BLUE CRANES ~ in the news

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August 29, 2010
Arts Dispatch
BARRY JOHNSON
"Entering the ether with the Blue Cranes"

At several points during the Blue Cranes CD release concert Saturday night band leader Reed Wallsmith seemed to enter a transition state between body and spirit, hovering in the limbo world between the two. Which makes sense because that's a reasonable description of music, too, I suppose. It wouldn't have been much of a surprise if he'd left us altogether -- his presence seemed that ethereal.

The music itself, the stage full of engaged collaborators (at one point 10 musicians joined together in the Alberta Rose Theatre), the happy crowd -- it's easy to see why Wallsmith might have left his human form behind for, well, something else.

The music of Blue Cranes on the new CD, "Observatories," isn't easy to convey because it's difficult to categorize. Both Wallsmith on alto sax and drummer Ji Tanzer employ experimental, free jazz techniques, and occasionally the sound of the band dips in that direction, but soon it has migrated to lush harmonies and simple, sweet melodies. Sometimes Blue Cranes sounds like the back-up band for a rhythm and blues singer, sometimes like a chamber orchestra, sometimes like those wind-swept post-rock Euro bands such as Sigur Ros. And sometimes they sound like a "where the spirit takes me" jazz band, most often when Wallsmith is soloing.

The heart of the band is the sax duet of Wallsmith and Sly Pig, who can get the creamiest tone from his tenor sax when he wants to or let go with one of those whipsaw blues riffs that we know so well. Their individual playing can be moving, but together they are uncanny, how they insinuate themselves into each other's musical thoughts, the rhythmic lock they have on each other's tempo, their sense of when to enter and when to depart, when to occupy and when to give ground. I watch them and want to be a better partner in all my enterprises.

I'm not going to get into the details of the new CD (Wayne Horvitz's "Love, Love, Love," above is the only cover on the album) beyond what I've already said. It takes me a while to get a fix on new music under the best of circumstances, let alone these, in which the approach is so eclectic. It's hard to talk about the contribution of keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn, for example, which sometimes seems limited to providing a chordal bedrock for the songs but then suddenly evolves into a winsome little duet with Tanzer's percussion. Or Keith Brush's bass, which is similarly submerged much of the time, but then steps out, especially when the band invites a string trio onstage (Kyleen King, Anna Fritz and Marilee Hord played on the CD and I'm presuming they were also the musicians on stage). I guess I'm simply saying that my impressions at this point are pretty superficial, so I'll spare you.

I've written about the Blue Cranes once before, a little piece I originally intended as my first column in The Oregonian two Januaries ago. It was too long and maybe too "expansive" for a daily newspaper I suppose, and I substituted a different subject. The column wasn't about the Blue Cranes, really, they just make an appearance at the beginning and then it starts to wander, to deal with the idea of noise, David Schiff's idea of composers as "differently eared," Charles Ives, the city and its sounds. I'm not sure how many people ever read that column, but I liked it, and if you want to take a little side trip, I've just posted it on Arts Dispatch.

Ah, side trips. The Blue Cranes want to tour the continent by train, and they've started a Kickstarter campaign to do just that. Really, American should give a listen, right? If you want to help, here's the link.

I should also mention that Rebecca Gates (Spinanes!) and the Consortium and electronically enhanced sax soloist Jonathan Sielaff were delightful openers for Blue Cranes, and I'll be looking for them in the future.

August 27, 2010
The Oregonian
ROBERT HAM
"Blue Cranes adds variety to PDX Pop Now! festival's indie rock and hip hop scene"

The lineup for the PDX Pop Now! festival is often chock-full of acts that hover around the world of indie rock and hip-hop. But the organizers do like to throw in a few bands from outside the spectrum to stir the pot and expose the attendees to scenes they might be ignoring, such as the city's vibrant jazz culture. And often, as was the case with the Saturday evening set by the electrifying quintet known as Blue Cranes, it can inspire awe and rock-star responses from the young audience.

"Two kids came up to us after the set and they were so pumped about it," says drummer Ji Tanzer, winding down at Produce Row Cafe after the band's PDX Pop set. "If I saw them on the street, I would think, 'Wow, they would hate what we do.' But they told me, 'You made me want to get a drum set and practice 9 to 5.'"

It's an entirely appropriate response to what Tanzer and his band mates -- saxophonists Reed Wallsmith and Joe "Sly Pig" Cunningham, keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn and bassist Keith Brush -- do on stage and on the CDs they've released to date. They all grew up playing, studying and appreciating jazz, but Blue Cranes aims for a more accessible and exciting sound that owes as much to the scene that surrounds clubs such as Jimmy Mak's as it does to what is going on at the Doug Fir Lounge or Holocene.

"We've taken some of the things that we like about jazz music, the interaction and playing from an emotional depth, stolen that and applied it to other music that we like," Sanborn says. "I don't see us as a jazz band but our instrumentation dictates that we are considered a jazz group."

This idea comes out most strongly in the band's recorded work. Their latest album, "Observatories," forgoes long flights of instrumental fancy in favor of clean, intertwining melodies played by the two horns, bolstered by Sanborn's wandering keyboards and Tanzer's sometimes steady, sometimes manic percussion work. Throw in the addition of a string trio and the emotions expressed in these songs soar.

There's a playfulness to the band, too, as can be heard on the new album by the small child's voice between songs complaining how noisy the band is, and in their current live staple: a wry take on David Bowie's "Oh! You Pretty Things." And that playfulness is at the heart of the relationship of a bunch of friends who seem to spend as much time laughing with each other as they do worrying over their compositions. For Wallsmith, who started the project six years ago, that's all he's ever wanted.

"My biggest goal is to have more fun than I've ever had playing music and always do that. This band should become more fun every year."

August 26, 2010
Portland Mercury
NL
"Blue Cranes, Rebecca Gates and the Consortium, Jonathan Sielaff"

Yes, Blue Cranes have a couple horns in their lineup, and sure, their instrumental pieces are largely improvised. But to pigeonhole them as "jazz" is not exactly accurate; the Portland five-piece makes use of Ji Tanzer's powerful drumming to pack its punchy swing full of gravity, and the chord progressions recall soul and R&B classics more than fake-book charts. On their third album, the brand new Observatories, Blue Cranes trade heavy math grooves with airy melodies, straying far from the scholarly museum pieces or schmaltzy elevator muzak that make up today's contemporary jazz. (Which raises the question, how did jazz end up there anyway?) If anything, Blue Cranes hearken back to jazz's exploratory days, when anything was fair game except for setting rules. And they do so without sounding at all retro—instead, the music of Blue Cranes is informed by a very vital, of-the-moment Northwest indie mentality.

August 25th, 2010
Willamette Week
CASEY JARMAN
"Jazz’s Not Dead: Blue Cranes buck expectations and make music for the people"

Reed Wallsmith, Blue Cranes’ alto sax player, is still a little foggy. Last night his band played a house show in Ashland, and at 10 am, he hasn’t quite woken up yet. He talks about the show as if he’s describing a dream. “There were a whole bunch of new parents with their little kids running around,” he says over the phone from the backyard of a friend’s house, where he laid out a sleeping bag and crashed beneath the stars. “It was pretty fun to have that background noise going on behind our music.”

While one would expect a punk or indie rock musician to embark on a half-booked couch-crashing (indeed, yard-crashing) tour toward Santa Cruz, it’s not generally a tactic associated with jazz musicians. But Wallsmith, whose Blue Cranes have shared basements and festivals with punk rock groups more often than they’ve played stiff, upholstered clubs with other jazz acts, will take a house gig any day. “I kinda like the atmosphere better, because it’s not based around making money for a venue,” he says. “It’s based around people being with their friends.”

For a jazz group (and, while Wallsmith shows some trepidation about overusing that word, “jazz,” the wide confines of the genre certainly allow room for the Cranes’ exciting, experimental music), playing uncompromising music for non-enthusiasts is a bold, even radical, move. There was a time, of course, when jazz was America’s popular music. But these days—though die-hard fans hate to admit it—jazz is a four-letter-word for a lot of mainstream music fans. It stays alive primarily through the support of academic institutions, private trusts and corporate-sponsored festivals. With some notable fresh-faced exceptions, this music—once a refuge for wild-eyed, weed-smoking rebels and stylish eccentrics—owes its life to the establishment.

“We’re not coming from that background,” Wallsmith says. “I mean, we all went to school, but in terms of where we want our music to live, it’s not in that environment.” So instead of playing clubs to jazz insiders, the Cranes—seven-year vets of the Portland music scene—have played the PDX Pop Now! Festival two years running, where they’re often the first exposure to jazz that young people have ever gotten. “People have told us that, that we’ve been their first live jazz band,” Wallsmith says. The players don’t see that as a burden. “I don’t feel like we have the responsibility to uphold jazz—we don’t want to be in a position where we have to make sure jazz reaches a younger audience.”

The music certainly isn’t kid stuff—that’s clear from Rebecca Sanborn’s delicate opening keyboard flourishes on “Grandpa’s Hands,” the first track of the Cranes’ new disc, Observatories. The tune, penned by Wallsmith about the muscles in his piano-playing grandfather’s hands locking up until he could no longer play, is a fitting introduction for the group: Funky with a hint of math-nerd obsessive compulsiveness, it splits wide open in the middle to allow Wallsmith and tenor sax player Joe Cunningham some deeply soulful, moaning solos that eventually twist around drummer Ji Tanzer’s nods towards hip-hop breakbeats and complex, Max Roach-esque patterns.

The whole disc—from the sepia-toned Wayne Horvitz waltz, “Love, Love, Love” to Tanzer’s epic first composition for the group, the slow-building “Maddie Mae (Was a Good Girl)” and Wallsmith’s video game-inspired closer “Here Is You, Here Is Me”—walks that line between carefully constructed jazz composition and wild, indie-rock abandon. The Horvitz track is the album’s only cover, a testament to the quintet’s resistance to pandering, even after it gained interest by playing a pair of Elliott Smith tunes earlier in its career. That said, the band’s next EP will feature three cover songs—the Cranes will take on David Bazan, the Red House Painters and Blonde Redhead. “We’re just trying to play whatever music comes from our heart,” Wallsmith says. Who knew such a simple approach could feel so revolutionary?

August 24, 2010
Oregon Music News
TOM D'ANTONI
"Reed Wallsmith on the Blue Cranes’ new album ‘Observatories’"

Portland’s Blue Cranes are almost ready to make the leap to national recognition. This will not be news to those of us here who have marveled at their playing for several years. They are: Reed Wallsmith, alto sax, Sly Pig, tenor sax, Rebecca Sanborn, keyboards, Keith Brush, bass, Ji Tanzer, drums.

