Against the odds

Despite tight money, small crowds, and scarce venues, outspoken saxophonist Marco Eneidi plays on.

By Will York

I LOVE DANCING around my kitchen and singing Sparks songs in a bad falsetto; I love going to death metal concerts and watching the drummers do impossible things with their limbs; and I love going to Pink and Brown shows and getting cheap beer poured on me and waking up with mysterious bruises. More than anything I love being up front at a jazz show, being right in the center of the whirlwind, with the players going at it full tilt, sweating and screaming and howling at the moon and all of that.

I had almost forgotten how much I love this type of experience until late last November when I saw a show by Oakland-based alto saxophonist Marco Eneidi and visiting Japanese drummer Sabu Toyozumi at the Luggage Store Gallery. The two had never played together, but they poured it on nonstop for 50 minutes, Eneidi wrestling sharp-edged, Charlie-Parker-through-the-meat-grinder phrases out of his alto saxophone and Toyozumi artfully beating the crap out of his drum set, at one point splintering one of his sticks and sending a big sliver of it flying 20 feet in the air. It was awesome. And there were about 15 people there.

"It's all about living in poverty," Eneidi says. Free jazz has never been the most popular type of music, but even so, it has seen better days in the Bay Area, as recently as the mid 1990s. "There was just more of a scene [then], more places to play and good audiences," Eneidi says. "And that's totally died off." He points to the demise of supportive venues such as Berkeley's Beanbender's and Mission's Radio Valencia – symbolically pictured with a fire truck smashed through its storefront on the cover of Eneidi's Live at Radio Valencia CD – as one factor among many.

"Playin' for no audience, you know, why should I do that?" he asks rhetorically and with typical bluntness in response to one of my stubborn questions – namely, why have gigs like that Luggage Store one been so rare lately. "If you only make $5 or $10, I can't afford to do that, because it costs money to get gas and buy reeds and this and that. Unless it's something special that I wanna do, then I don't need to go out and play just to play, because I've already done that."

Eneidi has released most of his albums, dating back to his 1986 debut, on his own label, Botticelli, which is something he views as a necessity rather than a choice – "a losing proposition," as he puts it.

The outspoken Eneidi grew up in the East Bay and started playing clarinet when he was in fifth grade – that would be sometime in the mid 1960s – before switching to saxophone late in high school. "I didn't get serious about music until I was about 20," he says. "Then I just started practicing a lot, playing 12 hours a day, basically, from eight in the morning to one or two at night." He took lessons from saxophone legend Sonny Simmons and made frequent trips from his Sonoma County home to San Francisco's then-thriving Keystone Korner, where he had a chance to see pianist Cecil Taylor's group in action numerous times. There he also had his first meeting with fellow alto Jimmy Lyons, Taylor's right-hand man for 25 years and, along with Parker and Ornette Coleman, one of the main inspirations for Eneidi's horn playing.

In fact, when Eneidi decided to move to New York City in 1981, it was to track down Lyons so he could study with him for a few months.

Instead he wound up staying on the East Coast for 14 years, making connections that have affected his career ever since. "When I went to New York, I was young – I was 24," he says. "But immediately I was around people like [drummers] Rashied Ali and Sunny Murray and Ed Blackwell and [saxophonist] Dewey Redman and all these cats who had been around forever, you know, like Cecil [Taylor] and [trumpeter] Don Cherry and people like that. Those were like my mentors – they were my heroes, but they became my mentors."

Along the way, he also began forming relationships with some of the best free jazz musicians of his own generation (give or take a few years), among them bassist William Parker, drummer Jackson Krall, trumpeter Raphe Malik, and tenor saxophonist Glenn Spearman – each of whom, like Eneidi, has also done time with Taylor's demanding groups over the years. "Me and Glenn and Raphe were like the horn trio," Eneidi says. "Especially me and Glenn. We hooked up totally. We played together so well."

