Disc One: 3.24.01, Bug Jar, Rochester, NY
1. Awake Nu (20:22) [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI]
2. The Thing (7:10) [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI]
3. Brown Rice (4:33) [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI]
4. Good-Bye Tom B. (17:44) [Joe McPhee, JoMac/BMI]
5. Lift (12:34) [Drake/Kessler/Vandermark]
Total Time: 62:25

Disc Two: 3.31.01, Harvey’s On The Mall, Kalamazoo, MI
1. East Broadway Run Down (10:44) [Sonny Rollins, Duchess Music Corp./BMI]
2. Elephantasy (14:07) [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI]
3. Awake Nu [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI] /
   Take The Coltrane (Duke Ellington, Tempo/Music Sales Corp./ASCAP]
   (7:25)
4. Brown Rice (10:30) [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI]
5. Red And Black (11:17) [Drake/Kessler/Vandermark]
6. Love Cry (3:17) [Albert Ayler, Birthday Music/BMI]
7. The Thing (7:55) [Don Cherry, Eternal River Music/BMI]
Total Time: 65:17

Except as otherwise noted, all themes and materials were improvised at the time of recording by Drake/Kessler/Vandermark.

produced by: DKV Trio
executive producer: Bruno Johnson
recorded by: Bill Olsen
mixed & mastered by: John McCortney/Air Wave Recording

Disk One: Thanks to presenters Otto Hauser and Tom Kohn, bopmail@rochester.rr.com.
Disk Two: Thanks to presenter Matt Dorbin, mdorbin@yahoo.com.
Thanks to Boche and the Billions Corp., Malachi Ritscher for the CD-R transfers, all the presenters during the tour, and all the fans who came to the concerts and listened. Special thanks to Bill Olsen, driver, roadie, and recording engineer extraordinaire.

From the 22nd to the 31st of March, 2001, the DKV Trio was on a tour of the Midwest and Northeast of the United States; we brought mobile recording equipment and an engineer to document the concerts. Two of those shows were selected for this release as solid representations of the band’s working methods and aesthetics at this time (as the Wels/Chicago albums were for the period of 1998).

Our performances were usually a continuous flow of music during each set. The index points on these disks should be thought of as access into the recordings; they’re not to be considered as structural divisions. (Disk One is the complete concert we played on a double bill with Joe McPhee’s Trio X [with Dominic Duval and Jay Rosen] in Rochester on March 24th. Disk Two is the first set and the last third of the second set [this starts with the piece "Red And Black"] from the show in Kalamazoo on March 31st. Other than combining the two sets in Kalamazoo there has been no editing of the material; this is the music as it was played.) As Always, DKV would hit the stage without a set list — sometimes there was talk about how to start — otherwise all the decisions regarding the music were spontaneous.

The band used a number of compositions on the tour ("Awake Nu", "The Thing", "Brown Rice", and "Elephantasy" by Don Cherry; "Good-Bye Tom B." by Joe McPhee; "East Broadway Run Down" by Sonny Rollins; "Love Cry" by Albert Ayler; and "Take The Coltrane" by Duke Ellington). Sometimes they were used as material for thematic development; sometimes they were melodic reference points used to shift the direction of the music; other times they were meant as a coda. Differences in the ways that the group works with this kind of material can easily be heard by comparing the way that "Awake Nu", "The Thing", and "Brown Rice" are utilized on these CD’s.

The fact that most of the index points coincide with the beginnings of previously composed material does not indicate that the trio has changed from being primarily an improvising unit. Most of the themes and materials were created by the ensemble at the time of performance. The use of these compositions is merely an expansion of DKV’s improvising methods.

— Ken Vandermark, October 2001

[top]