Their Observatories CD release is Saturday, August 28, Alberta Rose Theatre, doors 8pm, show 9pm, $10 advance (or $20 advance w/ cd). $12 at the door, 21+. Rebecca Gates and the Consortium and Jonathan Sielaff will open the show.

I sat with Reed Wallsmith and found I had to get into the now-somewhat-tiresome question of what exactly are they. Note: When Reed talks about Joe, he is talking about Joe Cunningham who is known in the band as Sly Pig because there is another Joe Cunningham who used the name first. A friend said he was a “cunning ham” and therefore a “Sly Pig.”

I started using the term “Indie Jazz” a while back. What’s interesting about the Cranes is that you play PDX Pop Now! and Holocene and places where you might think a Jazz band wouldn’t go.

I wanted to play in front of our peers. I wanted to play at shows that people at the house I lived in would go to…with bands that we were all listening to. That’s who I wanted to play for. Since then we’ve expanded to play for a lot of different audiences. We still don’t know what to call it. Last time we went on tour we had a sheet of paper and people could write what they thought it was…someone sent an email said you were not-Jazz/not-not-Jazz.

On their website, they call it Jazz/not-Jazz.

It’s hard because people want to categorize you…so people know what it is. So people innocently ask, “What kind of music do you play?” And we go, “Uhhhhhhhhhh….sorry we didn’t mean to bring you into this. It’s not your fault.”

It could all be defined very well as Jazz because Jazz is always changing.

This is an old fight. I got a phone call at KMHD while I was playing a tune by Monk telling me that wasn’t Jazz. People bring different sets of ears to everything.

Let’s go through the tunes on the album. Is “Grandpa’s Hands – for Frank Wall” about a real grandpa?

It’s funny when I write a song, it’s notes…it’s a feeling…but it’s about my grandpa who is really the only one in my family who is a musician. When I was young he gave me a keyboard. When I had written that song, it was right at the time when he and my grandma were moving out of an apartment and she made me take his keyboard because he has this thing where your fingers curl up and you can’t open up. It was so sad. He can’t play it anymore. It was so sad to watch that he knew that he couldn’t….it was just heart-wrenching to me.

So it’s about him and what that was like. It’s a very piano-intensive part (sings it). I was thinking about the agility of hands when I wrote it.

Do you write at the piano?

I do. My favorite way to write is at an acoustic piano.

Ever written any other way?

Some of the string parts I wrote using Finale software. Especially with counterpoint lines, it’s nice to be able to have a computer play them. I’ll work it out on the piano and then when it gets to hard to play all at once, I’ll transfer over to computer. Then I’ll hand write it out on to a chart. It’s easier to communicate stuff if it’s handwritten.

I feel like I should say that this is the first album I feel like has been a really collaborative compositional process. I think we’re going to get even more for the next one. Some of the songs are mine and some are Joe’s and Ji wrote one for the first time. It varies a little between us all how that works. Generally, we’ll bring a melody.

“These Are My People” (by Ji Tanzer), Ji woke up with this melody in his head and he sang it into his phone right away…and that’s the melody (sings it). We were at this lodge outside of Grant’s Pass and there was an old piano there and he figured out what it was on the piano. That really started as a sketch.

Someone might bring in a head and we’ll work with it and then they’ll take it back and add another part to it. “Broken Windmills,” Joe pretty much had an idea of what he wanted it to be. But all of these songs, they end up…one of us will write and then they completely metamorphosize once we’re working with it as a band…we Blue Cranify it. Whether it’s something one of us wrote or whether it’s a cover of someone else’s song, that group process of making it ours happen. ... [read more]

April 20, 2010
Circle Into Square
HIRAM LUCKE
"Not Quite 20 Questions with Blue Cranes"

Portland, Oregon's, jazz-based instrumentalists Blue Cranes were kind enough to answer a few questions while they were on the road. Keep an eye out for their upcoming release 'Observatories' this summer. If it's anything like their earlier releases, it'll be stupifyingly beautiful.

HL: Can you introduce the band members and talk about how the Blue Cranes started?

Reed: Blue Cranes started as a trio in 2004. Ji and I had been playing together since 1994, and we got together with Keith, who I had played with in a few different groups, to perform some songs I had written on a four-track. Becca joined in 2006, and Sly Pig in 2007. I think from the beginning our goal has been to play honestly from our hearts, pulling from the variety of places we draw musical inspiration, but without really trying to "be" something in particular.

HL: Since you're on the road, where are you headed? What sort of places do you find Blue Cranes playing in?

Reed: We are headed down the coast to Los Angeles and back. This tour we are playing a lot of house shows. House concerts have become an intimate and fulfilling way for us play for the first time in a city. We're also playing at more traditional venues, which vary from rock clubs to jazz clubs to coffee houses. Last tour we played at a punk festival on an organic goat farm outside of Ashland, which was amazing.

HL: Do you find yourself playing with jazz bands? Does that matter to you?

Rebecca: We do play with jazz bands, but I like it best when we play shows with other kinds of music. It gives the audience something different for their ears. Too many similar bands on a bill can be exhausting to listen to. Also, when we play with rock/punk/noise bands, it tends to give us all permission to push every boundary and, as they say, "go for it."

HL: Who do you think will be the first to crack from the pressure of touring and how will it manifest?

Rebecca: The person who will crack under the pressure of tour will be ME! And I think it will manifest in the delightful form of double pneumonia.... Also, keep the pita bread away from me.

HL: Can you talk a bit about your composing style? Does someone usually bring in the melody/chord progression? Do you all contribute? Is it a mixed bag?

Reed: The way it usually works right now is that one of us will bring a song that is somewhere between a sketch and a finished composition to a rehearsal, and we will work it over and come up with an arrangement as a group. Lately we've been moving more and more towards a collaborative approach to composition. We recorded a song for a split 7" with the Davis, CA post-punk band Elders last year. Sly Pig had a beautiful sketch of a song, and we took it to the nine person double group and everyone contributed parts and melodies to bring it to completion. On the horizon for us is a band retreat to focus on composing together for a few days.

HL: I really like the mix of traditional elements with noise skronk and rock/fusion beats as well as some post-rock leanings. Could you talk about what influences you in terms of music?

Rebecca: These aren't albums or anything, but I feel like a huge musical influence on the band has been the acquisition of both the toy piano and especially "The Baldwin Discoverer." When we started using the little analog synth on a lot of the tunes, it was impossible to go back. The Discoverer really defined how we hear the chords swell, and it provides textures that the soloists can use as another kind of springboard. Plus, it's so damn cute. I'm serious, it has the best color scheme of any keyboard I've seen.

Reed: It's hard to make a master list of our influences for the whole band—we all have different tastes in music that we gravitate towards. I think this variety is nice-- everyone brings something different and unique to the table.

HL: How do you see the Portland jazz experience [I really don't want to use the word scene, but that's what I'm getting at] as compared to other cities?

Reed: Speaking in broad terms, I think there is a lot of collaborative energy in Portland, including in the music world. There are many people here that are down to get together and work on songs or on a new project that someone has an idea for. This isn't unique to Portland, but I do think it is one of this city's strong points.

HL: What are you passing right now?

Ritchie Bros. large equipment auctioneers.

HL: Who would you defend more, Wayne Shorter or Wayne Horvitz? Philly Joe Jones or Spike Jones/Jonze [I'll let you pick between the band leader and director]?

Ji: Defend? I'd fight all of them... at once.

HL: Any other tours/projects you'd like the readers to know about?

Reed: We are releasing our new album, 'Observatories,' late this summer, and will be doing regional and national touring to promote it. It features some great guest musicians, including Timothy Young on guitar from Wayne Horvitz's groups, Anna Fritz from the Portland Cello Project, Kyleen King (viola), Marilee Hord (violin), and Mary Sue Tobin (alto sax) / Chad Hensel (bass clarinet) from the avant-jazz group Paxselin. We've been working on this for so long-- I'm excited to bring it to completion.

March 16, 2010
Oregon Music News
TOM D'ANTONI

Jimmy Mak’s was standing-room only when the Blue Cranes took to the stage ... The power and beauty (and majesty) of the Cranes filled the room...

...Blue Cranes news: Their new album, due this summer their new album will feature long-time Wayne Horvitz band mate, guitarist Timothy Young, a string section of Marilee Hord on violin, Kyleen King on viola, Anna Fritz on cello, and the Paxselin horns (Mary Sue Tobin on alto sax and Chad Hensel on bass clarinet). That was your mouth going “WOW!”

March 12, 2010
Ashland Daily Tidings (Ashland, OR)
MANDY VALENCIA

The Portland jazz band Blue Cranes not only has an improvisational sound but spontaneous touring tactics to boot.

"One thing I'm really psyched about on this tour is that we're playing three or four house shows," said founder Reed Wallsmith during a recent stop in Ashland. The band agreed to play for a Tidings Café (see www.dailytidings.com) and plans to return for a show during its summer CD release tour.

Popular in New York and L.A., house shows are concerts played for free at people's homes. Concertgoers don't have to pay cover charges, can bring their own beverages and donate to the band's tour fund or buy band merchandise.

"Especially if you're going into a town where you don't know a whole lot of people, it's been way better shows when it's a friend or a friend of a friend that wants to invite people into their home," said Wallsmith.

As band members put it, they don't want to play to an empty room, even if it is a paid gig. House shows provide a more intimate setting and guarantee a crowd. And the audience members feel they have been let in on a special happening.

Founding members Ji Tanzer and Wallsmith went to high school together, then reconnected in 2003 to perform. Self-proclaimed jazz band geeks, they've played at the Portland Jazz Festival twice.

On keyboards is Rebecca Sanborn, Tanzer's wife, who started playing piano and composing her own music when she was 5. Reminiscent of her early playing is her use of a toy piano.

"Ji and I were on our way home after our shift and we were at a six-way stop and the car in front of us was a station wagon jam-packed with plastic plants and shoes and a toy piano."

Sanborn stopped the car and bought the piano from the driver and has used it in almost every show since. When Sanborn is not playing with the Blue Cranes, she works at her family's breakfast restaurant in Portland along with her husband.

On tenor saxophone is Joe Cunningham, otherwise known as "Sly Pig," a pun on his last name. Cunningham started out playing alto sax and switched to tenor sax in college after his alto sax was stolen from his locker.

Wallsmith is the alto sax, band promoter and tour manager of the "inside-out jazz" band. Wallsmith became interested in the sax as a high school student. "My dad took me to Fred Meyer and let me pick out any tape I wanted. I asked for a saxophone recommendation and they suggested Kenny G," said Wallsmith.

