March 4, 2008

(Jamaica Plain). Boston-based purveyors of Moroccan-soaked dub-jazz, Club d'Elf, will play NYC on Saturday March 15 at visionary artist Alex Grey's gallery, the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors with violist Mat Maneri (Cecil Taylor/Paul Bley). The group was formed by bassist/composer Mike Rivard, a busy session player who recorded with Morphine, Jon Brion, Aimee Mann & The Story amongst others. Originally formed around a core rhythm section with the addition of different special guests for each show, the idea was to remix Rivard's groove-based compositions differently for each performance. Guests over the years have included Morphine's Mark Sandman, John Medeski (who is rumored to appear with the band at CoSM), Billy Martin (MMW), DJ Logic, Hassan Hakmoun, Marc Ribot, Dave Tronzo (Sex Mob/John Lurie's Lounge Lizards) and Marco Benevento (Benevento / Russo Duo), with Jambands.com describing the situation thusly: "Club d'Elf consists of Mike Rivard and any cohorts who decide to embark with him into perilous sonic chimeras."

From the beginning the music drew from a startlingly wide spectrum of styles, including jazz, hip hop, electronica, North African trance music, prog rock and dub, with the band exploring mash ups of these diverse musical universes before the term was even in use. Like an iPod on shuffle, loaded with a hip collection of everything from On The Corner & Squarepusher to Physical Graffiti & the Nonesuch World Explorer series, each gig became a unique, one-time only event, highlighted by the kind of genre-demolishing, high-energy improvisation the band would become renowned for. JazzWeek described the band's music as "Downtown jazz meets trance, Moroccan music, dub, electronica and jamband...the music's ambitious in its scope but navigated smoothly enough and with enough chops to cause musicians out there to take notes."

Live performance has always been where Club d'Elf feels most at home, and over the course of it's career it has released eight live, double-CD sets (the most recent being 2007's Perhapsody), which TimeOutNewYork described as "...combin(ing) the roaring avant-funk of electric-era Miles with the legato drift of the Grateful Dead. Manic Berber bop, hypnotic Moroccan gnawa and blissful electronica are usually present in the mix as well... heady music that doesn't neglect the tail." Since almost it's inception the group had been working on tracks in the studio as well, with Rivard helming the production of a project that grew in shape and complexity until eight years later the band finally dropped it's first studio disc, 2006's Now I Understand (Accurate), which Relix magazine called "A suite with many colors and moods, grooves, and melodies changing at a moments notice...If techno has come full-circle, enveloping [its] creator even as it points to another world, this party of relative soloists and collaborators keeps me guessing and wanting to guess." The band won the Boston Music Award this past year for Best Jazz Act, and over the span of it's career has also won awards in DJ/Electronic and Jam Band categories, underscoring the difficulty in pinning the band's sound down to one genre.

Most recently Rivard has begun incorporating the three-stringed Moroccan bass called the sintir into performances, which along with frequent d'Elf collaborator Brahim Fribgane's (a native of Casablanca, Morocco and member of Hassan Hakmoun's band) oud and percussion has added a deep, Moroccan trance aspect to the group's drum'n'bass meets Electric Miles sound. The group is in the final stages of completing it's follow up to Now I Understand, which will comprise two discs with very different moods: one a more or less traditional-sounding take on the various Moroccan styles the band favors, such as gnawa and Berber folk music, while the other disc is a more electronic and dub-oriented affair, featuring some of the last studio performances of Sandman. An early summer release is anticipated.

For the CoSM performance Club d'Elf will consist of Rivard on bass & sintir, Maneri on viola, drummer Dean Johnston, Mister Rourke (Soulive) on turntables, and other guests, including (possibly) John Medeski.

Praise for Now I Understand and more:

"All-stars they are: Club d'Elf have to be one of the most fluent polyglot musical aggregations on the planet: straight-ahead and avant-garde jazz, Indian, African, Moroccan, blues, funk (always funk), pop." - Jon Garelick, Boston Phoenix

"...something akin to skunky Jack Johnson Miles Davis flavored with the chop-and-cut of modern electric instrumentals. Think the Talking Heads’ Remain In Light stripped of the vocals and peppered with samples from David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label." - Crazewire

"...sounds like lost Syd Barrett...an interstellar dub cryptogram that builds outward in layers..an electronic thrust into the blackest heart of modern darkness." -Chris M. Slawecki, AllAboutJazz

"The brainchild of Boston bassist Mike Rivard, Club d'Elf is a genre-shattering collective that merges jazz, hip-hop, electronic music, worldbeat and more...Now I Understand is both instrumentally compelling and utterly uncategorizable. The future starts here." - Michael Roberts, Westword, Denver

"Club D'Elf's debut studio CD is the sound of a Dali painting...beautiful, surrealistic...eclectic, funny, technically impressive and, well, just awesome." -Jon Nolan, The Wire, New Hampshire

"This music takes its time, and only repeated exposure to its delights reveals the depth of its identity. There is an overriding sense of construction behind the entire programme of Now I Understand, [yet] this is music whose democracy is as profound as that of any piece of free improvisation." -Nic Jones, AllAboutJazz.com