Press accounts of Tomato Box

Tomato Box Reviews

     From nowhere comes the radically creative music of Tomato Box. (Madison Wisconsin, nowhere?) Yes Virginia, Madison Wisconsin is nowhere close to New York geographically (it’s not too long of a drive from Chicago, just pack some coins for the automated toll booths and some Old Style beer). But Wisconsin’s Tomato Box is all over Downtown sonically. Pairing a front line of marimba and saxophone, drummer Michael Brenneis’ compositions are simultaneously poised and free. They rewrite Gershwin’s “Rhapsody In Blue” on the track “South Dakota” with the eased introductory lines painting a relaxed vision. Brenneis blurs the space between sticks and hands, locomoting with brushes and soft rolls as saxophonist John Keech explores the lyrics. Things always seem to return to Geoff Brady’s marimba, an instrument not foreign to jazz, just one not featured so prominently. His mallets-to-wood place a strong identifiable stamp on this recording, signaling this new music to be bigger than jazz, or to be more specific, theirs is jazz that includes larger worlds (read non-Western sounds). On “Shake The Apparatus” the band creates a humming backdrop (almost a digeridoo sound) for the percussion discussions of leader Brenneis. They follow that with a sort of Steve Reich tribute on “Pockets Of Distorted Time” with the mechanical beats of a Reichian machine that deconstructs as entropy takes over.
     Saxophonist John Keech comes at you from the David Murray meets Arthur Blythe bag. As the timekeeper, bassist Henry Boehm, rarely plays in straight time. The band favors the free principles of exploration as on “Continuity,” which wanders a bit for ideas before settling into a disheveled groove. But they are also fluent in the post-bop language, flexing their chopped suey on “The Syndicate” and the soul-fueled “Hidden Messages In Jazz.”
     Tomato Box reminds me of the transitions jazz has made over the years from the New Orleans bands to Satchmo’s solos, from danceable swing to mind walking bebop, from composed pieces to freedom. Each subsequent evolution carries the entirety of the past as prologue to the future. Tomato Box opts not for the cheese of dairyland or Wynton-wannabes but for a unique future.

--Mike Baron, Isthmus, from at article entitled "The jazz is jumping"

     So-called avant-garde jazz has been around for 40 years, but it still has the power to shock the unsuspecting. The several dozen people in the Rathskeller for a recent "Behind the Beat" jazz show may have thought they were in for some cool sounds as Tomato Box set up: sax, vibes (sic), drums, percussion, what's not to like? The brainchild of drummer Michael Brenneis, who also plays with the Ed Anders Quartet and Erica Mather Trio, Tomato Box offers uncompromising soundscapes in the tradition of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Unlike, say, a rhythm-and-blues group, these guys don't start a set in a formal way. They coalesce onstage, and when they reach a critical mass, the music begins.
     They opened with an Ornette Coleman-like Brenneis comp called "Fun, Fun, Fun, Fun, Fun, Fun," which evolved into a vehicle for percussionist Geoff Brady's two-fisted (two mallets in each fist) vibes. Brady soloed with furious rhythmic virtuosity, but the melody, such as it was, disappeared like water into sand.
     The Rathskeller's acoustics are better suited to acoustic jazz because all those hard, curved surfaces burnish the sound rather than obscure it, as so often happens during electric presentations. As much of Tomato Box's output has a "found sound" quality, they were able to incorporate, consciously or not, the ambient noise of students relaxing after class. Shouts of greeting from across the room found their way into the mix, and at one point, during a composition that used recognizable blues chords, the rhythmic chatter from the popcorn machine in the Stiftskeller became part of the mix.
     Brady's kit consists of stainless steel condiment trays and hubcaps, as well as more traditional instruments. (Alas, he had no replacement for my Altima's front right wheel.)
     The third composition was a ringer, as Brady hovered busily over the vibes, Anders Svanoe contributed delicate alto sax lines and Brenneis a powerfully geometric solo that segued into the Five Stairsteps' "O-o-h Child." The old standard became tighter and more focused as they worked the familiar changes. Brady often evoking a Caribbean lilt from his kit, sounding more than a little like a steel drum band. The surprised audience rewarded Tomato Box with more than perfunctory applause.
      "Thank you," Brenneis responded, "Since you were so polite for the first three selections, we're going to play nothing but dance music for the rest of the set." The drummer must have his little joke. A chaotic tone poem followed, like one of those trick optical puzzles consisting of a riot of contrasting shapes and colors that may or may not conceal a hidden image. Brenneis favored tom-tom sticks on the next song, Beck's "Nobody's Fault but My Own," for their soft booming quality. As bass, drums and sax rolled out a leisurely head, Brady hovered above on vibes, filling in the gaps. You could slow-dance to this.
     You can hear selections off Tomato Box's new CD, Talisman, at www.tomatobox.com. Brenneis obviously has a sense of humor. He calls his label Rattle Tick Buzz Records.