"When I started listening to it, I just hated it. So we went back and Fred Meyer took it back and I was able to get a saxophone compilation." It was this compilation that introduced him to Charlie Parker, one of Wallsmith's influences.

Keith Brush, who plays upright bass, was inspired when his high school orchestra played at his elementary school in fourth grade. "I remember there were like 9,000 violins, 40 violas, and this one guy in the back playing this big huge instrument," said Brush. Of course he knew he had to find out more about it.

Tanzer also discovered a hugely influential musician through the help of the Fred Meyer music department. The bargain rack is where Tanzer and his father discovered a Max Roach cassette. "I took it home and it blew me away, because I had been listening to a lot of loud rock drumming. There was a lot of mystery in it and it kind of matched my personality," said Tanzer.

One of the songs on the upcoming album sprung from a melody in a dream that Tanzer had while staying in the Applegate. Cunningham explained that inspiration comes from everywhere and that he already had ideas for the next album.

The Blue Cranes' upcoming summer release is its first actual studio recording. The past two albums were recorded in Tanzer and Sanborn's bedroom.

The Blue Cranes just finished mastering its third album at the beginning of March. The album is due out early this summer but is, as of yet, unnamed.

"That's our goal: to come up with a name for the album on this tour," said Brush. Wallsmith remarked that naming the album is the hardest part.

"If we can't think of a name by the time we come home, we're not coming home," Cunningham said...

March 5, 2010
Santa Barbara News-Press
JOSEF WOODARD
"Jazz Coming Down the Coast — Portland's intriguing indie jazz band Blue Cranes plays at Mercury Lounge on Monday"

In recent years, Santa Barbara's club scene has been privy to a healthy, steady flow of fine bands passing through town from the indie rock world, and many of them hailing from the fertile Portland scene. Portland band Blue Cranes, making its area debut at Goleta's Mercury Lounge on Monday, is indie at heart, but from the jazz division.

Consider the band a brainier kinfolk to the indie rock scene, and with influences from rock and other areas, but with a solid foundation in the vocabulary of jazz.

Alto saxist Reed Wallsmith shares the front line with tenor saxist Sly Pig, bassist Keith Brush and drummer Ji Tanzer in the rhythm section, along with keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn. Sanborn is the only "non-unplugged" musician in the unit, but she uses her electronics tastefully, sometimes in ways reminiscent of acclaimed Seattle-based jazzer Wayne Horvitz, whom with the band has shared the stage.

Last Saturday, the band performed in the Portland Jazz Festival, which has become one of the more respected American jazz festivals in the several years of its existence.

To date, the band has released two albums — "Lift Music! Flown Music!" in 2006 and "Homing Patterns" in 2008 — and is set to burst forth with a new one. While they have toured down the West Coast and elsewhere, much of the focus has been in the Northwest so far, including the PDX Jazz Fest, Seattle's Sounds Outside and PDX Pop Now!

In an interview the day after their PDX show, Wallsmith effused about his hometown, that "there is a lot of amazing music happening in Portland. In music, and the arts as a whole, there is a strong culture here of collaboration and curiosity. I feel very fortunate to live here and to be able to listen to and collaborate with many open-minded players and bands."

Seeds of the Blue Cranes were sown by Wallsmith and Tanzer, who met and played together in high school in the early '90s. Fast-forward to almost a decade later and a band was ready to be born.

"We originally formed to play some songs I had written for a four-track project," says Wallsmith. "I had just moved back to Portland after playing in a progressive rock group in Rhode Island, and my mind was full of compositional and arrangement ideas. Ji and Keith and I originally played as an alto sax-bass-drums trio and later added Rebecca on keyboards and Sly Pig on tenor sax."

In terms of a stylistic identity, early influences included such flexible and left-of-center examples as Minnesotan trio Happy Apple — featuring Bad Plus drummer Dave King — and music by the great drummer-composer-thinker Paul Motian, whose fluidity of expression can be heard in the Blue Cranes' sound.
Wallsmith explains that "the main framework that has tied the group together over the years has been to focus our energy on melody, composition and working together as a group, rather than on individual virtuosity. There is a lot of room for expression and improvisation within this."

Along the way, heeding the self-reliant "indie" way has been critical to the band's achievements so far and on into the future.
As Wallsmith comments, "doing things DIY has been a necessity for us in order to build an audience for our music. It's been freeing to not wait around for a record label to do anything or be tied to someone else's vision for how our music should be produced or how it should be promoted."

From a more purely musical perspective, Wallsmith sees his band as part of a generational phenomenon among musicians approaching jazz as a rich and progressively creative genre.
"I think there are many young musicians influenced by the huge breadth of jazz-improvisational music of the past century and are creating exciting new stuff, in and out of the jazz genre," Wallsmith says. "Some people are saying that jazz 'needs' to expand into different musical realms to attract a larger audience. I'm not so concerned about whether jazz expands or not. What is exciting to me is people making new music that is from their heart, whatever it ends up being called."

March 4, 2010
Santa Barbara Independent
JOSEF WOODARD

For the left-of-jazz-inclined, check out the wily, lyrical, evocative and bright Portland band Blue Cranes, at Mercury Lounge on Monday. Wayne Horvitz has been known to play along. Check ’em out.

February 14, 2010
Crappy Indie Music
BEN MEYERCORD

Then Blue Cranes played. Oh. My. God. They are so good. They played mostly material that will be coming out on an album this summer (June?). It was beautiful. Every player in the band (two sax players, stand up bass, drummer, and piano/keyboard player) was so expressive in the way they played their instruments. It truly was like the instruments are extensions of themselves. The set seemed way too short, but they ended up playing a quiet encore so as not to upset the neighbors.

November 2009
Jazz Society of Oregon (Portland, OR)
"Featured musician of the month: Reed Wallsmith"

Click to here to read interview.

October 28, 2009
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
"Claudia Quintet, Blue Cranes"

Any Cranes show is a guaranteed delight, but this early-evening double bill with John Hollenbeck’s great New York-based Claudia Quintet (featuring sax great Chris Speed and former Oregonian Gary Versace on piano) is really special—and still leaves you time to make it to late-night Halloween revelry.

October 19, 2009
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
Front page of Living section
"A comet in the sky for Portland's jazz scene"
BARRY JOHNSON

Sometimes, even in the confusion of our culture, the signs and portents seem to point in a particular direction.

In the Portland jazz scene, the signs and portents are starting to point up. The historical forces are aligning. A lightning bolt has shattered the stillness. A saxophone cries out in the dark.

In recent weeks, the following phenomena have been reported:

Lynn Darroch, the indefatigable jazz journalist, historian and deejay, interviewed local musicians Darrell Grant and Ben Darwish one week, then Andrew Oliver and Reed Wallsmith the next, on his Friday afternoon jazz show on KMHD-FM.

Those performers then packed Jimmy Mak's jazz club for two consecutive Friday nights. The audience was younger than usual, just like the personnel in the bands.

The Portland Jazz Festival kept its momentum going away from its near-death experience last fall by hiring well-connected jazz veteran Don Lucoff as executive director and announcing a slimmed-down but interesting lineup for the 2010 festival. The festival is in talks with KMHD to figure out ways they can partner.

So, the four ingredients you need for a healthy jazz scene are coming together: Great young players. Good jazz clubs. A radio station that's reaching out to the local community. A jazz festival that brings important jazz artists to town -- and with them jazz tourists, who will spread the word about the scene here.

These things couldn't be more interrelated.

Here's Wallsmith of the Blue Cranes talking about the jazz festival two years ago, the one that featured the free-thinking music of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor: "I have not seen avant/free music promoted on that level in Portland in the whole time I've lived here," he said. "I started crying hearing Ornette perform at the Schnitz and seeing the thousands of people give him a standing ovation. The festival as a whole gave me an emotional/spiritual lift for quite a few months afterwards."

Matt Fleeger, assistant programming director at KMHD, says, "Before I got to Portland, the first thing I had on my radar was the Portland Jazz Festival." Fleeger came to KMHD from San Antonio, where many of the donors to his radio station travel to Portland for the festival.

Darroch, who has always had deep contacts with the Portland scene, says the station is also encouraging him to make use of those contacts to bring local musicians into the studio to talk (along with touring jazz musicians).

For his part, Fleeger is evidently getting out into the local clubs, too. "Those Blue Cranes are ..." -- and I interrupted him, quoting a line from "High Fidelity" where a customer in Rob's record shop listens to the song on the shop audio system, turns to Rob (played by John Cusack) and remarks how good the song is. Rob smiles and says, "I know." Yeah, the Blue Cranes are good.

For the first time I can remember, it seems as though everyone on the local jazz scene is working toward the same thing. "We're at a point where jazz needs to appeal to different audiences in order to survive," Darwish says, which happens to be what the folks at KMHD, the jazz festival, the clubs and the musicians are saying, too.

That's the fifth ingredient of a good jazz scene -- an active, involved, hungry audience. And that's the one we're hoping the other four help create.

Not that more can't be done. Wallsmith suggests that the festival figure out a way to comp local jazz musicians into the festival concerts, which tend to be beyond their means, for example (all we need is a sponsor!). Darwish is hoping that Jimmy Mak's and the jazz festival reach an understanding that allows the festival and the city's most important jazz club to embrace each other. "It's rude not to," he says.

As Darroch points out, the spirit of the scene right now is cooperative. It's collaborative. It's building on the hard work done the past two decades in the jazz programs at local middle and high schools, community colleges and Portland State University.

At the moment, the signs are all good.

October 7, 2009
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
"Jazz on the Rise"
BRETT CAMPBELL

"... another of the city’s most torrid and creative young ensembles, Blue Cranes"

October 5, 2009
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
"Blue Cranes and Andrew Oliver Kora Band at Jimmy Mak's"
BARRY JOHNSON

We received an email from Reed Wallsmith (OK, it was part of an email blast), who is back from Berlin "in one piece, after having had an amazing time there performing and recording with improvisers from Norway, Denmark and Germany. We are in the process of mixing an album - stay tuned." This means that Blue Cranes are back in full working order for an 8 p.m. performance at Jimmy Mak's.

August 15, 2009
Murfins and Burglars (San Francisco)
"Blue Cranes at Bluesix"

Oh, man, this band. Blue Cranes is an experimental sax-fronted quintet out of Portland. And they rule. Seriously. Sam Howard, an old friend of mine from UMiami, subs on bass with them quite a bit, and has actually been down this way on tour before, but I hadn’t seen them until Wednesday night. Before the show, I was asking him what they sound like, what the term “Indie Jazz,” which he’d used to explain their sound to me in the past, really meant.

“You know when Britney Spears shaved her head? It sounds like that.”

So... pretty much like this?

