An octet of middle-aged African-American jazz musicians seems somewhat out of place on the celebrated rosters of the mighty Chicago label Thrill Jockey, home of some of the architects of the new music of the last decade. Thrill Jockey has been the American embassy for continental squirm auteurs Mouse on Mars, Microstoria, and Oval, as well as purveyors of the bombastic outrock of Rome and Trans Am; not to mention Chicago's beloved the Sea and Cake and all the syrupy meanderings of its touted side projects. And remember Tortoise? Them, too.

In the mythology of modern music, post-rock is the spawn of Chicago's experimental jazz traditions and Louisville's experimental punk traditions. Nine months after that fateful union, Jim O'Rourke the Stork drops a bouncing baby genre down the chimney and the rest is history-- perhaps even already. And it's an ironclad rule of history that crisis in the present prompts an overwhelming concern for the past. For lineage. For origins. The debacle of John McEntire's Reach the Rock filmscore, the somewhat lackluster reception of Sam Prekop's solo debut, and the exceedingly low profile of the unassailable Tortoise collective (last I heard they had crashed in the Andes and were all eating Tom Zé) have stemmed the radial energy of post-rock devotees worldwide. Thus, it became important to remind the universe that before Chicago was post-rock, Chicago was jazz.

There was a time when the names associated with the recklessly experimental Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and its front line guard, the Art Ensemble of Chicago-- names like Anthony Braxton, Lester Bowie, Henry Threadgill, and Jack DeJohnette-- were pretty much the only names that mattered in jazz. It's the ghost of the Chicago free jazz scene of the mid-'60s that's being channeled on every Isotope 217 album, and its brief but critical dominance continues to contribute to the colossus that is Chicago's musical primacy. Even New York's musical godhead John Zorn has expended considerable energy trying to reckon with the lingering enormity of Second City jazz.

It's in this spirit, then, that Thrill Jockey decided to take a chance on releasing the latest 8 Bold Souls album, Last Option. 8 Bold Souls, led by second generation AACM member Edward Wilkerson, Jr., seem to have one overwhelming concern here: proving that experimental improv can swing. And believe me, it can. The octet melds fierce exploration with the striptease burlesque of Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady and the refined orchestral pomp of Gershwin and Bernstein. The alchemy works better on some numbers than others: the opening 12-minute "Odyssey" is beautifully inscrutable, wrenching a stellar clarinet solo from a sunny Ellington-at-Newport-type stroll, and devolving into a sparse and elegiac cello solo. Other numbers, like the boisterous "Brown Town," play up Vegas-style glitz and brass and come off sounding a little hollow. The initially cartoonish title track confirms the exuberance of this group's capacity for collective improvisation and builds to commanding and vertiginous intensity. Oddly enough, the joyous, klezmer-like "Pachinko" recalls Zorn's dazzling body of work with Masada and, though ethnically mismatched, it's nonetheless stirring.

Last Option is a remarkably strong collection of longer (averaging near eight minutes) pieces and Thrill Jockey is to be commended for presenting a seasoned group of accomplished musicians to a market (that is, Pitchfork readers) that traditional jazz labels tend to ignore, particularly when it's so clear that the free jazz movements of the '60s and '70s continue to have such a palpable influence on contemporary instrumental music. To their credit, 8 Bold Souls positively sings with the ghosts of Chicago's jazz legacy. Not in the Natalie Cole "Unforgettable" way. In the good way.

-Brent S. Sirota