Clavius Productions provides venues for avant-garde/extreme/outsider music,” Verrastro declares. “There are hardly any places in the area where one can see free jazz, electronic noise, excessive psych, fingerpicked ragas, or just plain old unclassified weirdness. 611 Florida is the place for these sonic explorers.”
Verrastro and friend/housemate Gregory Svitil came upon 611 Florida in 2001, when Verrastro was relocating from Boston, and Svitil was graduating from George Mason. For the first two years the only live music in the house came from practices of their now-defunct band, The Traces. However on February 28, 2003, approximately 35 people arrived knocking at the front door to attend a performance by free jazz duo Paul Flaherty and Chris Corsano.
“I was not booking at the time, and was desperate to find a venue for [Flaherty and Corsano],” remembers Verrastro. “Not one venue in town was interested, so I took the matter into my own hands and offered them my living room.” After that first successful night, Verrastro made a decision. “I decided to have shows [at 611 Florida] on a regular basis, for experimental musicians that would otherwise skip DC.”
House shows usually get regarded as lesser alternatives to club shows. For example: being underage can force a band of aspiring punks to hold a show in a local basement or garage; or, as was the case with the first show at 611 Florida, there simply might be nowhere else to go. But Clavius Productions strives for the house show setting. Even when they promote shows at local clubs like the Warehouse Next Door, Verrastro says, he tries to make it feel like a house show.
“Ultimately, the house show obliterates the barrier between band and audience,” Verrastro explains. “I feel there’s a huge difference between donating a few bucks, bringing your own beer, and sitting on a couch while some insane music is played ten feet in front of you, as opposed to [a club show].”
“I think what mainly differentiates 611 Florida from other house venues,” offers Svitil, who still lives in the house, “is that the acts who perform play music tailor-made for an informal setting where the performers as well as the audience members are guests in someone’s home. The more comfortable the improvisers are, the more likely they are to get into a zone with what they’re doing and play a set that’s inspiring and unforgettable.”
Unforgettable performances or not, Verrastro is quick to point out that a house show requires a certain amount of professionalism to run smoothly. The burden of running the door and cleaning falls on him (and any helpful friends). “611 Florida exists strictly for musicians that I love,” he says. “For challenging and beautiful music that demands attention.”
Pop Music
By Chris Richards
Off the Beaten Path
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, February 5, 2006; Page N13
There's a wolf in Scott Verrastro's dining room, and his guests are craning their necks for a better view. And for good reason: This wolf just finished honking on the sax and now he's brandishing a guitar.
We're talking about Little Howlin' Wolf, a blues musician with a gravelly voice and a live show bordering on incoherent. He's made his name busking in the streets of his native Chicago, but tonight Verrastro has invited the traveling bluesman to perform in his small rowhouse off U Street NW. It's one of many shows Verrastro has hosted under the banner of Clavius Productions, an entity he founded to bring weird, wonderful, experimental music to Washington.
Clavius promotes gigs at local clubs, namely DC9 and Warehouse Next Door, but the best stuff seems to happen under Verrastro's roof. He's hosted performances by saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano (a duo specializing in improvised clatter), Six Organs of Admittance (Californian Ben Chasny's psychedelic folk project), Michael Chapman (an overlooked British folk legend) and a gaggle of other fringe-notables you might read about in magazines such as Arthur or the Wire.
Tonight, most of Little Howlin' Wolf's audience is standing in the adjoining living room, watching his set through the doorway. Sonic Youth and Ghost posters drape the walls, while a Stan Brakhage film flickers on a TV in the corner. As the Wolf huffs and puffs on his harmonica, one onlooker asks a friend, "Is this not the coolest thing you've ever seen?"
House Music
Thursday, November 10, 2005; Artifacts
Washington CityPaper
By David Dunlap Jr.
When Scott Verrastro needed a name for his latest musical enterprise, he looked to the movies. The outfit’s moniker, Clavius Productions, comes from the name of the moon base where the second shrieking monolith was found in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “The name ties into everything that I am doing,” says the 28-year-old. “I wanted something that could convey the sound of that monolith—something alien, indescribable. Heavy philosophical stuff.”