Blue Cranes’ setup involves a fairly standard jazz rhythm section – upright bass, drum kit and keyboards (both standard piano sounds and a synthesizer) played by Sam, Ji Tanzer and Rebecca Sanborn, and fronted by Joe Cunningham (”Sly Pig”) and Reed Wallsmith on the tenor and alto saxes, respectively.

What is less than standard about the band is the music they play, and the way they play it. Basically, they play inside, triumphant pop melodies mixed with free-jazz explorations. It’s not the template of all of their tunes, but several times, I was struck at how effectively the band would pivot from a driving, lyrical section of ones and fours and fives straight into a wide-open free-blowing situation, bringing things sometimes to an utter standstill before building them back up. It was incredibly well implemented, particularly on their second tune of the night, “Love, Love, Love,” (by Seattle composer Wayne Horvitz), which came down to an almost impossibly sparse improvisation by Sly Pig and the band before building its way back to a ferocious ending. You can see a video of them performing the tune here:

What’s more, by adding Sanborn’s Hanne Hukkelberg-esque synth (or, if you prefer, Napoleon Dynamite-ish), they really do get a sort of “Indie” sound that, when combined with the strong saxophone melodies, makes for a listening experience that is quite unique. Other highlights from the set included an inspired cover of Sufjan’s “Seven Swans,” a punk-rock tune that played like an exercise in rhythmic displacement (Drums and bass on two and four! Now one and three! Now two and four! Now back!) Sam mentioned to me that they’ve been doing a lot of shows with punk bands, and that when they do a lot of this material, it’s about 200% louder than it was at Bluesix.

Which is cool, but man, as much as I dug the playing, and the writing, perhaps the thing I enjoyed most of all was the dynamic contrast that Blue Cranes brought. From the quietest whisper to the loudest, fullest saxophone roar, it was just so engaging to listen to music that displayed so much contrast. A good deal of this owes to the great room – I’ve never been to Bluesix before, but it is an absolutely fantastic place to see live music. It’s quite a bit like the Red Poppy, actually – a listening room/art gallery with a small wine bar and a close, warm vibe that encourages focused listening. I have never been to a bar where Pig’s solo on “Love Love Love” would have been possible.

Bluesix is run by bassist/rennaissance man Joe Lewis, a big, super-nice guy who plays around town with a ton of groups. His dedication to music, and to running a room where great, uncommon music is possible, really shows – I really loved the club, and hope to play there soon.

I am, of course, not really doing either of these groups justice with my writing, but I hope that by telling you a few of my thoughts and impressions that you’ll check them out. Spaceheater plays all over the city and features really groovy writing and some amazing horn arrangements. Blue Cranes comes to town not infrequently and are doing some of the most interesting, rewarding, and exciting acoustic jazz I’ve seen in a long time. Check them out, support them, and go see ‘em live!

August 13, 2009
Chico News & Review (Chico, CA)
"Player's Night"

Portland, Oregon's Blue Cranes (pictured) create works of experimental jazz that one press clipping likened to "some David Lynch style basement jazz hallucination." The Cranes go live at Cafe Coda Thursday, Aug. 13.

August 7, 2009
Sacramento News and Review (Sacramento)
"Blue Cranes say ‘Eff you, elevator jazz'"
JOSH FERNANDEZ

Maybe jazz, in the context of contemporary music, has been relegated to the confines of hip-hop samples, public radio and elevators for a reason. Perhaps it’s being punished for stubbornness—for keeping to tradition for almost 100 years without much room to wiggle. But as the punishment subsides, new jazz acts with something different to say are emerging. Take into account “Broken Windmills,” from the Portland, Ore., quintet Blue Cranes: Drums exist within the natural momentum of wildly interesting orchestration, rather than simply to dictate a pace. Yet there’s a sense of excitement and urgency within the band’s strangely arranged melodies, which is not always the case when discussing experimental jazz. Rock critics are even using words like “polished,” “unique” and “innovative” to describe the band’s textured sound. But the band also conveys a certain old-time romance, reaching middle ground between structure and playfulness. Whether it’s the jarring Latin polyrhythm of “Awesome Hawk” or the punk rock bassline on “X,” Blue Cranes provide a new amplification of jazz, allowing listeners to hear a stream of water pass through a storm drain thick with sediment.

"That was the best fucking music I've ever heard in my whole goddamn life... and I'm including Mozart and Brahms in that. I thought you guys were going to be crappy and boring." - Leb's dad

August 5, 2009
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
"Beat Off feat. Blue Cranes"
CASEY JARMAN

[JAZZ BEAT] Tonight, the popular Beat Off beat battle—wherein, to remind you, fledgling producers must work with a handful of samples to quickly churn out an earth-shatteringly cool beat—gets sophisticated. This time around, the beat doctors will use samples from local jazz institution Blue Cranes’ recent studio visit, making for instrumentals we hope fall into the Premier/Dilla category rather than that of Us3’s “Cantaloop.” The Cranes themselves will also make an appearance. It's good to see Portland’s jazz set embracing sampling rather than taking its practitioners to court.

July 31, 2009
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR)
"Beat It"
PG

Rather than battling with their own selection of juicy samples, the DJs at Holocene's Beat Off competition will be using studio samples from the Blue Cranes' latest album-who also happen to be kicking off their national tour and playing a live set while beatmasters oil everyone up with sexy tunes. It'll make you so excited you'll wanna... you know.

June 26, 2009
Oregonian A&E (Portland, OR)
Five Live Top Pick #1: "Blue Cranes"

This jazz combo, led by sax player Reed Wallsmith, has the moxie to cover songs by indie icons such as Elliott Smith as well as crank out bristling noir-ish originals.

June 24, 1009
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
"Blue Cranes, Gojogo, Walking Home"

"One of the Northwest’s most fascinating progressive jazz bands will present new material."

February 18, 2009
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
"Lessons Learned From The Portland Jazz Festival"
BARRY JOHNSON

[on "Crane," a piece arranged for the Portland Jazz Composer's Ensemble by R. Wallsmith]: "Crane" by Reed Wallsmith of Blue Cranes fame was the most polished piece of music on the program, especially for this setting and this band. (I've written about the Blue Cranes before.) It started with a low saxophone note and a murmur of Paul Mazzio's trumpet joined in, which would swell into a lonesome theme. Then, he created a dynamic change to a swift, swinging little section with a very cute tune, before taking it back down for orchestral chords and solo passages, which continued that plaintive idea. It was all very noir-ish, very "LA Confidential." And Wallsmith at the podium kept shushing the band so the individual strands could be distinguished. Smart.

January 28, 2009
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
BRETT CAMPBELL

"Portland’s most exciting neo-jazz band"

January 13, 2009
Art Scatter
"Looking At Noise, Or Why We Love the Blue Cranes"
BARRY JOHNSON (Oregonian arts editor)

We walk or drive around Portland, and we are bombarded – by signs, buildings, sound, traffic, information of all sorts, every possible corner filled with the cultural stuff of the modern city, the air a battlefield of warring noises. We rush by it and through it all quickly because we couldn’t possibly pay attention to all of it, maybe any of it, if we want to focus on things that matter.

Which is all another way of saying: The city sometimes sings out to us in unexpected ways.

A few days before the Great Christmas Whiteout of 2008, I found myself listening to the new CD by the Portland jazz band Blue Cranes, “Homing Patterns,” as I walked to work. I like the energy of the band, the collage of blues, rock and noise, and I like the melodies Reed Wallsmith and Sly Pig wander through on their saxophones. Every now and then, the horns in the band collide, often in a chord, an interesting chord, that expands into another chord and then another, each one pushed to the limit of breath, to the point of honking.

Anyway, I had reached the pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks on Portland’s east side (about where the photo above was taken), right before you get to the Esplanade and the Steel Bridge. The rail line at that place curves deeply, and as I approached a long freight train, with graffiti-embellished boxcars and flatcars, lumbered underneath. They do not do this silently. They grumble along, of course, but because of the curve, they also squeal sometimes, a teeth-gnashing vibration that makes your fillings hurt.

But here, at this particular intersection, something happened: The screech of that train finished off one of those bleating Blue Cranes chords. Slid up the scale a little and finished it off. It was exactly the right note, somehow, and it pulled me up short as the delight of it all dawned on me. Amazing. The perfect sonic accident.

I crossed the Steel Bridge, the chord still in my head, and started walking along the Willamette River, passing the new Mercy Corps headquarters, where construction was underway and a jack hammer was at its business. But now the song had changed, and the hammer’s staccato picked up the tempo of the new tune, the chattering in time to the snare on the CD, on and between the beats. And then I noticed that the two trucks chugging along Naito Parkway created a deeper, more rhythmic bass line.

My ears were on fire. And I wondered, idealistically, is this always the way it is when you’re truly attuned to the outside world? It becomes something “symphonic”? But then it all fell apart as the CD and random noises took different paths; the city stopped playing along with Blue Cranes.

I didn’t know quite to make of it, this moment of alignment, of private meaning, my city and its jazz band united in my head,and my head only, to make something special...

[click here to read the rest]

...

January 8, 2009
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
ROBERT HAM

[BURGEONING JAZZ STARS] If you've not familiarized yourself with the work of Blue Cranes, you'd better get on board quickly. This arch and artful jazz combo already has listed on its website shows with keyboardist extraordinaire Wayne Horvitz and a showcase at this year's Portland Jazz Festival. My point is that you can pay a nominal fee to see them in a small venue like the Doug Fir now or, once the jazzheads that descend on our city once a year get ahold of them, end up losing half your paycheck to see them on a big stage in six months' time. The choice is yours.

January 2, 2009
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
LUCIANA LOPEZ

The stereotypical jazz show is composed of an older audience listening to older performers. Wrong on all counts, particularly for shows of this indie-spirited jazz group, led by sax player Reed Wallsmith.

December 25, 2008
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR)
RJP

Another local band braves the unforgiving chill of the holidays and the icicles to lay musical waste to your ears... with brass! Blue Cranes absorb the tinny din of grimy jazz and noodly improv with a nightmarish plunge into bizarre. Brush the sheen off your shoulders and get weird one more time before '09.

December 24, 2008
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
BRETT CAMPBELL

Maintaining the restless spirit of past pioneers, the colorful avant-jazz of Wallsmith’s Blue Cranes looks forward to the music’s future.

November 2008
Performer Magazine (San Francisco, CA)

Portland jazz quintet Blue Cranes head down to California this month to tour in support of their album, Homing Patterns. The dates will kick off on November 20 in Chico, include an appearance on KDVS radio show Cool as Folk, and conclude on November 25 in San Francisco with a performance at the Climate Music Box Series.

