TDU This week!!!!
Mike Switzer
Come out and hear The Defenestration Unit this week! You have two
choices to hear them create art for your ears! This week, they have a
guest drummer, Wayne Barnhill.
1) Avant Garden (used to be Helios) on Thursday, October 18 at
10:00pm. Free punch and pie.
2) Notsuoh on Friday, October 19 at 7:30, right before the funky March
Fourth Marching Band www.marchfourthmarchingband.com
Get there early so you can get a good parking spot and a seat! Its an
event not to be missed.
Also, we have TDU t-shirts for sale for $10.00 each. Get your limited
edition shirt now before we run out!
For more information www.myspace.com/thedefenestrationunit
ABOUT TDU
Founded in 1996 by saxophonist Charlie Naked and trombonist Kid
Ornery, The Defenestration Unit started out as a roughhewn Free Jazz
quartet, and over the next ten years mutated several times, with
various members coming and going, becoming at one point an R&B cover
band and at another a minimalist drummerless psychedelic group, until,
in its tenth year, the group settled into its current configuration,
with Naked and Ornery joined by Jim Otterson on electric guitar (who
had joined the fold back in 2002), Jeff Miller on electric bass, Kirk
"Monkeyboy" Suddreath on drums, and Johnny Freedom on Alto Sax. TDU
has discussed what to call the music we play, but the only thing we
can all agree on is that it's improvised, so let's call it
"improvisational music". What "improvisational" means to us is that
when we play, we are making it up as we go along, as a group, in a
form of unspoken democracy. Someone makes a choice, options are laid
out, and as a group, we decide in which direction to move, and what
parts we will all play in moving. Though the music is moving, it's not
about a destination, it's just a journey, and it's over when it's time
to stop. We can play relatively brief "songs", or we can improvise for
nearly an hour non-stop. What we play for an audience will never be
played exactly the same way again; each time we play it's a new
experience for us and for our audience. We have in our bag of tricks a
collection of musical themes that we occasionally return to and
improvise on, expanding the original song into something different in
some way, including Free Jazz standards like Sun Ra's "Space Is The
Place", Pharoah Sanders's "Black Unity", Don Cherry's "Brown Rice",
and the Miles Davis tune "Black Satin", but even when we utilize a
familiar grounding, it is used as a springboard for moving into new
places. TDU takes inspiration from many musical sources in addition to
Free Jazz however, as we've also incorporated elements of funk,
Krautrock, psychedelic music, and electronic music. Underneath
everything else we are a band of improvisers, which means everything
we play is in some way new.