Luckily for his neighbors, the noise emanating from Verrastro’s house shows—primarily free jazz, space rock, and folk music—is less piercing than the one in Kubrick’s film. That, Verrastro is quick to offer, was “a work by György Ligeti, the experimental Hungarian composer.”
His inaugural house show, however, did come pretty close to replicating a monolithic clamor. In February 2003, Verrastro was trying to find a venue for the Paul Flaherty–Chris Corsano duo. “I tried Now! Music and Black Cat, but no one wanted a free-jazz show,” says Verrastro. He ultimately decided to have the concert at his place, a three-story row house near U Street NW. Since that first time, Verrastro estimates, he has put on 26 house shows.
Despite his day job as an editor and proofreader, Verrastro continues to tirelessly promote shows at such local venues as the Warehouse Next Door and DC9. However, not every band gets the official Clavius Productions imprimatur. “About 75 percent of the shows are Clavius,” he says. “No offense to the nice guys of Say Hi to Your Mom, but that wasn’t a Clavius show.
And it’s obvious that the house shows are particularly close to Verrastro’s heart; he’s created a venue for the fringe music he enjoys, where he and the musicians don’t have to deal with a middleman taking a cut of the “donation stocking” hung near the front door.
“You go to house shows and it’s always hardcore and punk,” he says. “People don’t do house shows for this kind of music.”Verrastro has hosted everyone from fingerpicking acoustic guitarists Jack Rose, Glenn Jones, and Max Ochs to Kiwi noisemakers Birchville Cat Motel and Vancouver garage-thrashers S.T.R.E.E.T.S. “One of the guys from S.T.R.E.E.T.S. actually skateboarded through the hall of the house during the show,” says Verrastro, “which makes sense since their name stands for ‘Skating Totally Rules Everything Else Totally Sucks.'"
Verrastro is inspired by the notorious acid tests of the ’60s.ÊPerhaps the closest that he has come to re-creating that psychedelic hootenanny vibe is his Free Folk Phantasmagory festival, a daylong “celebration of folk, psych, and improv.”“It’s not as clichéd as it sounds,” he contends. “I try and avoid any cheesy hippie connotations.”
Verrastro’s own space-rock outfit, Kohoutek, was one of 11 acts that played the second Free Folk Phantasmagory this past September. The band, whose sound is reminiscent of krautrockers Popol Vuh, has a self-titled release that’s also under the Clavius Productions umbrella.But Verrastro isn’t sure that Clavius will turn into a full-time label: “Between booking, the day job, and a lack of funds, I can’t afford to put anyone’s fucking record out."
Verrastro certainly isn’t getting rich with Clavius, and he’s more concerned with reaching people and turning them on to good, weird music. “We may be small and frustrated, but it’s beautiful,” he says. “I can’t do this forever and sometimes wish someone else would pick up the slack.ÊBut then I think, Who else is going to do these kinds of shows?"
So Verrastro will keep doing what he’s doing and, like the music he houses, will improvise along the way.“Who knows?Maybe next time, we’ll have a stand-up comic, a juggler, and a firebreather,” he says.“OK, maybe not the firebreather unless we put him out on the back porch.”—David Dunlap Jr.
Downtown, a Warehouse Full of Music
Friday, September 16, 2005; Page WE40
WashPost
by Richard Harrington
For 120 years, Paul Ruppert's family has been in business at 1017 Seventh St. NW, where the Warehouse Theater and Warehouse Next Door sit. You can still see signage for Ruppert Real Estate on the building. For a decade after that office closed, the location housed Ruppert's Restaurant, but it, too, closed in 2002, as construction began on the massive Washington Convention Center across the street. Eventually, the Warehouse Cafe opened, followed by the 120-seat black box Warehouse Theater behind it. That gradually expanded into a complex that includes the Warehouse Next Door (literally), a second, smaller black box stage, a small screening room and a gallery for emerging artists. The Warehouse has become one of the city's most active alternative performing art spaces, with music shows most nights.