November 12, 2008
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
"Blue Cranes, Quiet Countries, Gavin Castleton"
BRETT CAMPBELL

The avant jazzers are raising money to fix their tour van, and are joined by members of Portland Cello Project, Quiet Countries and Gavin Castleton, plus a screening of Portland filmmaker Jim Blashfield’s St. Helens Road, with music by the Land Camera Micro Orchestra, which includes head Crane Reed Wallsmith. Worksound, 820 SE Alder St. 8 pm Tuesday, November 18.

October 16, 2008
Daily Vanguard (Portland, OR)
STEPHANIE SASSE

Jazz has a rough time of it. The under appreciated genre rarely nets the audience it deserves and often has a hard time at that.

However, a little research will quickly reveal that anywhere with Blue Cranes on the bill should serve as a good entry point for newcomers and a breath of fresh air for genre devotees. This local group's sound is as invigorating as it is disarming. They gracefully merge nostalgic tributes to old jazz with completely fresh innovations on the genre. Even the band itself sees its sound as something of a conundrum.

"Jazz, rock, electronic, Latin. We don't really know," says saxophonist and arranger Reed Wallsmith, "I feel like we're just trying to draw on all of the influences we have, and play the music that comes out of us."

In 1994, at Portland's Grant High School, drummer Ji Tanzer and Wallsmith met to form a musical project and creative outlet for their jazz-leaning sensibility. Nine years later, in 2003, they joined with bassist and fellow jazz enthusiast Keith Brush to form Blue Cranes.

The group soon began looking for a keyboardist, a role eventually filled by Tanzer's wife, Rebecca Sanborn. Finally, to round out the quintet, Sly Pig joined on tenor sax.

With years of playing together now under their belt, Wallsmith explains how familial each other's company can be.

"I feel really fortunate to be playing with four other musicians who are amazingly compassionate people," he says, "Regardless of what is going on musically, they are so supportive."

When asked about his influences, Wallsmith mentioned The Bad Plus and Happy Apple.

He later explained what a good jazz-fusion band must offer to impress him, saying, "It's when I'm inspired by how they work together as a group. When they are amazing, amazing musicians but aren't using their music to showcase their abilities as individuals. They're working as a group. That's inspiring."

Blue Cranes is part of a tight-knit, once prominent and now rapidly re-growing community of musicians who remain convinced of the belief that the making of music is a group art, not to be wasted on show dogging. Each musician has a role to play, contributing to the wellbeing of the whole.

Another unique aspect of the band's music is its lack of vocals, the inclusion of which would take away from the music's purity and the audience's freedom to interpret and respond however they are inspired to.

The band's music is heavily reliant on subtle yet infectious interactions between the instruments, with random doses of electronics and high-powered rock that one would never find on an early-period jazz album. The audience is inspired to pay close attention, listening as each piece contributes its part and supports the next, with no foreshadowing of what's to come. The music is completely unpredictable, especially when experienced live.

"I think a lot of pop music in the U.S. doesn't involve much improvisation," says Wallsmith. "For me that's what can make a live show. You're playing something that is never going to happen again."

As far as recent accomplishments go, Blue Cranes has an impressive list. They released a self-produced album entitled Homing Patterns in May 2008, earned a raving write up in the Willamette Week, completed a successful tour of California and played a sold-out show with the Portland Cello Project. Wallsmith considers the latter performance one of his most impressive moments as a musician.

"To be up there in front of all those people, playing really quiet so everyone has to lean forward and listen," says Wallsmith, "We had seven cellists from the Portland Cello Project. I just felt so proud being up there."

This sort of "color outside the lines" approach to jazz is exactly what the Blue Cranes have tried to cultivate. When jazz music was at its prime, it was revolutionary, hip and a little irreverent.

Perhaps Blue Cranes' greatest accomplishment has been its ability to reintroduce jazz as it was intended; a little familiar, a little rebellious, entirely unpredictable and breaking every single boundary it can find.

August 27, 2008
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
AP KRYZA

[JAZZ HANDS] Like some David Lynch-style basement jazz hallucination, the Blue Cranes' music is the type of experimental, sometimes insane, but always invigorating experience that's hard to shake. The Portland quintet understands jazz is alive and well—but also that it was never something to be defined in the first place. The Cranes treat music as the broad, blank canvas it is, splattering it with color, bizarre time splits, soothing melodies and frightening bursts of brass while forging an original soundscape that would make a by-the-books beatnik jazzhead's beret spin.

August 10, 2008
The Jibsheet (Seattle, WA)
EMMA SERGEANT

Music, no charge, the most delicious offer in the world, especially when you are a financially struggling student working more than 40 hours a week and you want to attain some dignity or air of sophistication.

Cal Anderson surprised many on a sunny evening last week with a free summer concert in the park. Early evening, crowds accumulated with picnics, paper-bagged beverages, summer dresses and straw hats to enjoy artists from the Northwest, supported by the Monktail Creative Music Concern, a celebration of music and community outside. The Blue Cranes from Portland stole the awes from a gob smacked audience, playing the best eclectic jazz Seattle’s heard since Benny Carter at Jazz Alley in Seattle.

Although Seattle shines above most states for its strong sense of Jazz culture, the scene is wearing a little thin with bands playing limited repertoires of over-practiced Duke Ellington and Coltrane.

The Blue Cranes were something different. Something extraordinary. Presented on a mounted stage at Cal Anderson Park, next to the baseball field on Capitol Hill. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelliger, an alto saxophonist, Alto Wally Shoup explained his thoughts that “people go out to hear jazz to participate in a bygone era, one where elegance and cool were expressions of freedom.” He goes on to hope that people will “go out to hear every form of music calling itself jazz. In doing so, they will remember what freedom still sounds like.” The Blue Cranes were a modern break of conformity, performing an emotive attack of music and passion, grasping the freedom of exiting a mind of negative thoughts and distractions, to enter a mind set of musical nirvana.

The quintet composed of two saxophonists, a keyboardist, a bassist and a drummer were originally high school friends who reconnected and gathered more instrumentalists to collaborate on a jazz/rock project. The music of the Blue Cranes inevitably centers around the powerful alto saxophonist Reed Wallsmith. He grabs the listener instantly, through the immense size of his sound. His tone is big, expressive, and unique with his skilled use of vibrato. He takes risks as he performs, using a variety of tones and vocalized effects. Wallsmith, bassist Keith Brush, and drummer Ji Tanzer anticipate each other’s next move with well thought empathy as Brush and Tanzer articulate Wallsmith’s notes.

Blue Cranes play original material, with some divine melodies and a variety of rhythmic approaches. Since forming in 2004, Blue Cranes have successfully built a diverse audience of people who are not normally drawn to jazz. For this performance on Capitol Hill, the group engaged the audience with a contemporary piece, a Sufjan Steven’s cover of “Seven Swans”, which was breathtaking in its execution. Starting with an opening upbeat walking tempo rhythm that became a moving wave of splashing sound, beating each sound to form another and building more power.

The event was sponsored by 4Culture, which is King County’s cultural services agency, which was established in 2003. 4Culture originally started a Preservation Program to promote the value of historic resources in building a unique sense of place in the Pacific Northwest. The organization combines the resources of the public sector with the flexibility of a non-profit group. Through the collaboration of four program areas, 4Culture encourages cultural activity and enhances the assets that distinguish Northwest communities as “vibrant, unique, and authentic.”

The Northwest is a blossoming community with a heart in the arts. With companies sponsoring events to support developing artists, inviting the community to watch their growth, Seattle is really the place to take advantage of letting go and expressing yourself with your talent.

The next outdoor concert at Cal Anderson on Capitol Hill will be on August 23, starting at 1pm. Guests will include: Floss, Reptet, Ahamefule J. Oluo and the New Seattle Brass Ensemble featuring Okanomodé, and The Wally Shoup Free Three. The event is free. For more information, visit: http://www.soundsoutside.com.

August / September 2008 - #137
Dirty Linen (national publication)
"Blue Cranes - Homing Patterns"
MITCH RITTER

Following its warmly received, if disparately perceived, debut CD, Lift Music! Flown Music, this Portland, Oregon, quartet has taken on a new member in the Decemberists' tenor saxophonist Joe Cunningham (a.k.a. Sly Pig). Guest New York City guitarist Ila Cantor adds her simultaneously cerebral and sensual asides. The debut disc used songs (mostly sans lyrics) as launch pads for all manner of frame-shattering tonal and textural reconstructions (Carlos Mejia Godoy's "Cristo de Palacaguina," with Nicaraguan streets open mic'd; Elliott Smith's "Coming Up Roses" along with the reincarnation of Beat-era Allen Ginsberg as a young Portland poet homesick in New York and telephoning letters home to free-jazz accompaniment, as on "Dear Howard"); The new Blue Cranes CD adapts only Sufjan Stevens' "Seven Swans," retooled here as a vehicle for Reed Wallsmith's disarmingly sustained alto saxophone tone and pianist Rebecca Sanborn's nearly mini rondo with acoustic bassist Keith Brush, whose lush, deep tone complements Wallsmith well. Drummer and percussionist Ji Tanzer plays the colors and locates a backbeat even on tenor man Sly Pig's woozy "Dirty Bourbon," recorded live at a No' Po' pizza pub. For such spontaneous music making, these pieces sure feel lived in.

Summer 2008
Pop Tomorrow (Portland, OR)
ANGELO DE LESO II

Portland, Oregon’s finest five piece jazz combo Blue Cranes present a sultry and soulful offering that stirs the psyche while tantalizing the heart. Crooning saxifone melodies roster through eleven tracks and are reminiscent of smoky bourbon bars and meloncholy late nights. High school friends Reed Wallsmith and Ji Tanzer team up to profer a unique connectedness replete with starry piano jimgles and swaying acousting bass riffs. There are moments of the great Mingus coupled with Latin jazz interludes. The finished product is an refined yet impromptu-textured mesh of howling instrumental laments. Straight forward and at times lulliby-esque Homing Patterns is a complex and elaborate manifold of approachable and somewhat swanky numbers that concurrently extricate and replenish the spirit with artful intricacies. Without covers or gratuitious solos, this work is a fusion of various warm and tender stylings sure to be remembered in an artfully timeless fashion. Static whispers close out the tenth track “Washington Park – Eastbound” before assuming asylum with an eerily bouncing reprise of “Crane.” Each listen unbolts a new interpretation as determined as the last.

Summer 2008
KDViations (Davis, CA)
KEVIN DEMANO

If you feel as though there must be nothing that can stem the endless tide of easy-listening, breathy-voiced and otherwise "unguarded" indie rock that seems to seep into all corners of your surrounding sonic life, then Portland's Blue Cranes offer to fly you to safety with their new album, Homing Patterns.

