Sextet

Pianist/composer Horace Silver has remained a popular presence on the international jazz scene for more than 25 years with good reason: He writes enchanting, often exotic, melodies that are underpinned by catchy, foot-tapping rhythms; and he finds top--and mostly young--talents to bring these evocative vehicles to life with feeling and precision.

The math behind eighth blackbird's program Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter, titled "The Only Moving Thing," was this: The ensemble, based at the University of Chicago, takes its name from Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," an inspiration for many composers. The musicians number six: flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano (the grouping Schoenberg came up with nearly a hundred years ago for "Pierrot Lunaire"), plus percussion.

I read your piece on Das Erste Wiener Gemseorchester (Sitings, June 20) and thought I should give you a tip about another Austrian "orchestra" where the performers are fruit, actually fermenting wine! The Willi Opitz Winery has made a CD with about 10 different wines and a quartet, a sextet and the "full orchestra." A sample is at http://www.willi-opitz.at/willkommen.htm. OVE FOSSA Sandnes, Norway

Concertante isn't so much a fixed ensemble as a pool of young, accomplished musicians who perform in combinations, from quintets to nonets. Yet for its Coleman Chamber Concert in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium on Sunday afternoon, Concertante materialized as a string sextet -- and only a string sextet. Groups organized solely for the sextet literature are pretty rare.

Funny how the signature Copland style known through the great ballets--"Appalachian Spring" or "Rodeo"--or the Third Symphony suddenly sounds like Copland Lite when you hear some of his earlier music. It's all there--the sense of bracing, open vistas, the visceral excitement of urban rhythms and syncopation, the shading into tender but unsentimental emotions. But it's more compacted and varied, and its shifts take place more quickly.

Mbilia Bel's featured role in the ensemble of Africa's most popular singer, Tabu Ley Rochereau, ensures the young Zairian vocalist an immediate audience for her solo career. But Bel's two 45-minute sets before 400 enthusiastic fans at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Culver City on Friday were scattershot affairs.

Fishbone's show at the Palace on Friday capped a quick rise for the first black band since the Bus Boys to make a mark on the L.A. rock scene. On stage, though, the kinetic sextet pelts you with so much action that it's nearly impossible to get a fix on what it's about. It's easier to identify the sources of Fishbone's volatile vaudeville, starting with the original funk ringmaster, George Clinton.

Though it's riding high on two recent dance hits ("Object of My Desire" and "Restless"), Starpoint showed even more flair for balladry during its confident, enthusiastic set at the half-filled Universal Amphitheatre Saturday night. That skill could win the sextet crossover success not unlike that of Atlantic Starr, a group it resembles stylistically.

Regarding "Remembering Arnold: This Pig Was a Trouper Long Before 'Babe,' " (Counterpunch, April 29): Margaret Hehman-Smith wrote a nice tribute to Arnold the Pig by comparing his talent with Babe, the Aussie porker whose acting skills were manufactured through special effects. Arnold had no such luxury; everything the script called for Arnold did, the hard way. I know, I was there for all 168 episodes. I was the director. In fact, I was known as the best pig director in town. Hehman-Smith stated that Sugar, the original pig, took an early retirement and from then on only previously filmed clips of Sugar were used to depict Arnold.

After a successful week with the Ray Brown Trio, Catalina has turned over the bandstand to another bassist, Charles Fambrough . A relative newcomer as a leader, he heads a sextet of local musicians that will be appearing through Sunday. Two of the members, pianist Kenny Kirkland and drummer Jeff Watts, are members of Branford Marsalis' "Tonight Show" band and played on a couple of cuts in a recent Fambrough album.

THE presence of DJ Val on stage Tuesday at the Jazz Bakery with trumpeter Wallace Roney's sextet let the audience know right away that the ensemble probably was going to move beyond mainstream jazz territory. That's precisely what happened.

"Infame," the latest album by cult rock en espanol act Babasonicos, is the kind of resounding musical statement that can make you fall in love with the Latin alternative movement all over again. A profoundly sophisticated and unexpectedly emotional recording, "Infame" inhabits a psychedelic world where the glam-rock of David Bowie and early Roxy Music coexists with the greasy Latin pop of B-list crooners such as Sandro and Roberto Carlos.

At one point during Wednesday's concert by Yerba Buena, New York's Afro-Latin fusion band, two male musicians took off their shirts and hopped offstage into the crowd at the Conga Room. In front of surprised fans, the muscular conguero and the dreadlocked singer faced off in a crouching, sweaty, shoulder-shaking rumba that evoked the virile street dancing of old Havana slave communities. They did down and gritty Cuban moves, deeply rooted in African rituals and traditions.

The sextet eighth blackbird wins extravagant praise everywhere it goes, and the reason was apparent Saturday night at UCLA. These are exceptional young musicians with a real flair for performance. Their specialty is making music of our moment come to life. In this case, the players turned to composers their own age -- about 30 -- and demonstrated a remarkable commitment and spunky imagination, performing difficult scores from memory.

The word "new" in new music implies a lack of regard for convention, and eighth blackbird -- lowercase and all -- takes the implication seriously. For this Chicago-based sextet, gaining career momentum has involved two seemingly contradictory approaches: disregard (or reinvent) convention and, at the same time, behave traditionally. Somewhere, somehow, the twain successfully meet. Saturday at Royce Hall, eighth blackbird arrives in the Southland with a program called "di/verge."

It's a common complaint in the jazz world that the audience is graying, and a visit to many jazz venues tends to confirm the gripe. But the perception is distinctly different for those who check out rooms that don't ordinarily cater to jazz and acts that don't fall squarely within the traditional mainstream. The appearance of the Swedish band Koop at the pop-oriented El Rey Theatre on Thursday touched both those points.

The math behind eighth blackbird's program Tuesday night at the Orange County Performing Artscenter, titled "The Only Moving Thing," was this: The ensemble, based at the University of Chicago, takes its name from Wallace Stevens' poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," an inspiration for many composers. The musicians number six: flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano (the grouping Schoenberg came up with nearly a hundred years ago for "Pierrot Lunaire"), plus percussion.

Afro-Cuban jazz, a music that has long flourished on the East Coast, also has a well-established presence in Southern California, one that deepens as more Cuban-born musicians settle here. Bands such as those of longtime California residents Francisco Aguabella and conguero Long John Oliva, who appeared Friday at Steamers Cafe in Fullerton, provide musical refuge for the more recent arrivals, who in turn, keep the music close to its roots.

The Adam Rudolph Organic Chamber Ensemble, performing at the Electric Lodge in Venice, called up memories of one of the less visible musical aspects of the turbulent '60s. Although rock was the dominant sound of the decade, fascinating if vastly different music was resulting from a growing interaction between jazz and classical musicians swapping ideas at the frontiers of improvisation.

It's a bit hard to tell what motivates people to go out to hear music in these strange, post-Sept. 11 days. On some evenings, venues can be inexplicably full of listeners; on others, artists who might ordinarily expect to draw enthusiastic crowds play to half-empty rooms. In neither case does the attendance seem to have very much to do with the quality of the music. On Tuesday night at the Jazz Bakery, for example, T.S.