I have this vision of Brad Henkel practicing his trumpet. In lieu of pounding scales he analyzes his saliva outtake and the myriad of methods with which he may manipulate his saliva in a mouthpiece.
The man is centrifugal. His tongue invents diphthongs. Passionately impudent, he curses a waterfall. Watch closely as he rocks and transitions to crawl around David Grollman. Commotion builds and groans. Screeches and excretions amass then suddenly vanish with a flippant signal of his delicate hand.
Brad is one of a handful of gentlemen busily building a scene in Brooklyn that commands what’s left that’s good in Jazz, Noise, and New music, gloriously borrowing and running with it like that snarky octopus stealing the video camera.
The result is sculpted sound that exhumes eternal cycles of impatience and upheaval from some long-forgotten vault. The music pivots absurdly. The experience resonates with intellectual bravado. You intake and you feel both ridiculous and smart, which is good.
I first heard Brad in Chicago, alongside two fellow horn-slinging ingenues, (Peter Hanson, Nathaniel Morgan), co-conspirators. Together they read music off pink stands, uttered suspended phrases inside a Bucky dome assembled from rolled up newspaper. They call this project Buckminster.
Brad recently started a label, Prom Night Records. Perhaps this evokes every moment you almost kissed someone, or alternately skipped prom altogether and got drunk in the woods on skunked beer, ie. what I did on that fateful evening. – Valerie Kuehne