Rising even further above where their previous effort left us, the core Cranes, with Reed Wallsmith on alto sax, Rebecca Sanborn on keyboards, Keith Brush on acoustic bass, and Ji Tanzer on drums, continue to hone and expand their blend of rock-influenced jazz on this record with the addition of Sly Pig (Joe Cunningham) on tenor sax and Ila Cantor on guitar.

Most songs on Homing Patterns are based on simple chord progressions of varying intensity, interspersed with fits of free-blowing, but often feature a straightforward rhythm component, which is one of the hallmarks of the Cranes' sound. Now, while the idea of taking jazz out of its proverbial stuffy cocktail lounge and throwing it into the sweaty basement of your average house show isn't exactly new, the Blue Cranes do it with such effortless authority that you can't help be a little awed. Indeed, when your dad sat you down in front of the hi-fi to show you there is more to life than three chords and a 4/4 meter, he wasn't reaching for any LPs that sounded like the Blue Cranes, but that's what makes them so great.

Continuing in the tradition of covering songs by indie rock artists, Homing Patterns contains a standout cover of the Sufjan Stevens track, "Seven Swans," which begins sparse and tentative, but ends full and forceful. "Beware the Pneumatic Nailer," which one can only guess is a reference to Wallsmith's day job as a carpenter, starts as a swirling cacophony and gets moving with a straightforward rhythm, eventually developing into a fantastic 7/4 groove before ending all too abruptly. "Early Morning" slowly rises with saxophones casually conversing, in a dialogue that gets increasingly heated, until scorching guitar work drops in and lights the sun into the day. If you've been reluctant to try listening to jazz, or haven't liked what you've heard in the past, pick up Homing Patterns and take flight with the Blue Cranes, because the view from above might be one you like.

July 16, 2008
mel.opho.be (national publication)
DEREK HILL
(live review of 7/12/08 show @ Doug Fir w/ Portland Cello Project)

The final cello-added act was the Blue Cranes, a local jazz band that started the set with a Sufjan Stevens cover of “Seven Swans”, which was amazing in its implementation. Starting with an initial upbeat walking tempo rhythm that became a moving wave of cannonading sound, it was easily the most dynamic piece of the evening. They followed with a self-composed track “Returning to Portland,” and finished with “Inner Dialogue” which was an interactive bit where stage members and the audience were called on for shout-outs on what became a dialogue on where to have brunch the following Sunday. But I can’t remember the exact location.

July 2008
Jazz Society of Oregon (Portland, OR)
KYLE O'BRIEN

Having just moved back to Portland after two years away, I had never heard of the Blue Cranes, but I'm certainly happy to know about them now. With a double-headed sax attack leading the way, this genre-fusing, experimental group is a welcome addition to a scene that too often tries to define itself as straight ahead, though it's much more diverse. And diversity is what this group is all about. Saxophonists Reed Wallsmith and Sly Pig share obtuse but somehow engaging melodies, trading lines with harsh tones before taking the proceedings outside the chords. This is not necessarily just free jazz. There are many compositional elements involved, as on the frenetic but held-together "Awesome Hawk," a blaring example of how modern jazz can be while still being plenty accessible. And it isn't just atonal jazz, though those elements exist. Take the melancholy "Seven Swans," a sparse but beautiful and melodic composition that wins with simplicity and tone before finishing in a Bad Plus-like bombast that also somehow works. This is not music for the masses. It is rooted in many traditions, but it feels young and vital. It is rough around the edges but also sophisticated. It's a guy wearing a tuxedo begging for change. It's the bungalow on a street of mansions -- you know it's there and you don't want to look but if you don't, you might be missing a gem. It's not a jazz album as much as it is a mash-up of styles and instruments. "X" is a brash rocker with a sweet melodic heart as played by the group, which also includes Ji Tanzer on drums, Keith Brush on acoustic bass and Rebecca Sanborn on keys and piano, along with guest guitarist Ila Cantor. This is fun music that pushes the limits ... but not too far. The disc is not crisply produced. The sounds all seem very live and with you, which works in building a feeling of hipness. The avant-garde sax duet, "Washington Park - Eastbound" was recorded in a Max tunnel, giving it an other-worldly feel. As I said, fun.

July 13, 2008
Audiophile Audition (Portland, OR)
HERMON JOYNER

So what would happen if a group of younger musicians came to jazz by way of indie rock, indie pop, folk, and experimental music? Without conscious care for the trappings and traditions of jazz? With an emphasis on raw expressionism and boundless energy? The result of this might very well be the music of Blue Cranes, an indie jazz band from Portland, Oregon. “Homing Patterns” is the newest CD from this band that features original compositions and improvisations that were mostly recorded live in various venues around Portland, including an underground light rail station. But more on that in just a moment.

Blue Cranes’ sound is built around saxophones and has Reed Wallsmith on alto sax and Sly Pig (otherwise known as Joe Cunningham, if you get the pun on his last name, from the indie pop group, The Decembrists) on tenor sax. Their performances on the recording are uniformly coordinated, matching each other in tone, energy, and imagination. It’s a real pleasure to hear these two play together. Rebecca Sanborn performs on keyboards and piano, Keith Brush handles the acoustic bass, Ji Tanzer plays drums, and Ila Cantor is featured on guitar.

The music ranges from the dissonant to the semi-lyrical, and the musical journey that the band takes the listener on is filled with unexpected surprises, some jarring, but most are pleasantly intriguing. The use of melody is restrained and used sparingly (using instead repeated and concise melodic motifs like electronically samples sound bites), and instead spurts of expressionistic runs, growls, and howls supply the intensity and drive that propel the listener along. One of the more interesting numbers is “Washington Park – Eastbound,” a duet between Wallsmith and Pig. It was recorded in an underground light rail station underneath Washington Park in Portland. Both musicians work with the natural ambience and reverberation of the tiled environment, responding to the arrival and departure of one of the light rail trains and incorporating its sounds into the composition. It’s a totally fascinating piece and sums up the inventiveness and creativity of this endeavor. Leave behind your expectations and go along for the ride. Blue Cranes will take you to new and interesting places. If nothing else, you won’t be bored.

May 21, 2008
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
LANCE KRAMER

[INDIE PIG JAZZ] For a few long days last December, Blue Cranes alto saxophonist Reed Wallsmith was vomiting pretty heavily. Crappy timing, considering he was in the midst of recording the band’s latest album, Homing Patterns. Keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn then came down with the stomach flu. Meanwhile, Type Foundry engineer Jason Powers was huddled in a scarf with a box of Kleenex by his side.

“Pretty much every day we were recording, a different person got very sick,” Wallsmith says. The result, however painfully conceived, is a fine product of Portland’s dreary, sun-deprived winters. It’s also an evolutionary step in the brand of expressionistic jazz that’s defined the group since it linked up just over a year ago. But tenor saxophonist/horn arranger, Patterns- and Decemberists-contributor Joe Cunningham doesn’t think of the Cranes as a jazz band. Drummer Ji Tanzer agrees: “We’re just having fun and playing music using the influences we have...rock, folk, whatever. We’re not on a mission to teach rock listeners what jazz is all about.”

Those influences range from the Bad Plus to Elliott Smith (whose “Coming Up Roses” was covered on the Cranes’ debut). The band—rounded out by bassist Keith Brush and often found playing rock clubs like Holocene or sharing bills with punk groups—doesn’t see itself as “alt” or “experimental,” either. It is, however, open to experimenting with performance spaces. On Patterns’ “Washington Park–Eastbound,” for instance, Wallsmith and Cunningham—who recently made the screwy decision to go by “Sly Pig” to distinguish himself from an East Coast smooth jazz sax player of the same name (it’s a pun; figure it out)—play an eerie freeform horn duo recorded in the Washington Park MAX tunnel.

Wallsmith also has a whole backlog of ideas when it comes to keeping Portland jazz performances weird. “In Paris,” he says, “a hundred saxophonists were on some sort of email list and all showed up at the same subway stop at the same time, pulled out their horns, and played completely free for a minute. Then they put their horns away and dispersed,” he continues. “I’m putting a call out to all of Oregon and Washington that this should happen.” Well, Reed, I happen to have an old alto sax sitting in my closet. Just say the word.

May 7, 2007
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR)
MD

Portland jazz group Blue Cranes celebrate the release of new album Homing Patterns tonight. They've set their sights on reclaiming jazz as an indie medium, played in regular clubs where you don't have to pay $80 for dinner while you listen. Remember when jazz was about musical experimentation, not pretentious cross-marketing? All hail Blue Cranes!

May 7, 2008
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
BRETT CAMPBELL

[ALT JAZZ] Blue Cranes is one of those rare jazz combos that appeals to both serious jazz listeners and alt-rock fans. Tonight the Portland quintet celebrates its second album, Homing Patterns, which features a Sufjan Stevens cover and 10 new originals by virtuoso altoist Reed Wallsmith (including one recorded in the MAX tunnel beneath the zoo). With Decemberists tenorman Joe "Sly Pig" Cunningham now aboard, the band features thoughtful, Mingus-influenced excursions that often erupt into raucous, smeary, David Murray-style sax duets. And the Cranes' rhythm section (keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn, acoustic bassist Keith Brush, drummer Ji Tanzer) cooks throughout.

May 5, 2008
Livepdx.com (Portland, OR)
BOB HAM

The quintet known as Blue Cranes are one of the many jazz groups in Portland that aim to take music reserved for smoky supper clubs and hotel bars into the rock club world. Led by alto sax player Reed Wallsmith, the group's freewheeling sound captures both the improvised energy and the gently melodic moments of John Coltrane's classic quartet and Sun Ra's Arkestra.

Blue Cranes also pay homage to their indie rock brethren by featuring covers of Elliott Smith and Sufjan Stevens on their two albums — the latest of which, Homing Patterns, was celebrated at a Holocene show this week.

For some further insight into Blue Cranes, Wallsmith was kind enough to answer some questions about the band via e-mail for LivePDX.

There seems to be a number of jazz and classical groups in Portland that are very serious about taking the music out of the concert halls and jazz clubs, and instead play in unusual venues and with varying types of groups...is something you wanted for Blue Cranes from the start?
---
I think for me it was mostly that I wanted to be playing music in the places that my friends and I were going to hear music. At the time when we formed the group, my friends listened mostly to rock music, so for me it was about playing in places that were accessible to them.

