You can't blame indie-jazz artists for fearing the smooth. Like the Red Death, it held indomitable sway over all throughout the 80's; and one could read the unfolding of 90's mainstream jazz as a series of half-steps away from its satin dominion. The neo-traditionalists, following Wynton Marsalis, urged a return to the tight modal sound of the 60's Miles Davis quintet; the luminaries of early hard fusion, like John McLaughlin and Joe Zawinul, set adrift in the giddy pluralism of world beat; others lamented the pollution of jazz by other sounds and recalled with nostalgia the undiluted purity of bop (albeit a commercially-softened version).

In any case, throughout the last decade, independent label jazz has been virtually shotgun-married to noise. In a form so compromised by the radical ease of the smooth, innovators have been consistently forced to cast their lots with dissonance. The very cause of innovation demanded it; anything else was viewed as conciliation.

I understand this genealogy is ridiculously oversimplified. I haven't taken into account phenomena like the lamentable swing revival, or the work of hip-hop jazz experimenters like Gang Starr and Digable Planets, or the independent development of acid jazz. However, the dominant Downtown NYC jazz scene has presided over the union of jazz and heady noise for the last decade and a half, virtually ensuring the impossibility of squeezing the new sound between the musings of a deep baritone DJ whose deep intonations can make the shadow traffic sensual. But indie jazz became deeply unsexy. Artistic integrity was purchased at the expense of the butter-- the slathering seduction of the smooth. Sure, it's good to think. But is it good to sprawl?

I haven't yet decided if Rollerball's Einäugige Kirsche EP ("one-eyed cherry") is sexy in any conventional sense of the term. It's noisy as hell, I know that: junkheap jazz marked by skronking horns and clattering percussion. Whoever you could get onto the kitchen floor with this dark beauty has mental problems. But don't let it stop you from trying.

Rollerball's EP offers anarchic noise, seething with disaffection and schizophrenia. The terrifyingly distorted voices in the background of "1/2 Horse, 1/2 Pig" morph with the rising horns, rinsing in and out of the cacophony. But something happens along the way-- something almost like disco. I swear to God, "Stone Cold Rhythm Dog" features free-funk, breathy female vocals over precarious, sculptured rock that sounds halfway between Ornette Coleman and Funkadelic. If you could actually employ the dissonant howl and horrorshow affect of the first track, "Officer Down," in the seduction of a pretty young thing, the 26 bristling minutes of "Stone Cold Rhythm Dog" is all for your nasty, nasty love. The record even concludes with a few minutes of a hazy, disorienting reverb jam perfect for a smoke and the afterglow.

Einäugige Kirsche breathes with a kind of violent sexuality, treating the beauty of confusion with configurations of space and speed. With this and the release of Jackie-O Motherfucker's stunning debut, Fig. 5, the Road Cone label is rapidly monopolizing the jazz of the future today. Bands like these are finally disrupting the tradition of noisy, cerebral, sexless indie-jazz by interjecting hot strains of the primitive. Anyone can make noise. How many of us can really make love?

-Brent S. Sirota