Neil Tesser :: Chicago Reader, Critics Choice, Chicago Illinois

"Tomato Box" is an oddly clunky, utilitarian name for percussionist Michael Brenneis's quartet. It belies the frequent delicacy of their postmodern chamber improv -- delicacy that survives bassist Henry Boehm's arco shrieks, the occasional police siren, and the battery of hubcaps and kitchen utensils Brenneis uses alongside his small conventional trap set. In groups like this a vibraphone, with its icy, silken tone, commonly turns up in place of a piano, but Tomato Box's front line pairs Anders Svanoe's alto sax with Geoff Brady's marimba -- another unusual choice. Though the marimba lacks the vibes' electrically driven tremolo and long sustain, demanding more aggressive mallet work, its lighter, warmer sound better complements the alto. Brenneis's colorful compositions have some of the same angular bite as Ken Vandermark's writing, but he usually softens it with a rolling lyricism that draws on Eastern scales -- which, played on the marimba, sometimes suggest gamelan music. On Talisman (Rattle Tick Buzz Records), Tomato Box's impressively focused new disc, the tunes share center stage with the solos in a delicate balance between notated composition and unstructured improvisation; at times, like during the suspenseful modal vamp in "Shake the Apparatus," the band gets suspiciously (but delightfully) close to the similar balance Dave Brubeck attained with his 1940s octet and on the best recordings his famous quartet made in the '50s. Formed last year in Madison, Wisconsin, Tomato Box made its local debut a couple months ago with an underpublicized gig at a small, rudimentary new space called the Brick House, where Brenneis and Boehm kept up a blithe running commentary behind the solid and engaging solos. Hopefully this show, in a larger, more established venue, will be a better coming-out party.

Tom Laskin :: Isthmus, Madison Wisconsin

A strong reliance on marimba helps set Madison's own Tomato Box apart from many of the youthful "free" aggregations that have been sprouting up around the country of late. When mallet-weilder Geoff Brady is skittering across his instrument's wooden keys during his skewed solo passages on "Hidden Messages in Jazz," it's easy to imagine these locals emerging as one of the more promising contemporary jazz acts in the Midwest. Drummer/composer Brenneis makes sure that his Tomatoes avoid overstatement and mindless blowing; more important, the entire band makes the space between the notes count as much as the notes themselves.

Heavy debts to Coltrane, Dolphy and AACM pioneers like the Art Ensemble of Chicago indicate that Tomato Box are still in the process of finding their own voices as jazz players. Still, all of the deliberate, at times elegiac music contained on Talisman is played with brio and intelligence, and every track benefits from the percussive strangeness of Brady's marimba. These guys aren't in the cosmic realm just yet; however, they're definitley at the limits of the stratosphere.

Joe Milazzo :: www.onefinalnote.com

Thankfully, the at-time radical atomization of North America's creative music 'scene' has not resulted in a commensurate dissipation of the music's collective strength. The American novel, attempting at its best to see far beyond the confines of its literal time and space, may have in the past 20 years become myopic with regionalism, and the major events in American cinema can be witnessed unfolding against a standardized backdrop of lovely grime and beautiful people, but the narratives of our musical story-tellers have only become more vivid, more courageous, and more relevant. The artists we identify from their association with cities as diverse as Boston, Vancouver, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Detroit, New Orleans and even New York City all speak with distinct accents. Still, the language is a common one, and the confluence of voices results in anything but unintelligibility.

But it is also true that those artists whose claims are staked outside of these larger territories can far too easily be lost in the tangled density of the contemporary discourse. In some ways, though, these are the most fearless artists, Thoreauvian individuals laboring at the furthest frontiers of aesthetic and economic circumstance. Ernie Krivda (Cleveland), Bob Nell (Montana), Dennis Gonzalez (this writer's own neighborhood of Dallas / Fort Worth) - these are just three of the more prominent names from the ranks of those improvisers perhaps most defined by their perceived isolation from creative music's sustaining urban ecologies. Both the realities and the perceptions are unfortunate, and it is hoped that the same reception does not await Tomato Box, a cooperative quartet based out of the 'college town' of Madison, Wisconsin. Talisman is their debut release, on their self-owned, self-described "shoe-string" Rattle Tick Buzz label. If the bloat of the twelve Wynton Marsalis releases (including a seven-disc box set, no less) sponsored by multinational giant Sony in the past year had their excesses boiled off, the condensed remainder would still not possess a hint of the pith and zest of the music to be found here. For this is a group that has crafted a very original and distinctly unvarnished, finely-grained sound.

