Click here to view the embedded video.

John Dierker

At last night’s Mobtown Modern performance of Philip Glass’ Glassworks at the Windup Space, a first-ever official collaboration with musicians from the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, MM curator Brian Sacawa announced yet another trailblazing project: the Project 20 Remix. Jumping off from Project 20, the ambitious year-long 20th-anniversary arts rubric/celebration put forth by MM sponsoring institution the Contemporary Museum, the Remix aims to gather 20-second samples of playing by 20 local instrumentalists and then hand those 20 samples over to 12 local remixers.

The contributing musicians read like a who’s who of local players from the avant/improvising/jazz/classical end of the spectrum: Susan Alcorn, Dave Ballou, Nathan Ellman-Bell, Karin Brown, Lara Bruckmann, Sam Burt, Audrey Chen, John Dierker, Neil Feather, Ian Hesford, Adam Hopkins, Lura Johnson, Marcia Kämper, Liz Meredith, Will Redman, Sacawa himself, Shodekeh, David Smooke, Eric Trudel, and Igor Yuzefovich. The remixers are Cex (aka erstwhile City Paper contributor Rjyan Kidwell), Dennis DeSantis, DJ Dubble8 (aka MM co-founder Erik Spangler), Michael Lowenstern, Ecstatic Sunshine’s Matt Papich, Wendel Patrick, Gabriel Prokofiev, Quincy of Uncle Jesse, Ricky Rabbit, Todd Reynolds, Schwarz, and Cullen Stalin. The Cex track will feature rhymes from the Get ‘Em Mamis.

Plans call for a CD featuring the remixes to be released in September, at the beginning of the next MM season, and this being 2011, there’s a Kickstarter campaign underway to help fund the project.

This week’s Detroit Metro Times, a CP sister publication, features a fairly exhaustive feature on Negative Approach/Laughing Hyenas frontman and aggro rock legend John Brannon. (His current outfit, Easy Action, recorded a couple of albums for Baltimore’s own Reptilian Records.) If you paid any attention to ’80s hardcore or post-hardcore underground rock (i.e. the Touch & Go universe), you probably owe it to yourself to read it.

As organizer of the annual High Zero Festival and the experimental hive the Red Room, the High Zero Foundation (HZF) has been an integral part of the city’s arts community for more than a decade now, and a forerunner/sparkplug of Baltimore’s current arts explosion. But the HZ folks also understand that there are plenty of Baltimoreans who are perhaps unfamiliar with or even intimidated by the very idea of free improvisation and experimental music. So tonight, beginning at 8 p.m. sharp, HZF hosts Taster!, a free event at 2640 Space featuring a stellar line-up of local avant types playing brief sets in a casual setting with wine and nibbles in hopes of reaching new listeners.

“This event is designed to be a thumbnail introduction to the music and the people who make it,” HZF President John Berndt writes in an e-mail, “with an emphasis on fun and novelty.”

If you aren’t familiar with Baltimore’s experimental scene or its players, the following litany of names might not mean much to you. If you are familiar, feel free to be amazed to see this kind of all-star line-up on a local stage outside the annual High Zero blowout itself. For newcomers or veterans, it’s not a night to be missed. The sets include:

Neil Feather: inventions
Eric Franklin: inventions
Dan Breen: inventions

John Dierker: bass clarinet
Samuel Burt: bass clarinet
Britton Powell: bass
Will Redman: drums

Susan Alcorn: pedal steel guitar
Paul Neidhardt: drums
Chris Pumphrey: alto saxophone

Andy Hayleck: inventions
Ayako Katoaka: inventions
Peter Blasser: inventions

Audrey Chen: cello, voice
Shodekeh: human beat-boxing
Brian Sacawa: saxophones

Allaboutjazz.com reports that reedsman and educator Joe Maneri died Aug. 24. He was 82.

Maneri was best known for his interest in and dedicated use of microtones (simplistically put, the notes between the usual do-re-mi notes of the standard scale) in his playing and composing, though his music also included beguiling strains of free jazz, Mediterranean Basin ethnic sounds, and 20th-century European composition. A relatively obscure figure, even at the peak of his renown, he spent most of his career away from the bandstand and recording studio as he schooled, a couple of generations of jazz musicians at the New England Conservatory, where he was on the faculty for decades. In 1990s, he was suddenly (re)discovered and embraced by avant-jazz heads and went on to record a number of fine albums for esteemed labels such as ECM, Hat Hut, and Leo, often in collaboration with his violinist son Mat.

Despite the modest vogue for his music in recent years, Joe Maneri remained mostly heard of, rather than heard. Perhaps the imminent slew of small obituaries like this will inspire people to track down a copy of, say, Three Men Walking and give him a listen.

Jazz composer/bandleader/theorist George Russell passed away Monday after a long illness. His was far from a household name even in many jazz-loving households, but cognoscenti will mourn him for a career that encompassed an influential theoretical treatment of modal playing in jazz (The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization) to shrewd experiments within the vanguard mid-20th-century jazz (including vital collaborations with seminal figures such as pianist Bill Evans and reedsman Eric Dolphy) to the ambitious genre-bending suites such as Electronic Sonata for Souls Loved by Nature and The African Game that defined his later career. Posthumous appreciations for this under-appreciated figure will surely follow, but Patrick Jarenwattananon has already posted an appealing remembrance over at NPR.org.

Not only did local Top 40 R&B quartet Dru Hill get back together yesterday, but it broke up again live on the radio about 10 minutes later. And you can watch the whole thing happen on video.

This is not news to dedicated fans of 92Q‘s Big Phat Morning Show, where original members Woody, Siquó, Jazz, and Nokio were back together on the air for the first time in almost a decade. Whatever new project they had in the works probably isn’t in the works anymore, though, after James “Woody Rock” Green basically backed out of the reteaming into an open microphone, citing his commitments to doing God’s work. (He left the group originally in 1999 for similar reasons.) You can imagine how upset the other members were, but you don’t have to: As tipped to us by City Paper contributing writer/blogger Al Shipley, somebody shot footage of the whole thing.

As gawk-worthy as this fiasco is, it’s more than a little sad, too. Quiet as it’s kept these days, Dru Hill was a bigger pop success than any other Baltimore act of the past 15 years. These days its legacy tends to be defined by Sisqó’s 1999 solo hit “Thong Song,” but the first two Dru Hill albums featured plenty of compelling smooth R&B buoyed by the quartet’s luxurious vocals. And if this means we’re never gonna hear “Never Make a Promise” (talk about drama) live again, well, that just sucks.