Ted Reichman

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alt.coffee press The New York Times The Village Voice Time Out NY from The New York Times, October 31, 1997 ...On the more experimental end of the spectrum, musicians are taking greater control of their work, creating new situations for themselves, even starting their own record companies. "A lot of people are getting tired of waiting for calls," said the saxophonist Tim Berne, who has formed his own record label, Screw Gun, and who's just as likely now to perform at the Internet Cafe in the East Village as the Knitting Factory, where his free-ranging music was almost exclusively heard. At restaurants like the Bell Caffe and Jules, groups led by the saxophonists Dan Willis and Michael Blake have been able to get regular engagements; this is how bands grow into maturity. The trumpeter Dave Douglas started a group out of a regular engagement at the Bell some years ago; it has grown into one of the more exciting trios in jazz, and it's called the Tiny Bell Trio, in the restaurants honor. Alt.Coffee, a cafe on Avenue A at St. Marks Place in the East Village, is another good example. It's a friendly joint where loners read books and students chat for hours: a captive audience. Ted Reichman, an accordionist and composer, saw the opportunity there. For a year, with the drummer John Hollenbeck and the vibrophonist Matt Moran, he's been booking experimental improvised music and jazz into the club every Monday night for free concerts; he plans to produce a mini-festival there in January. Mr. Reichman said he was "inspired by how things work in San Francisco and Chicago," where the do-it-yourself ethos has resulted in thriving performance scenes. A band playing at Alt.Coffee can stretch out across a whole evening, make more money then at an established club, with the help of a tip jar, and draw greater interest from the regular habitués. One recent night, the cafe was standing-room-only for a performance of Mr. Hollenbeck's quartet, with percussion, voice, saxophone, and steel guitar. By contrast, although playing at the Knitting Factory still has an element of prestige (European promoters hold the club in awe as an imprimatur for new music), as many as five bands may play there in one night. A band can sometimes get overlooked; it's hard to create a following with a few performances there in the course of a year. - Ben Ratliff BACK from The Village Voice, August 12, 1997 Improvising a Heritage alt.coffee wanders the 20th Century The chairs at alt.coffee are banged-up cushy old things, big and soft. On Monday nights, they’re filled with Avenue A types who’ve come by the Internet café for a cup of chai or a quick log-on, and with others who’ve come for the free music; a different little group of young composers and improvisers every week, clustered around music stands, playing a couple of leisurely sets, and building a new branch of New York’s creative-music tradition. More often than not, the players include at least one of the series’ organizers: accordionist Ted Reichman, drawing resonant, shifting tones out of the box strapped to his chest, playing with his whole body, as mindful and patient as the Stockhausen scholar he is and as enthusiastic as the 23-year-old klezmer buff he is too; or Matt Moran, battering a deluge of tone clusters out of his vibraphone, then playing it with a bow for a rasping, singing-saw tone, then finishing a thought by shaking a toy piano; or John Hollenbeck, flickering in and out of a Brazilian rhythm on his accessory-decorated drum kit or dragging a few dozen kitchen utensils tied to a stick over the top of it. All in their twenties, all conservatory-trained and anti-conservatorians, Reichman, Moran, and Hollenbeck aren’t exactly a group in any formal sense, though each plays in duos with the others, and all three are in Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet. They’re superb, technically ingenious musicians, but also playful and funny. Hollenbeck’s title for a percussion solo he dedicated to a friend he’d blown off after a show: “Sorry Shu-Mei, I’m a Dick.” The alt.coffee shows began in late 1995 with a long residency by Refuseniks, a frequently amazing trio of Reichman, Hollenbeck and double bassist Reuben Radding (who’d been in Dave Grohl’s pre-Nirvana group, Dain Bramage, in a previous rock life). When Radding moved to the Midwest for grad school, the two remaining Refuseniks and Moran started trading off Monday nights for their various one-off collaborations and ongoing projects… …Their collective versatility and enthusiasms cherry-pick 20th century music for a jagged, peculiar ancestry, with its own heroes. It’s a line of composition/improvisation hybridizers that runs through Sun Ra, Stockhausen, and especially Anthony Braxton, with whom Reichman has worked and recorded, starting in his teens… They also listen to a lot of anonymous folk musicians, a few weeks ago, Hollenbeck and Bleckmann covered for a string change with a sprightly whistling-and-drumming rendition of a tune they’d learned from a recording of postal workers in Ghana. The there’s their habit of making their instruments make sounds they ordinarily don’t. “Accordion and vibraphone are not instruments commonly associated with the phrase ‘infinite timbral possibilities,’” cracks Moran, so the alt.coffee crew likes to play things the “wrong” way to discover hidden sound-languages. The vibraphone isn’t commonly associated with spasmodic free-improv self-expression, either, but when Moran’s short-fuse pauses ignite into four-malleted pyrotechnics, it’s like hearing an angel have a seizure. And they all love playing with toys - $2 squeakers and $10 voice-modulators, rattling paddles to shake and whistles to blow. The comfortable, low-pressure setting of the Monday-night series, with the odd heckler showing up for extra entertainment value, is an ideal place to hear their work as composers and performers develop. As Moran notes, the café isn’t “leaden, tired, music-scene weary… You’re guaranteed an audience, and you can play anything there.” – Douglas Wolk BACK from Time Out New York, December 4-11, 1997 ...their music has such unusual breadth and wonderful inconsistency that calling it simply 'jazz' paints it into an inaccurate corner. Their performances don't focus on displays of whirring virtuosity (though that's certainly a part) or even on the nebulous quality of 'soul.' Instead, the musicians attempt to work beyond or outside the patterns to which they would ordinarily gravitate. Traditions are somehow upheld while being transformed, and the concerts often become vortices of focus and concentration, though mistakes are encouraged. Every show is drastically different. - Robin Edgerton BACK
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Time Out NY

