Luke Rovinsky, Caleb Duval, Michael Larocca, Tom Weeks, Sandy Ewen, at Lilypad

These are leaders, creators, builders of a free Jazz, free form music scene and community in Connecticut and NY, too, invited to perform in our TM/This Music, Mass series, to create a connection between New England musical scenes that benefits not only the musicians traveling to be heard elsewhere, but benefits you the listener, by experiencing their creativity and unison in being more than neighborly towards vital and valuable mutual cooperation and exchanging.

Come and hear the best of the rest, playing sounds you never heard before!

The liner notes for HI-FI LO-IQ give a sense of what’s in store. The album “may be proof of concept, but Bookers itself is not an exercise,” the notes read. “Bookers is not self-expression, unless itching your leg or screaming in a mirror is self-expression. Bookers may be humorous, but only in the way watching a person drink milk when they expect orange juice is humorous or watching a man gravely injure himself is humorous. The bookers practice is a sound methodology in every sense, including the water one. Bookers is simple, intuitive music from Connecticut for all to enjoy.”...

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These are leaders, creators, builders of a free Jazz, free form music scene and community in Connecticut and NY, too, invited to perform in our TM/This Music, Mass series, to create a connection between New England musical scenes that benefits not only the musicians traveling to be heard elsewhere, but benefits you the listener, by experiencing their creativity and unison in being more than neighborly towards vital and valuable mutual cooperation and exchanging.

Come and hear the best of the rest, playing sounds you never heard before!

The liner notes for HI-FI LO-IQ give a sense of what’s in store. The album “may be proof of concept, but Bookers itself is not an exercise,” the notes read. “Bookers is not self-expression, unless itching your leg or screaming in a mirror is self-expression. Bookers may be humorous, but only in the way watching a person drink milk when they expect orange juice is humorous or watching a man gravely injure himself is humorous. The bookers practice is a sound methodology in every sense, including the water one. Bookers is simple, intuitive music from Connecticut for all to enjoy.”

That mix of serious and playful appears in virtually every second of the record, which finds Larocca, Rovinsky, and Duval each setting off musical ideas like tiny explosions, perhaps of live ammunition, perhaps of rubber balls or confetti, that then bounce and flutter around the room at high velocity.

There is a keen sense of music from various sources being taken apart and scrambled, and of new music being built before our very ears, sometimes with the air of a furrowed brow, sometimes with the flavor of cartoon characters creating Rube Goldberg music that they already know will fail to catch their mouse, and they don’t care. They’re serious musicians who like to have fun, who don’t take themselves too seriously. As the musicians associated with F.I.M. are the inheritors and latest iteration of a free-improv tradition in New Haven now three generations deep, it’s heartwarming to hear the music being carried forward by such capable hands."

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