A glance at the quite percussive instrumentation here might lead the listener to expect a fragile or even brittle ensemble clatter. But clatter is often just complexity misinterpreted, and although there is a fair degree of rattling, ticking and buzzing here, its not placed in the barnyard context of, say, the Original Dixieland Jass Band's equally Midwestern "Livery Stable Blues." Rather, the noise (for lack of a better descriptor) is organic, the sound of people practicing their craft in the backyard shed. Tenor saxophonist John Keech favors a tone whose contours seem equally impressed by the influence of Zoot Sims and Ellery Eskelin, and his playing is versatile without being wayward. Drummer Brenneis' approach is neither slavishly devoted to mere decoration or rote time-keeping, but it is colorful, and not garishly so. He can also rev up to a Krautrock-like, locked-wrist drive (hear "Visions in Chartreuse") when his compositions call for it. He's an inventive composer as well. All the performances here evince a nearly seamless integration of composed and improvised elements; it is very difficult to know here what is notated and what is not, and that serves only to draw the listener's attention further in. "Visions in Chartreuse" is a piece of fluctuating moods, if not melodies, worthy of the anxious Mingus of the mid-1950's. Still, the pace, sequence and nature of the emotions expressed are entirely this group's own. "Hidden Messages in Jazz" is suitably rumbling and ominous, the sound of hard bop succumbing to the popular noir connotations vintage television dramas have attached to the style. Similarly, "The Syndicate" is a long, breathless quote from a minor-key bop solo stretched, pulled, compressed, intimidated and otherwise deformed into another shape. The disc's mournful "Empty Pages" features some of the most sublime interactions between bass, marimba and sax and is the best of several judiciously placed, slower-tempo (or more gradual) pieces.

Still, the real surprise here is the exclusive use of the marimba, an instrument that can often seem a vehicle for simple tinkering or cartoon diegesis (think skeletons and haunted houses) when the mallets are handed to the wrong kind of player. Thurman Barker is one of the few improvisers to realize the unplugged vibraphone's possibilities in a jazz-based context. Geoff Brady's approach demonstrates a similar sensitivity, intelligence, and wide-ranging musical curiosity. To these ears at least, Brenneis' compositions demand a player who not only understands him/herself very well, but one who can evoke the architectonic bustle of Varese as well as the sunny dispositions of Carribean song. Contrast Brady's performance on "Born With Style", an investigation of the intersections and divergences of staccato and rubato, with his solos during the dance episodes in "Shake the Apparatus." It's worth listening to this recording once through, concentrating wholly on the resonances that obtain between the woody timbre of the marimba and the very different but equally woody notes Henry Boehm pulls from and sustains in the space around his double bass.

All in all, there's a refreshing, bracingly dry quality to this music. It is not without humor (note the thumping that brings "Continuity" to a close), but there are moments when the performances can be almost hermetic. This is the danger attendant upon inward investigations. Is it easier for you to pull back out through the direction you've already made, or to just keep tunneling until you come out the other side? It is to the ensemble's credit that in their own restless but considered way, they opt for the latter. It will be interesting to hear what they have to report once they discover what's beyond that limit marked by the turning inside-out of the self.

Stephanie Kuenn :: Green Bay Press-Gazette Weekend, March 1, 2001.
From an article entitled "Madison Jazz on the Upswing"

     Jazz music is experiencing a renaissance these days. In Madison it's been aided by the opening of the King Club, the 4-month-old nightclub that focuses on jazz, swing and blues.
     This weekend, it features a great double bill of avant-jazz, as the legendary Roscoe Mitchell takes the stage with the Madison-based Tomato Box opening.
     Mitchell is renowned for his experimentation with silence and sound. Inspired by Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane, Mitchell's saxophone playing and various incarnations of his band have made his work legendary in the medium.
     The opening band is, quite possibly, Madison's best jazz act (if it's fair to call it just jazz). Led by drummer Michael Brenneis, Tomato Box celebrates the edges of jazz, where it collides with other musical forms and where it can go through improvisation. The band's latest album, "Talisman," is available at www.tomatobox.com.
     Brenneis described Tomato Box's unique approach.
     "We take music and we cut away all the assumptions and compromises and are left with complete improvisation, pure creativity," Brenneis said. "We have only two limitations; our instrumental technique and our imaginations."
     Brenneis said the band is pretty excited for the chance to play with Mitchell.
     "We are quite honored to be opening the show for Roscoe," Brenneis said. "If not for him and others like him, we would not be doing what we are doing today."

Frank Rubolino :: Cadence, June 2001, Vol. 26 No. 6

Tomato Box is the creation of drummer and percussionist Brenneis. On Talisman, his band forges a bracing union of reeds and rhythm into motive, surging music. While Brenneis and Brady develop arrhythmic, highly stimulating percussion patterns and Boehm does the same on bass, tenor player Keech roams the territory in open, freely flowing style. The sounds of Brady's marimba swirl around to establish a path and then a point of departure as the youngish group moves energetically through the Brenneis program. Brenneis astutely molds the two-percussionist session, shaping a unique sound through the contrasting rhythms that pour from his and Brady's assortment of instruments. His tunes have substance, providing the proper balance to promote the improvisational excursions each musician takes.
The program is an extensive exploration of the innovative possibilities inherent in their selected format. Brenneis continually prods the band with his deftly defined drumming skills, and Boehm counters with equally probing bass lines. Keech often takes his tenor to the upper register, building improvisations that bubble over to the dancing beat of the marimba. The tenor/marimba sound is the foremost identifier of this group's music, and it is a well-conceived paring. The band occasionally touches down with fluid, theme stating segments, but they quickly gain renewed flight instructions from Brenneis and soar on high. Tomato Box has appended the subtitle of Creative Music Ensemble to their name, and this descriptive addendum aptly describes the music of this very engrossing band.