Üt Haus Jazz Band releases 2 CDs

For some folks, jazz is in the blood. Once it's got you, it doesn't let go easily. You have to hear it, you have to play it. You can't stay away for long. For three high school buddies from central Indiana, that has been the case for more than 30 years.\nNow, those same old friends, who have been playing together since high school but performing publicly with other local musicians since 1990 as the Üt Haus Jazz Band, are celebrating their past so they can get on with the future. They're releasing their first two CD-Rs this week -- Best of the Basement and alt.basement, a compilation of music recorded in their rehearsal space in 1992.\n"Hopefully what the recording is doing is providing a benchmark as to what we started out as," said David Miller, the band's trumpet player. "I think the interesting thing about the group is that it has retained that core of original players. What you hear in that recording is the unique improvisational chemistry between people who had known each other for a long time."\nThat "core" is comprised of Miller, bassist Steve Johnson and Jerry Morris, who plays French horn, clarinet, cello and serves as the band's musical director. The three graduated from Greenfield High School (about 75 miles from Bloomington) in 1966. They all attended Indiana University, but went their separate ways after college before reuniting in 1990. Since then, they've been playing together on an almost-weekly basis, be it on the stage of a local club or in the basement of Johnson's house. In addition to the three from Greenfield, the lineup of the band at the time of the Basement recordings includes saxophonists Brian Kearney and Greg Marsden, drummer Kevin Newcomb and flutist and poet Steve Gardner.\nThese discs are Üt Haus' first full-length releases -- the costs of a professionally recorded release had unfortunately been too prohibitive for the band. But the advent of recordable compact discs provided them with the opportunity they needed. Johnson, the group's bassist, compiled the two CDs.\n"I really enjoyed the quality of the music we were performing at that time," he said. "When we started the band in 1990, we got into doing a lot of recording in my basement. We listened to them, enjoyed them, and thought other people would enjoy them."\n"We're a group of old friends, so when we get together in the basement, we're pretty uninhibited," Miller said of the recordings.\nTo celebrate the discs' release, Üt Haus are throwing a CD release party at Bear's Place Thursday night. They'll be performing material from the CDs, some of which has not been in their repertoire for some time. The band has also expanded instrumentally since the 1992 recordings, adding vibraphonist Robert Stright and saxophonist Tom Clark.\nÜt Haus (pronounced "oot-house") takes the "Üt" in their name from a jazz term that refers to more avant-garde styles. Its members draw influences equally from jazz pioneers like Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman and rock mavericks like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.\n"Compared to straight ahead jazz, we tend to play music that is more open in terms of harmonies -- at the time we recorded these, we weren't using any rhythm instruments," Johnson said. "That frees things up a lot in terms of what you can do harmonically. Sometimes less means more."\nThe group's repertoire attests to their diverse influences. Next to jazz compositions by Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane are pop standards like The Tokens' "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" and Dion's "Runaround Sue."\nThe band hopes to get some of their pop arrangements on CD in the future.\n"Our goal down the line is to ultimately start documenting more material," says Miller. "When we get together a significant mass of that, we'll come out with a more recent recording."\nBut for one night, the band is content to look backwards.\n"In some ways, those values that we had at that time and the improvisational chemistry that we had in those days still has remained. We want to get those examples out"