What inspired you to play jazz instead of going the route of most kids who want to play in a rock band?
---
I never really seriously listened to music until I started playing saxophone at the end of middle school. Before that I would listen to Z100 in an attempt to be able to talk about something at recess. The first music that seriously moved me was a compilation called The Best of the Jazz Saxophones. I started checking out albums by the musicians on the tape, and my love of improvised jazz music grew from there. For whatever reason, I didn't get into rock until much later. I sometimes felt like an outsider when I was younger because I knew who Charlie Parker and Miles Davis were but I couldn't name a song by Sonic Youth or Soundgarden.

How did the band get together?
---
Ji [Tanzer, Blue Cranes drummer] and I have played together since high school. In 2004, we were playing shows as a drum/sax duo. I had a four track project that I recorded that I wanted to put a band together to play. The two of us got together with Keith [Brush, bassist], who I had been playing with in Dave Storrs' and Jimmy Bennington's groups, and began playing as a trio. We joined with Rebecca [Sanborn, keyboards] a year later, and Joe (who now goes by Sly Pig) [tenor saxophone] a year or two after that.

You recorded one of the songs on the new album in the MAX tunnel...where did you hit upon that idea? What was the experience like?
---
Joe and I wanted to record a saxophone duo song for the album as a kind of outro or hidden track. We were trying to think of places to record it that would have a big natural reverb, and thought of the tunnel. We recorded it in the middle of rush hour, thinking that there would be lots of people around in the station, but, it turns out, the zoo is not a huge commuting hub. We played down there while Rebecca manned the recorder for about half an hour. The trains would come by packed with people, the doors would open, and after ten or twenty seconds of no one getting on or off, the doors would close and the trains would take off. It was funny thinking about the sounds of screeching saxophones filling the train cars full of commuters. After we recorded it, it became one of my favorite tracks, with all of the sounds from the train and the loudspeaker and the wind ripping through tunnel. The experience was so fun that we're planning to record a whole album of saxophone duo, with each song done in a different public location.

What is next for the band after your upcoming tour through California?
---
We've been working hard to get away from using any sheet music, so if we haven't gotten there yet by the tour, we'll continue chipping away at that. We've been talking with the Paxselin Quartet about writing music together for a double quartet/quintet group and calling it The Chamber of Commerce, which I'm pretty excited about. We're planning to do a MAX Blue Line tour, in which the ticket to the show is a MAX ticket, and we get off at stops along the route to play. We'll see if this happens.... We're going to tour out East sometime this Fall, to play shows with friends in Providence and New York and points in between.

May 2, 2008
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
LYNN DARROCH

Jazz has long been home to virtuoso soloists, and usually, the younger they were, the more notes they played. But the Blue Cranes' Reed Wallsmith has moved in the opposite direction. His compositions build simple melodies on two-and-three-note motifs that attain intensity from repetition and a broad, expressive tone.

On the Cranes' second album, "Homing Patterns," Wallsmith (saxophone) and original Cranes Keith Brush (bass), Rebecca Sanborn (keyboards) and Ji Tanzer (drums) continue to draw from folk and indie rock to create shifting, cinematic soundscapes that further blur the line between jazz and popular music.

This time, though, they've added a new voice in Joe Cunningham, tenor sax player for the Decemberists. New York guitarist Ila Cantor also guests on the CD, but Wallsmith has found a kindred spirit in Cunningham. Their collaboration is at the heart of the new Cranes sound, whether they're playing in unison or weaving decorative lines around each other.

With Tanzer kicking out steady beats, you're always well-grounded, even on Cunningham's "Dirty Bourbon," where the waltz feel is never lost, even as it goes wildly off-kilter and Cantor deconstructs the melody. Only the infrequent free-blowing sections cause the focus to wander.

Despite the simple melodies and rock beats, the Cranes' music never feels monotonous or static. Like the long-form compositions of other progressive jazz artists, it's constantly changing. In "Awesome Hawk," for instance, the spacious melody gives way to an untidy improvisational passage before the sweeping theme returns, the volume and intensity build to a dramatic peak and the Cranes take flight. The view is different up there, and actually quite serene.

May 3, 2008
Southeast Examiner (Portland, OR)
BRIAN CUTEAN

Migrating back from a successful West Coast tour as far south as San Francisco, Portland’s Blue Cranes have released their third recording, Homing Patterns. Blue Cranes celebrate their new disc with a homecoming concert Wednesday, May 7, at Holocene, 1001 SE Morrison at 8 pm. Tickets are $6 for folks 21 and over. Blue Cranes are Reed Wallsmith (alto saxophone), Sly Pig (tenor saxophone), Rebecca Sanborn (keyboard), Keith Brush (bass), Ji Tanzer (drums) and their guest on seven of the eleven tracks is New York guitarist Ila Cantor. The addition of Sly Pig (Joe Cunning-ham) has evolved their sound farther, clearer, tighter and to a more spontaneous juncture. Pushing the borders of jazz with rock structures, latin rhythms and voicings bringing the open playing of pioneers like Coltrane, Dolphy and Ornette Coleman into the group sound- scaffolding, this unit breathes together, takes chances together and goes places together. Wa llsmith’s alto is instantly recognizeable from the first notes on the first track, “S.T.I.L.L.” as the melodic voice of other Blue Cranes recordings and his compositions have a distinctive sound with a dash of wholeworld flavor. The twin alto and tenor countervoices echo and mirror jazz’s other great sax duets but sounding more like now. The bass here is large and articulate, the piano clear and the drums metamorphic. The band’s playing and interplay here is seductive like a multi-headed, one body Hydra of sound. By the fifth track, a waltz called “Dirty Bourbon” (recorded live in the Max tunnel somehow), the band’s momentum is a continuous story and wave and exhilarating. A track from Homing Patterns has already been selected for the 2008 PDX PopNow! compilation. Have a preview listen at www.myspace.com/bluecranes and find out what all the buzz is about. And don’t miss them live at Holocene for the close-up 3D experience. Their website is www.bluecranesmusic.com and a high quality mp3 version of the album is available for immediate download (as well as mail order for real cds) at www.integersonly.com.

January 2008
Performer Magazine (national publication)
BOB HAM

In recent years, Portland has become a breeding ground for a number of exciting jazz combos, all of which aim to take the genre out of the cocktail lounge and into the indie rock club. One such group is an invigorating quartet known as Blue Cranes. Although it sticks to the typical lineup of a jazz quartet (sax, keys, bass and drums), the group avoids expository solos and renditions of traditional songs, instead sticking together throughout like a rock band and, on this album, even covering a song by the late Elliott Smith.

Blue Cranes haven’t completely eschewed the notions of what jazz music is, writing straightforward works like the swinging ode to another Portland band “Thirty Ought Six Circus,” as well as proving they can ride a Latin groove with best of them on “Cristo De Palacaguina.” Yet what makes Blue Cranes so enticing is how closely they align themselves with other jazz artists like Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, who stretched the boundaries of what jazz can be. To that end, the Cranes have included fascinating songs like “Dear Howard,” where they provide the backing track for a spoken word piece, and the slow-simmering tunes “Greenwood” and “Aluvion Song for Audrey,” which see each member (especially drummer Ji Tanzer and bassist Keith Brush) thrumming and rolling along like ocean waves.

The real star of this show is Reed Wallsmith though, not only for his brilliant alto sax work but also for his production on the album. The young bandleader adds the right amount of texture and color to this already captivating musical canvas. With his input, Blue Cranes take flight with ease and grace on this accomplished debut.

2007
DAVID KING (Minneapolis, MN)
(The Bad Plus, Happy Apple)

Great melodies and a strong focus on ensemble playing over individual virtuosity.

August 5, 2007
PDX Pop Now! Blog (Portland, OR)
GREG

"... I managed to make it back in time for the amazing Blue Cranes. We've been hearing The Cranes described as one of Portland's leading jazz lights and now I know why. They just played the heck out of a bunch of songs, ranging from originals to a cover of Portland mainstay (and PDX Pop alums) The Kingdom to a few standards. Keeping tightly to the charts, The Cranes intersperse wild out wailing with elegant straight ahead melodic soloing. Reed (their leader and alto player) walks that tightrope particularly well, using honks, squawks, and runs to enliven choruses and add dramatic tension to his solos. Their rhythm section drives the whole proceedings with a near-rock style straight beat decorated just the slightest forward-leaning swing.

We're lucky, living in a town so far from New Orleans, New York, LA, and the other centers of American jazz, to have the Blue Cranes and Evolutionary Jass Band (coming up later tonight!) and the other truly excellent original groups that we do."

August 2007
PDX Pop Now! Festival Pamphlet
(Portland, OR)

Local rock fans, don't be afraid of this young experimental jazz quintet, since they're one of you, having covered both The Kingdom and Elliott Smith on their 2007 debut, Lift Music! Flown Music!. Like The Bad Plus -- who've given them props -- the Blue Cranes swing with both jazz tradition and current pop sounds.

April 26, 2007
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR)
EZRA ACE CARAEFF

"Nothing scares me more than a jazz group playing a rock club. When I see horns in a club setting, my first, and only, instinct is to flee. Blame ska. Granted, Holocene isn't your typical club, and Blue Cranes are far from your typical jazz quintet. Their abstract arrangements and bold decision to cover an Elliott Smith song make them a nice exception to the "no horns in the club" rule."

March 29, 2007
OregonLive.com Pop Music Blog
(Portland, OR)
LUCIANA LOPEZ

"Jazz has a notoriously hard time attracting young audiences, so Blue Cranes' recent venues have been somewhat unusual: Holocene in January for their CD release party, and Someday Lounge on Wednesday night, both of which skew toward a younger crowd than the typical jazz show.

But Blue Cranes showed last night that they're not really trying to be the typical jazz outfit, either. For one, they're obviously influenced by rock (the drumming leaned more toward rock than jazz at Someday). There's also the strong compositions that form the group's backbone (the group's leader, Reed Wallsmith, won a residency at Caldera for his composing skills).

The quintet, playing with guest drummer Todd Bishop (regular drummer Ji Tanzer was on tour), fit each other easily; Wallsmith's alto sax and Joe Cunningham's tenor sax especially worked well together..."

December, 2006
MIKE HEFFLEY (Portland, OR)
(author of The Music of Anthony Braxton and Northern Sun, Southern Moon: Europe's Reinvention of Jazz)

Music reviewers of a certain age (hello…) develop an eye and ear for late bloomers in the bud. At least that’s what I tell myself when I groove and daydream along with one of my new favorite local bands since I’ve been living back here in my City of Roses this past year.

When you’ve been around seeing and commenting on these matters as long as I have, your mind is full of arcs where once were sparks. You’ve seen players and bands who burst on the scene with promise and brilliance settle into commerce and career after a time and lose all their original interest, even as the arc of their success extrudes. You’ve seen others start more humbly but also more hauntingly and grow with the pace of a plant into the full realization of their musical promise, whatever their worldly success or lack thereof.

