Ra Kalam Bob Moses keeps time at the Lilypad on Sunday, 2 June 2024.

Bassist Bruno Råberg and more keep the rhythm alive as part of the percussive polycule.

The Jamaica Plain Music Festival is coming!

Also known as the JP Music Fest. That’s got more zing.

It will be the 12th edition, coming your way in September, and each year is organized with tender love and care by a neighborhood community that loves live music and knows how to have a good time. This is a bottom-up affair, by and for the people, and it needs your support.

If you missed the annual Smell The Love fundraiser, you can still donate below!

If you missed the fundraiser show in March at the American Legion Hall with Rick Berlin, Colonel Broccoli and the Legion Basement Band, and Fantastic Trees, you can still donate below!

And if you won’t or didn’t make it out to Midway Cafe on June 4 in time to catch the annual classic fundraiser John Casey’s JP Bar Wars, you can still donate below!

Do your part to keep Jamaica Plain fresh AND funky.

How many percussionists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Who cares?

Reject the underlying premise of the nonsensical joke. Namely, that there’s something strange or out of place about more than your one standard percussionist at any musical place at any musical time. Fill an ark with percussionists and let’s set sail on the sea of jazz.

Isn’t that what Glenn Branca used to do with guitarists? Gather about himself hundreds of guitarists for entire symphonies of six-stringers.

We didn’t have quite enough drummers for a percussive orchestra at the Lilypad on Sunday. But three out of six musicians were banging, scraping, and slapping something. That’s a pretty good ratio regardless.

Jazz drummer and music educator Ra Kalam Bob Moses was in the house, with special guest Bruno Råberg on the upright bass.

The pair were joined by young compatriots Nitzan Birnbaum (guitar), Ethan Klotz (saxophone), Hank Fisher (drums), and Gabriel Toth (drums). Birnbaum and Klotz provided some late modern jazz colors, and shapes, and lines, while Fisher and Toth added a couple more layers of percussion.

What do you do with all those layers of percussion?

The first thing you do is avoid your standard drum kit and start experimenting with the more marginal percussive equipment. You know, at bottom percussion is just the sound of one thing hitting another thing. So mess around with the material that’s getting hit and doing the hitting: plastic, wood, metal, bone, solid, hollow, heavy, light.

Get weird with it. At one point Ra Kalam Bob Moses appeared to be coaxing rhythm out of a metal office mail divider. The kind of thing that you use to separate your incoming and outgoing mail, if you work in an office that still mails letters.

Later in the show one of the drummers jingled and jangled what looked like a wreath of mice skulls. It was that kind of night, and it was beautiful.

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