Kelly Rossum - "Minnesota Sur Seine 2005: Intercommunal Music on the Mississippi" by Clifford Allen

There was, for me, a postscript, which occurred at Acadia’s Tuesday night improvisers’ series following the festival. Trumpeter Kelly Rossum, a University of North Texas-educated purveyor of fat and guttural smears in the Bill Dixon-Jacques Coursil school of brass playing, convened his quartet with Chris Thompson and Chris and JT Bates for a set of wide-open, earthen-toned improvisations.

JT, ever the physical player, hovered above his kit approaching it as if to say ‘what is this pile of junk before me and what sounds can I make with it?’ Chris Bates was hell-bent on working out the connection between post-bop anchor and palette for a deconstructive workshop, while Thompson interjected terse free-time Newk into the conversation. In light of everything that came the week before, and left days earlier on a plane back to France, there was something in the room belying a Twin Cities music reality that few take the opportunity to see—there are players here that, in the words of JT Bates, “take what [they] do each day and turn it upside down.” One can only surmise that players like Francois Corneloup, Denis Colin and Francois Tusques thought the same thing about Minneapolis—every which way is up.



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