Apr
01

Jason Adasiewicz’s Sun Rooms with Nate McBride and Mike Reed

Saturday, Apr 01, 2023

Constellation

Chicago, IL

Show: 8:30PM

QTY

• General Admission$20.00$2.56 01020304050607080910

8:30pm.

The first show featuring the original lineup in 10 years.

Jason Adasiewicz – vibraphone
Nate McBride – bass
Mike Reed – drums

Event Location

Jason Adasiewicz is an American jazz vibraphonist and composer.Life and careerJason was born in Wichita, Kansas in 1977, but raised in Crystal Lake, Illinois. He studied jazz drums at DePaul University for three years. He only eased into the vibraphone after leaving school, playing it in the indie-rock scene around Chicago with bands like Pinetop Seven and the singer-songwriter Edith Frost.In the early 2000s he began his collaboration with cornetist Josh Berman and drummer Mike Reed. Since then he was worked in the Chicago jazz and improvisation scene with multiple bands, including Rob Mazurek’s Starlicker and Exploding Star Orchestra, Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly, Josh Berman and His Gang, Nicole Mitchell’s Ice Crystal, James Falzone’s Klang and Ken Vandermark’s Topology and Audio One.Adasiewicz formed his Chicago-based jazz quintet, Rolldown, in 2004, while living in Madison. In 2008 he founded the trio Sun Rooms, with Nate McBride and Mike Reed.

Jason Adasiewicz

“Jason Adasiewicz’s vibes shimmer in the ether. A Chicago mainstay, Jason is a true original with a deep sensibility for sound vibration that can be heard through his innate and idiosyncratic approach to harmony and melody. Jason’s musical history is spiked with fervent free improvisation and tight melodic rendering”
-Rob Mazurek

Spacer, the title Jason Adasiewicz has given to the second album by Sun Rooms, the remarkable trio he shares with bassist Nate McBride and drummer Mike Reed, left me thinking that he and I must have been in near-telepathic contact at one point — because the term I’ve long linked to Adasiewicz’s music (but only in my mind) is “shaper.” That’s “shaper” as in “shape maker,” and, I would guess, ”spacer” as in “space maker” — not quite the same thing but close, because you do need space in order to make and then place a shape, while we on the receiving end need and usually get more space in which to perceive it.

In those more or less basic musical realms, Jason Adasiewicz, at age 34, seems to me a young master. But let me mention two other closely related matters — dimensionality and timbre. Adasiewicz, of course, plays the vibraphone, and in the past he has emphasized what anyone can hear: “The vibraphone has become very physical for me. I hit the instrument very hard…. An aluminum bar feels like a brick wall, but you can get spring from the cord that is suspending each bar of the instrument. I’ve felt most comfortable with trying to get those bars to resonate to the point of distortion…. I have never put away the drums

Thus the force with which one strikes the instrument’s bars becomes a crucial part of the musical mix, not unlike the blow with which a sculptor’s hammer strikes a chisel. In fact with the use of various means — the damper of course and, on the two solo pieces here, the backs of two violin bows — the results Adasiewicz gets can range from the imposingly gong-like to the dry and delicately skittering.

And timbre? Well, as Adasiewicz said, those forcefully struck bars resonate to a fare-the-well, and, I would say, in a manner that is unique to the mallet percussion family — every note being at once somewhat dissonant (because so many overtones are rubbing against each other) and part of the mallet percussion family’s “rhyming” timbral vocabulary. Here then continual (even seemingly microtonal) gradations of shading can arise — space and shape, dimensionality and timbre, all bedded down and hard at work under the covers.

A New Vibe

“Chicago has a way of producing fabulously eccentric, fiercely individualistic jazz stars.”

Published in Chicago Tribune | June 21, 2012

Onstage Memories: Concert Highs Of 2011

Sensitivity isn’t what you ever expect from the saxophone firebrand Peter Brotzmann. But that’s what came of this freely improvised duet with Mr. Adasiewicz, a deft, dynamic young vibraphonist.

Published in New York Times | December 29, 2011

Sounds That Come From in the Head and on the Street: Top Pop and Jazz Of 2011

…steeped in ecstatic free improvisation and the dynamics of experimental rock. Their cohesion, intense and unforced, comes across with articulate bluntness.

Published in New York Times | December 18, 2011

Sun Rooms all about the beauty of free jazz

This is music that strikes the ear as bop, but when you listen closely there’s adventure  afoot as the performers alter pace, melody and approach.

Published in Chicago Tribune | December 15, 2011

Zenon, Adasiewicz, Lage top best jazz list

Adasiewicz has extended the sonic impact of a trio

Published in Chicago Tribune | December 3, 2011

59th Annual Critic’s Poll

#1 Rising Star Vibes

Published in Downbeat | August 2011

Creating Uncommon Vibes

“I use the sustain pedal a lot, and I hit the instrument very hard,”  …  “It’s like a drum to me.”

Published in New York Times | July 22, 2011

New Jazz That Keeps an Ear Trained on the Past

He’s the youngest member of the group, at 33; he’s the wild card in the deck, the updater.

Published in New York Times | May 7, 2011

Redrawing Rhythmic Strategies: Top Pop and Jazz of 2010

An elegant and plain-spoken record — jazz as just the facts, ma’am, yet full of style and beauty

Published in New York Times | December 19, 2010

New York Times Critic’s Choice

If it were a film, it would be black-and-white with high contrasts.

Published in New York Times | September 26, 2010