Album Notes

Every now and then we at Sound Bites, a small staff on a smaller budget, head south.

While Boston is a fine rock city, New York offers a bigger musical buffet and a club scene that doesn't insist on sending you home at 2 a.m.

So, we're on the bus, post-Thanksgiving, preparing to check out some nightlife, when it turns out that the progressive club complex we've set our sights on, the Knitting Factory in Tribeca, is the very space the guy in front of us, Jesse Selengut, is appearing that night.

He plays trumpet and saxophone in a punk-infused jazz quartet called Butz (look for them in Cambridge early next year). Is this serendipity or what?

"It's a small bus!" says Selengut, describing his band's music as somewhere in the James "Blood" Ulmer/Minutemen realm.

That's enough to snare us, and a few hours later Butz honks and skronks through a challenging, aggressive set of avant-jazz, a genre mash that is both psychedelic and primal.

Selengut jumps about the stage in front of an abstract video, dressed in red, sporting a cardboard sun mask- think old King Crimson albums.

Distorted spoken word blips emanate from drummer Brendan Burke - "Stand back! You are too close to the car!" It's all good for the head, good for the heart.