According to Ruppert, "we want to be a place where interesting art happens and to be a resource for Washington artists, a place where mostly local, but also touring artists, can perform in a variety of genres."
Bookings are done by several people: Scott Verrastro of Clavius Productions brings in experimental groups as well as metal and stoner rock bands. Matt Bitdwell, the venue's sound engineer, and bartender Denman do much of the punk and hardcore booking.
The majority of the schedule is put together by booker Nick Pimentel, who says: "We don't really have a booking philosophy. Bands seem to come to us; we rarely go out looking for bands. We're an intimate space that's comfortable for touring bands who can't really draw many people. . . . That's why when we do out-of-town bands, we try to get at least one or two local bands to play, so they can get their friends out. There's nothing worse than seeing a great band with just two other people."
Verrastro, who also promotes concerts elsewhere around town (visit http://www.claviusproductions.org ) says: "There's a huge untapped reservoir of extreme and experimental music that is ignored, and has been ignored in D.C., for a long time. That's the main purpose of what I'm doing, just to get them here, whether it's noise, experimental, outsider, avant-garde electronics, free-form jazz, avant folk or even scream metal stuff -- it could be anything. Music is music -- it's all about the presentation and the attitude and the feeling behind it."
Verrastro (who plays in improvised psychedelia duo Kohoutek with Scott Allison) points out that the Internet has made information about -- and sound samples of -- fringe music more widely available. Although one can find plenty of information online, including sound samples, "you can't reproduce live music, the visceral experience of seeing something you'll never see again in the same environment, which is why it's important to give people an avenue to see these acts and be challenged."
The Web site http://www.warehousennextdoor.com/bands lists hundreds of bands that have played at Warehouse Next Door, many with . Some Pimentel recommendations for the next two weeks: Friday's show featuring 302 Acid ("a D.C.-based experimental drum'n'bass band that does dance music with all live orchestration") and the Sept. 20 show, headlined by Japanese no-wave band Nisennenmondai. ("Everyone's telling me that they're the band to see, and they're friends with a lot of local musicians they hosted when those bands went to Japan.")
Though Steve Feigenbaum notes that Warehouse Next Door is not wedded to experimental music -- "it's not their mission statement, and they obviously have a lot of other things," that's where the founder of Silver Spring-based Cuneiform Records first heard North Carolina speed rock trio Ahleuchatistas, "the most technically adept post-punk band you'll ever hear -- they've got chops growing on their chops," he says. The band will have a Cuneiform album out soon.
Feigenbaum has benefited from visits to other risk-taking venues as well. He signed the "jazz and beyond" Claudia Quintet after its second concert for Transparent Productions. "How good were they? It cost me 10 bucks to find out," Feigenbaum says. "Semi-Formal," the group's third Cuneiform album, will be released next week, bringing the label's output over 21 years to 215 albums.
Feigenbaum also caught Rhode Island's Alec K. Redfearn and the Eyesores at the Velvet Lounge last year and in January will release an album by the accordion-led nonet that features saxophone, violin, cello and French horn on music that melds avant-garde and primitive esthetics. "It's an acid-folk big band, the big band of Weird New America," Feigenbaum says, referring to a genre springing out of a 2004 Wire magazine cover story documenting the latest "movement" in weird/psychedelic folk music. Redfearn and the Eyesores play at DC9 on Oct. 22.
For 25 years, Feigenbaum has also run Wayside Music, a mail-order business that offers 5,500 titles ("and we're always adding to it") of what his Web site, http://www.waysidemusic.com , describes as "progressive rock, experimental rock, new jazz, off-beat, contemporary and other indefinable musics from across the globe." He remembers years ago seeing vanguard saxophonist Sam Rivers and Dave Holland at d.c. space with only 20 or so people; now, Feigenbaum suggests, a local venue would probably be packed for such a stellar pairing. "It's a DIY world, and if you really care about this music, you band together."