A&E

Improv jazz tonight at Cite

by Dominick Cross

Instead of sheet music, a score, or even chords, frontman Jeff Albert says  Dickie Landry, Tim Daisy and Josef Butts will receive written instructions at the start of the piece before venturing off into improv land.

Improvisational jazz like you've never heard before comes at you this evening at Cite des Arts with Jeff Albert's Instigation Quartet.

And it all begins at 9:30 p.m. at Cite, 109 Vine St., in downtown Lafayette.

Instead of sheet music, a score, or even chords, frontman Albert says  Dickie Landry, Tim Daisy and Josef Butts will receive written instructions at the start of the piece before venturing off into improv land.

"It might say something like, 'Player 1, play a groove. Player 2, wait about 15 seconds and play something melodic. Player 3, play a counter-melody to Player 2 play, or play something spastic," says Albert, musician, trombonist, improviser, music technologist, and composer. "Some of them are goofy adjectives and some of them are more kind of directly musical instructions.

"And the idea is to let it feel like a free improvisation to musicians, but to give it some structure so that the starting texture is something that I've sort of thought about and realized that, 'Okay, I think this will be cool,'" says Albert. "And then if we start from that point and improvise from there, it sort of hedges the bets in the audiences' favor a little bit."

Albert says that once the initial texture of the piece has settled in, he tells the musicians to "just improvise as you would in any open improvisational situation."

And thatt shouldn't be a stretch for the musicians and it should be an event for the audience.

Albert has performed with Daisy, on drums, as well as bassist Butts, who've together in New Orleans pre-Katrina days.

"So I've got histories with both Tim and Joe in these sorts of improvisational situations," says Albert. And he's also got a great deal of respect for saxophonist Landry.

"Dickie's the wild card which really excites me about [tonight],"says Albert. "I know Joe's played with Dickie, but neither Tim nor I have played much with him. So, that's going to be the exciting mix-up in the mojo to see what Dickie comes up with to keep us on our toes.

"Many of us who were into remotely weird things," says Albert, who grew up in Lafayette, "Dickie was the hero."

Butts says he is looking forward to tonight's gig.

"It's going to be new to all of us because everyone is going to interpret things a different way," he says. "The gig's something that is exciting to watch unfold for the musicians and the audience. And we're really excited to have Dickie come play with us. He's a legend. He's known all over the world. It's going to be sort of an interaction of many different things, many different players from different places.

"It should be pretty adventurous," he says.

Go here for more information.

And keeping with its cutting edge concert series (Rio Luminoso this past Friday was pretty cool), Cite has a Father's Day show featuring  Thirteen Moons, an original musical project featuring New Orleans musician GrayHawk Perkins, a Native American of the Choctaw and Houma Nations, and Mezcal Jazz Unit, a French Jazz quartet from Montpellier.

Showtime is 7 p.m. Go here for more information.

Tickets are $10 for each show. Call 291-1122 for more information.