Mark Southerland
Mark Southerland (aka Dirty Force, Snuff Jazz, Wee Snuff, Bohemian DJazz, Jazz Jihad…) is chops looking for a new planet. His music comes from the tradition of A Love Supreme and Bitches Brew gone Sun Ra: electric, eclectic, and concentric.
His “Jihad on Jazz,” whether grooving or thumbing its nose at the Wintons and musical museum curators of the world… his act, his theater, his dance, is fulfilling, satisfying, funny, light, serious, mysterious, obvious, complex, simple, introverted, extroverted, and even a little perverted.
His trio “Snuff Jazz” brings to mind Ravel’s Piano Trio, an orchestra of three. Three in the right hands is powerful, even monstrous, but it takes skill to be tender without patronizing, subtle without arousing narcolepsy. It screams: “BE HERE…BE NOW,” or go away, back to your own complacency. Other times, it coos.
Whether he’s playing the tenor sax, something self-made out of a Dr. Seuss book (“bastardized horns”), a duck call, or circuit-bending musical toys, Southerland’s technique serves one purpose: to make music that ebbs and flows organically. No prefab history book structures here. Warning: this music is NOT homogenized! The only rule is intelligence borne of listening imagination. It is animalistic ritual: primal goes refined and back again; beast meets beauty and falls in love, but not that sappy Disney crap…
And this is the mild snuff…
It’s time to go to camp!: “Urban Noise Camp,” with Wee Snuff and Red Shirt Theory in some “Bohemian DJazz, an installation with disco lights, tent sculptures, moon songs, divination, wearable horns, body suits, robes, and deep improvisation.” It’s a homeless camp in the city, but the music is anything but homeless: it’s snuffed-out straight ahead jazz that occasionally grooves out the door, past the slums, into the junk-yard, toy shop and homemade do-it-yourself kit of everyday life, into the absurd, then comes back again to howl at the moon.
The instruments range from ordinary to full metal jackets. Southerland actually plays gorgeous young women’s sensual latex-squeezed curves wrapped in brass tubing. Those lucky vibrations! From there he plays his Seussian homemade instruments (the tenor forgotten in the trunk of the car) and circuit-bends on musical toys his kids might play. A young drummer with a smallish kit plays with/on everything. A bass thumps and thunders from inside a tent while costumes fly and more curvaceous latexes walk the camp and sing. The piano grooves, kicking and slapping — it’s just wood and strings; sometimes there’s even chords…melody! Occasionally the music goes berserk, or settles into a groove. Sometimes it’s just camp, but no matter what, it’s hip, it sounds good…I WANT to listen on the edge of my seat…wait…I AM listening on the edge of my seat, following wherever they take me next. This has all the licentiousness of a PG-13 orgy, arousing the adults while the kids just laugh.
Sun Ra said, “You have to do everything with alacrity and sense of urgency, or you can be replaced by a button,” something Mark Southerland knows well! On a trip to the moon, maybe a distant nebula…I enjoy this bumpy ride out of gravity. Mark Southerland is chops looking for a new planet…and he’s finding it!
-Paul Rudy
To visit Mark Southerland’s website, click here.