from The New York Times, October 31, 1997

...On the more experimental end of the spectrum, musicians are taking greater control of their work, creating new situations for themselves, even starting their own record companies.

"A lot of people are getting tired of waiting for calls," said the saxophonist Tim Berne, who has formed his own record label, Screw Gun, and who's just as likely now to perform at the Internet Cafe in the East Village as the Knitting Factory, where his free-ranging music was almost exclusively heard.

At restaurants like the Bell Caffe and Jules, groups led by the saxophonists Dan Willis and Michael Blake have been able to get regular engagements; this is how bands grow into maturity. The trumpeter Dave Douglas started a group out of a regular engagement at the Bell some years ago; it has grown into one of the more exciting trios in jazz, and it's called the Tiny Bell Trio, in the restaurants honor.

Alt.Coffee, a cafe on Avenue A at St. Marks Place in the East Village, is another good example. It's a friendly joint where loners read books and students chat for hours: a captive audience. Ted Reichman, an accordionist and composer, saw the opportunity there. For a year, with the drummer John Hollenbeck and the vibrophonist Matt Moran, he's been booking experimental improvised music and jazz into the club every Monday night for free concerts; he plans to produce a mini-festival there in January.

Mr. Reichman said he was "inspired by how things work in San Francisco and Chicago," where the do-it-yourself ethos has resulted in thriving performance scenes.

A band playing at Alt.Coffee can stretch out across a whole evening, make more money then at an established club, with the help of a tip jar, and draw greater interest from the regular habitués. One recent night, the cafe was standing-room-only for a performance of Mr. Hollenbeck's quartet, with percussion, voice, saxophone, and steel guitar.