Spearman, who also had childhood roots in the Bay Area, moved back west in the early '90s and quickly established himself as one of the anchors of the local out-jazz scene, most visibly with his formidable Double Trio.

Eneidi started coming out for weeks at a time to play with Spearman and company, finally moving back in '95 because, he figured, "it was gonna be cheap and easy to find a job. But it wasn't that way, and I got stuck." (He is staying put for the time being because his son, Nicco, is a freshman in high school.) Regardless, Eneidi and Spearman made some beautiful, intense music together during this period, much of it in live settings and still whispered about in hushed tones by people who were there back in the day, and some of it on CD, including the Radio Valencia disc and, my favorite, the massive Marco Eneidi-Glenn Spearman Creative Music Orchestra (1997).

Tragically, Spearman died somewhat suddenly from colon cancer in 1998. He was just 51, and his own recording career was hitting a peak. His death was a great loss not only to Eneidi but also to the Bay Area free jazz scene and to jazz music as a whole. "His personality drew people like a magnet," Eneidi says. "He was definitely a leader. He knew how to lead rehearsals and control situations and bust into other people's scenes and lead them, too!" There's a tone of excitement and happiness in his voice that's missing from the rest of our somewhat gloomy conversation.

On the positive side, Eneidi is still enthusiastic about his music – that is, once you separate it from all the low-paying gigs, closed-down venues, and so forth – and he continues to make strides, even if he doesn't go out of his way to admit it. Cherry Box, his 2000 release with bassist Parker and local drummer Donald Robinson on the Massachusetts free jazz label Eremite, brought him some overdue recognition as a major player in what is still widely viewed as an East Coast-centric genre. In May he's heading to Japan for a tour with Toyozumi. And this week he'll be sharing the stage with some old friends from both around town and far away – fire-breathing German tenor saxophonist Peter Brötzmann among them – as part of the third annual Glenn Spearman Music Festival, which Eneidi organizes and sponsors through his label.

He still practices some six hours a day, reasoning that "if Cecil can do it at age 73, then surely I can at 46." He adds, "In the last few years, I've definitely stepped up to some other levels that I was always striving for. I'm still striving for the next thing, but right now I feel like I can do what I want to do and have total control. And I know what I want to do." As he told me, "We're trying to create a tornado when we play."

The third annual Glenn Spearman Music Festival

Wed/20

21 Grand Poets Jack and Adele Foley with Ben Lindgren (7:30 p.m.); Edie Gale Quartet, with Marco Eneidi, Jackson Krall, and Damon Smith (8 p.m.); U.S. premiere of Off the Road, a film by Laurence Petit-Jovet, featuring Peter Kowald, Kid Jordan, George Lewis, Pamela Z, Hamid Drake, and William Parker (9 p.m.)

Thurs/21

21 Grand Poet Jessica Loos (7:30 p.m.); Kali Z. Fasteau, Art Lewis, and Shantee Spearman (8 p.m.); Erik Glick Rieman and John Ingall (9 p.m.); Peter Brötzmann, Jackson Krall, and Marco Eneidi (10 p.m.)

Fri/22

Skyline High School Improvisation-performance workshop with Peter Brötzmann, Marco Eneidi, and Jackson Krall (10 a.m., free)

21 Grand "Forward Energy," with Jim Ryan, Kali Z. Fasteau, Spirit, and Damon Smith (8 p.m.); Marco Eneidi, Chris Brown, and Jackson Krall (9 p.m.); Peter Brötzmann, Spirit, and Damon Smith (10 p.m.)

Sat/23

World Ground Cafe Skyline High Jazz Combo (3 p.m., free)

Mills College ESL Trio, with Marco Eneidi, Spirit, and Jessica Loos (8 p.m.); e33, Lisle Ellis on bass and solo electronics (9 p.m.), Peter Brötzmann, Fred Frith, Chris Brown, Marco Eneidi, and Jackson Krall (10 p.m.)