Racer Session #533 | Jim Knodle 5iveTette | November 7, 2021

Hello, Racers!

Thanks for making our grand re-Open Session last month so wonderful. We have so missed gathering in-person and playing music and conversing with y’all, and it was a treat to give that reunion the energy and attention it deserved. This month we head back into curated sessions with opening sets, and we’re excited to kick that off with an opening set from one of our dear friends and community pillars, Jim Knodle!

To know Jim is to adore him. I still remember the first time we met, at a double bill he invited me to play on at Gallery 1412. All at once he was familiar to me, and was immediately welcoming and encouraging of things I was doing musically that even I wasn’t sure of yet.

We talk about the midwest often - I found out only recently that he grew up in the same Illinois suburb as my father. I think you can hear that heartland warmth in his music. “I was raised in a Midwestern fundamentalist religion,” he says. “Some of my earliest musical memories are of revival-meeting piano players raising the crowd seemingly several feet from the floor. I've always felt the best musically when I'm a sort of conduit for something inexplicable - it's like the music grabs me by the scruff of the neck and we're gone.”

He is a deep lover of music, indebted mostly to saxophonists for musical influence, but his sound is clearly informed by trumpet heroes of past and present, such as Louis Armstrong, Cootie Williams, Ruby Braff, and Barbara Donald among others. In his own words: “I'm usually considered a little too out for the Ins and a little too in for the Outs, but that's just where I want to be.”

He wrote us some additional words on the occasion of this gig with his 5iveTette. Please check those words out, and then come and find us at Cafe Racer on Sunday 11/7 at 7pm. We’ll be happy to see you, and so will Jim.

- Haley

“Tofu is made by adding nigari (calcium chloride) to hot soy milk. The vat of soy milk is stirred into a rapid whirlpool and the nigari is added. Where once was a vat of featureless white, there is now a beautiful three-dimensional skyscape of fluffy clouds.

“Imagine a jar of 10,000 red, yellow, and blue marbles. Inject a single rule: red can touch yellow but not blue. Suddenly where there was randomness now exists forn and structure.

“5iveTette is an ongoing project built on the principle of musical organization via simple instruction. Feel a pulse too fast to articulate and play everything to your own pulse. the faster the individual pulse-tracks, the more points of coincidence between them. And/or: player A and player D listen only to each other, as do playersB and C. Player E is the nigari.

“I met the great Casey Adams through our mutual friend Mike Gebhart. I met Heather Bentley at the Spite House and knew three words in that she is music walking. I met Haley Freedlund when her duo with Ruby Dunphy shared our very select audience at Gallery 1412. She was obviously beyond words. Evan is someone I met at the original Racer Session and from whom I have never heard an unnecessary sound.

“I hope you appreciate our thirty minutes of inevitable surprise.”

- Jim