By contrast, although playing at the Knitting Factory still has an element of prestige (European promoters hold the club in awe as an imprimatur for new music), as many as five bands may play there in one night. A band can sometimes get overlooked; it's hard to create a following with a few performances there in the course of a year. - Ben Ratliff

BACK

from The Village Voice, August 12, 1997

Improvising a Heritage
alt.coffee wanders the 20th Century

The chairs at alt.coffee are banged-up cushy old things, big and soft. On Monday nights, they’re filled with Avenue A types who’ve come by the Internet café for a cup of chai or a quick log-on, and with others who’ve come for the free music; a different little group of young composers and improvisers every week, clustered around music stands, playing a couple of leisurely sets, and building a new branch of New York’s creative-music tradition.

More often than not, the players include at least one of the series’ organizers: accordionist Ted Reichman, drawing resonant, shifting tones out of the box strapped to his chest, playing with his whole body, as mindful and patient as the Stockhausen scholar he is and as enthusiastic as the 23-year-old klezmer buff he is too; or Matt Moran, battering a deluge of tone clusters out of his vibraphone, then playing it with a bow for a rasping, singing-saw tone, then finishing a thought by shaking a toy piano; or John Hollenbeck, flickering in and out of a Brazilian rhythm on his accessory-decorated drum kit or dragging a few dozen kitchen utensils tied to a stick over the top of it.

All in their twenties, all conservatory-trained and anti-conservatorians, Reichman, Moran, and Hollenbeck aren’t exactly a group in any formal sense, though each plays in duos with the others, and all three are in Hollenbeck’s Claudia Quintet. They’re superb, technically ingenious musicians, but also playful and funny. Hollenbeck’s title for a percussion solo he dedicated to a friend he’d blown off after a show: “Sorry Shu-Mei, I’m a Dick.”

The alt.coffee shows began in late 1995 with a long residency by Refuseniks, a frequently amazing trio of Reichman, Hollenbeck and double bassist Reuben Radding (who’d been in Dave Grohl’s pre-Nirvana group, Dain Bramage, in a previous rock life). When Radding moved to the Midwest for grad school, the two remaining Refuseniks and Moran started trading off Monday nights for their various one-off collaborations and ongoing projects…

…Their collective versatility and enthusiasms cherry-pick 20th century music for a jagged, peculiar ancestry, with its own heroes. It’s a line of composition/improvisation hybridizers that runs through Sun Ra, Stockhausen, and especially Anthony Braxton, with whom Reichman has worked and recorded, starting in his teens… They also listen to a lot of anonymous folk musicians, a few weeks ago, Hollenbeck and Bleckmann covered for a string change with a sprightly whistling-and-drumming rendition of a tune they’d learned from a recording of postal workers in Ghana.

The there’s their habit of making their instruments make sounds they ordinarily don’t. “Accordion and vibraphone are not instruments commonly associated with the phrase ‘infinite timbral possibilities,’” cracks Moran, so the alt.coffee crew likes to play things the “wrong” way to discover hidden sound-languages. The vibraphone isn’t commonly associated with spasmodic free-improv self-expression, either, but when Moran’s short-fuse pauses ignite into four-malleted pyrotechnics, it’s like hearing an angel have a seizure. And they all love playing with toys - $2 squeakers and $10 voice-modulators, rattling paddles to shake and whistles to blow.

The comfortable, low-pressure setting of the Monday-night series, with the odd heckler showing up for extra entertainment value, is an ideal place to hear their work as composers and performers develop. As Moran notes, the café isn’t “leaden, tired, music-scene weary… You’re guaranteed an audience, and you can play anything there.” – Douglas Wolk

BACK

from Time Out New York, December 4-11, 1997

...their music has such unusual breadth and wonderful inconsistency that calling it simply 'jazz' paints it into an inaccurate corner. Their performances don't focus on displays of whirring virtuosity (though that's certainly a part) or even on the nebulous quality of 'soul.' Instead, the musicians attempt to work beyond or outside the patterns to which they would ordinarily gravitate. Traditions are somehow upheld while being transformed, and the concerts often become vortices of focus and concentration, though mistakes are encouraged. Every show is drastically different. - Robin Edgerton

BACK