But maybe that dichotomy is too pat to cover Blue Cranes. These four 20/30-somethings have in fact brought impressive beginners’ creds to the group, and the group itself has presented with its own impressive bang since forming in 2004, visible often in all the best rock and jazz venues in Portland’s healthy music scene, audible live on its excellent local music stations KMHD and KBOO.

Still, my sense of them is more personal, and more of their potential’s future than its present. I hear something in this CD debut (and live around town) that reminds me of lush greens in rich Oregon soil, fertilized by equally rich elements from other parts of the world. It fills my mind with visions of the full blown plants to come.

The soul of its sound is Portland native Reed Wallsmith. Composer of five of the CD’s eight tracks, and provider of some keyboard and vocal bits, he’s most present in his alto saxophone. It grabbed me by shining a broad, bright beam on ground common to most jazz people: the personal envoicing of the alto sax sound. It’s something like jazz’s equivalent to violin in the classical tradition: warm, human, relaxed, also brilliant, fluid, poignant. I instantly connected it to the tradition of Bird, Desmond, Ornette, and Braxton.

If Wallsmith has schooled himself in that tradition, it may have been by minimizing its influence in favor of his own path, as those players did. His sound suggests that—no blatant imitation here—but even more so his musical mind. He thinks melodically more than any other way, and his pieces strike a mood throughhis melodies that, with his sound, begs the tag “soulful.” Not in the now-generic sense, but as in full possession of his own young-old soul, full of Portland’s musical and…weather-full soul.

His melodies also speak things that invite other things to join it (unlike much similar butt more hermetic beauty). These feel like aspects of an aesthetic in its formative youth. The first of those components is the roles played by his three bandmates. Each shares Wallsmith’s intimate command of his or her instrument, and more generally interdisciplinary musicianship; all are well-known players on the scene in other good local bands, sometime-leaders/composers themselves.

This CD draws on free jazz (Wallsmith’s work), indie rock (covers of Portland band The Kingdom’s “Polaris,” and the late great PDX-son singer-songwriter Elliot Smith’s “Coming up Roses”), local poetry (Nico Alvarado-Greenwood’s “Dear Howard”), gritty-cool electronic effects, everyday speech and sounds, film music, and the Nicaraguan Nueva Cancion political song movement (Nicaraguan musician-laureate Carlos Mejia Godoy’s “Cristo de Palacagüina”) Wallsmith has studied and participated in in Managua, Havana, Barcelona, and Berlin, as well as around the States.

Blue Cranes: humble while engaging, not afraid to not dazzle and impress, too brashly…handling its youthful energies and potentials wisely—a rare and heartening sight.

February 9, 2007
The Oregonian (Portland, OR)
LYNN DARROCH

The compositions and arrangements on the first CD for this young jazz group won bandleader Reed Wallsmith the 2007 Caldera Arts residency. That should be no surprise once you hear it, for this is music of great promise.

Built on simple melodies, often delivered slowly by Wallsmith's compelling alto saxophone over keyboard, bass and drums, these tunes are constructed with subtle sophistication. Never sleepy or static, and sporting an indie-rock edge that periodically disrupts the tranquillity, the Blue Cranes are what jazz is all about: applying advanced harmonies and improvisation to the sounds of the day. It's worked for the Bad Plus, and it might for the Cranes, too.

"Returning to Portland," for instance, opens abruptly with an off-kilter but strangely pretty line that spins out slowly in a minor key until, about four minutes in, an infant's cry shatters the mood. Drums and bass scratch and scrabble uneasily until the questing alto rides again, followed by distorted, bowed bass and a rocking backbeat over which the melody finally emerges, this time in a major key.

Several tunes have similar narrative scope; "Dear Howard," a series of poems recited over the music, literally presents a story, though it's overlong and obscure. And Wallsmith's arrangement of the Nicaraguan "Cristo de Palacaguina" evokes the Sandinista struggle, retaining its folk feel while shifting into improvisational territory. They turn Elliott Smith's "Coming Up Roses" into jazz as well.

Though the melodies tend to sound similar, I walk around happily whistling those insistent instrumental lines over and over; they feel new each time. Expect to hear more from the Cranes, who also include Keith Brush (bass), Rebecca Sanborn (keyboards) and Ji Tanzer (drums).

January 24, 2007
Willamette Week (Portland, OR)
MICHAEL BYRNE

"...The immediate kickers on the disc are its two cover tracks. The first is the Kingdom’s “Polaris,” in which the quartet manages to pull the song’s original, abstract melody out and put the remainder into a jazz composition without compromising the piece or its penners. Basically, cut the tempo of the Kingdom’s version and replace Chuck Westmoreland’s vocals with the alto sax of Blue Cranes’ massively talented and powerful Reed (yes, really) Wallsmith. ... the Cranes’ abstraction is indeed welcome. Breaking formula with a fairly non-trad keyboard progression, the cover also rolls with a fair amount of unexpected drama.

Blue Cranes also takes on Elliott Smith’s “Coming Up Roses.” Bold move: One can easily imagine a Muzak-ish outcome, not to mention the ensuing street riots in Portland. But it’s a good adaptation, with the Cranes cleverly condensing the chorus into a single measure. ..."

"Blue Cranes celebrates the release of Lift Music! Flown Music! with Bright Red Paper and Rollerball Wednesday, Jan. 24, at Holocene. 9 pm. $6. 21+."

January 2007
Wayside Music / Cuneiform Records
(Silver Spring, MD)

I was turned onto this unique jazz and etcetera quartet by John Hollenbeck who I think heard them when they opened for the Claudia Quintet! [BC note: we didn't open - just watched] The music is definitely comparable to Claudia, which means many of you would probably be interested in what they're doing here. A fine first effort.

January 2007
Southeast Examiner (Portland, OR)
BRIAN CUTEAN

Blue Cranes, Portland’s four-piece instrumental group blur the line between jazz and indie rock and adventure. Their first full length album, Lift Music! Flown Music! will be released at Holocene,1001 SE Morrison on Wednesday January 24, 9 pm.

The new Blue Cranes CD begins with “Returning to Portland”, a haunting tune featuring an unforgettable saxophone melody accompanied by an unusual electronic organ, upright bass, cellos and drum combo. The stage is set for the unfolding musical tale that lifts and soars, inviting repeated listenings.

The CD title refers to the actions of a heavy machinery company and the wetland African bird from which this band derives its name. Portland’s Blue Cranes have a thoughtful and accessible blend of cohesive sounds with capable and accomplished musicians listening and playing together in a refreshing, powerful ensemble. Five of the eight tunes are originals penned by founder Reed Wallsmith.

The music on Lift Music! Flown Music! draws on free jazz (saxophonist Wallsmith’s work), indie rock (covers of The Kingdom’s “Polaris,” and the late PDX-son singer-songwriter Elliot Smith’s “Coming up Roses”), local poetry (Nico Alvarado-Greenwood’s “Dear Howard”), film music, and the Nicaraguan Nueva Cancion political song movement (Nicaraguan musician-laureate Carlos Mejia Godoy’s “Cristo de Palacaguina”).

Alto saxophonist, composer and bandleader Wallsmith has studied and played in Managua, Havana, Barcelona and Berlin, as well as around the States. His saxophone is featured on the soundtrack to St. Helen’s Road, a film by filmmaker Jim Blashfield. Wallsmith is recipient of the 2007 Caldera Arts residency for music composition.

Keyboardist Rebecca Sanborn began writing music at the age of nine, and went on to study composition as well as theatre. She also performs as a singer-songwriter under her own name and recently released Ballads and Namesakes on Duomo Records.

Bassist Keith Brush began a music career in Montana with the Billings Symphony while performing with multiple cross-genre groups. Brush has had the opportunity to study, perform and record with Dirty Martini, The Stolen Sweets, Ca“a Son, and The Dusty York Trio.

Drummer Ji Tanzer performs with National Flower, the Nigerian afro-beat of Jujuba, and the Ghanaian fusion of Chata Addy. Tanzer has collaborated with jazz pianists Darrell Grant and Randy Porter, receiving recognition in Downbeat magazine.

Blue Cranes, part of a movement of Portland bands (alongside Paxselin and Evolutionary Jass Band) breathe new life into the structure and aesthetic of a music sometimes “mothballed by purists and considered dead by cynics”. Since forming in 2004, Blue Cranes have successfully built a diverse audience of people not normally drawn to jazz. They have amassed an impressive log of shows at the most prominent rock and jazz venues in the Portland area, as well as performing live on the air at local music stations, KMHD and KBOO.

Scheduled guests for the CD soiree are Bright Red Paper and Rollerball. The show starts at 9pm. The concert is for ages 21+,and the cover is $6.

For further information, visit their website at www.bluecranesmusic.com.

January 12, 2006
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR)

"reverential jazz stylings"

2005
AllAboutJazz.com (New York, NY)
MARC MEYERS

Blue Cranes is the name of a Portland, Oregon-based jazz trio whose self-titled CD is an EP containing live performances. They describe their music as fusing “the repetitive elements of modern loop-based music with traditional and avant-garde jazz styles in an acoustic setting.”

The music on Blue Cranes inevitably centers around the intriguing alto saxophonist Reed Wallsmith. He immediately grabs the listener through the sheer size of his sound. His tone is big, expressive, and marked by a warm vibrato. He takes chances when he plays, using a variety of tonal shadings and some vocalized effects. However, Wallsmith sometimes stumbles over his double-timing, which blunts the force of his ideas. On the other hand, he swings forcefully for the most part.

The greatest strength of Blue Cranes is their unity as a band. Wallsmith, bassist Keith Brush, and drummer Ji Tanzer anticipate each other's moves with considerable empathy, while Brush and Tanzer adroitly punctuate Wallsmith's lines. Their propulsive swing is especially evident on “Running Out” and “.30-06 Circus.” Guitarist Johannes Haage is a definite asset when he appears. His comping adds depth to the sound, particularly on the rubato ballad “A Nicaragua.”

Blue Cranes play entirely original material, with some tasty melodies and an attractive variety of rhythmic approaches. Harmonically, however, there seem to be similarities in each tune, resulting in a sameness in mood to this CD. Overall, however, this is a fine band, and Blue Cranes is a solid album.

Track listing: Running Out, .30-06 Circus, A Nicaragua, Crane.

Personnel: Reed Wallsmith, alto saxophone; Keith Brush, bass; Ji Tanzer, drums. Tracks 3, 4: Johannes Haage, guitar.

September 22, 2005
Portland Mercury (Portland, OR)

"Local, sax-based quintet Blue Cranes play palatable, melodic originals rounded out with bass, drums, and keyboards..."