Projecting the Unexpected

Free jazz label Out of Your Head Records kicks off a new “Second Mondays” concert series at Artspace.

First it was a concert series. Then it became a label. Now it’s a concert series again.

This full-circle moment is brought to you by free jazz label Out of Your Head Records, which kicks off a new monthly event this Monday at Artspace. Headlining this first “Second Mondays” show will be the label’s two Richmond-based co-curators, bassist Adam Hopkins and drummer Scott Clark, along with trumpeter Bob Miller. On tap? Brand new compositions they’ve never played and probably won’t have a chance to practice. And that’s exactly the point.

“I don’t think we’re going to get to rehearse it before, but we can maybe fail a little bit and that’s OK,” says Hopkins.

To be clear, Hopkins and Clark are as devoted to their craft as musicians come, the former having studied at Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Conservatory and Michigan State University, the latter in VCU’s jazz studies program. But in Artspace, Out of Your Head believes it’s found a spot where risks can be taken — and where listeners can return on a regular basis.

“That consistency has been one of the hardest things to keep in town,” says Clark, who has become a point person for like-minded artists looking to play on their way through Richmond. “It’s really exciting … having that infrastructure there to be able to present shows and have it be a regular series where people will know what to expect, even if they don’t know the music.”

In Hopkins’ mind, they’re harkening back to jazz heydays — New York City’s 1970s loft scene, and its 1980s downtown scene — where off-the-cuff performances were the norm. “People were just trying stuff, and it’s OK to try stuff in front of an audience,” he notes.

Onstage origins

He’s also reviving the ethos of the concerts that gave Out of Your Head its name. Starting in the late 2000s — first in Baltimore, where he grew up, then in New York, where he lived for seven years — Hopkins helped organize weekly events in which players would collaborate for the first time. “People would get up and play two sets of improvised music that had never met each other before. It was this awesome thing. All the musicians in town used to hang there.”

Fast-forward to 2018: Hopkins is looking to release a new album called “Crickets,” but no label is jumping at the opportunity. Emboldened by a conversation with avant-garde saxophonist Tim Berne, Hopkins decided to create his own imprint, building outward from the name and logo he’d used when hosting shows in Baltimore and New York. “The collective had been inactive for years,” he recalls, “so I wanted to reuse what we already had, and it’s turned into a totally different thing. But really the label is rooted in the concepts of those concert series: Put people together that fit and see what happens.”

What’s happened since Out of Your Head’s 2018 founding has surpassed Hopkins’ hopes. The past year in particular has established a hot streak; releases from bassists Nick Dunston and Mali Obomsawin and drummer John Hollenbeck’s GEORGE ensemble have been lauded by standard-bearing publications like JazzTimes and Pitchfork, showing the label is succeeding in bringing attention to highly adventurous music. “It’s crazy to see these kinds of releases being reviewed in Pitchfork,” Hopkins says. “I would have never expected that at all.”

“The life that the label has taken on, even in the last couple of months — the last year especially — has been really amazing to watch,” confirms Scott Clark.

An (almost) immediate partnership

Clark was among the first to pick up on Out of Your Head’s potential. By the time Hopkins moved to Richmond — within months of the late 2018 release of “Cricket” — he and Clark were already talking about joining forces. Their partnership was a natural outgrowth of their first experiences sharing gigs, chatting about the music that moved them, and comparing notes on the day-to-day of facilitating shows while promoting works of their own.

“We both have this ability to sit and send a million emails,” Clark says. “That’s the other side of [putting] your music out… We both understand what goes into it.”

“Us two doing it together was going to be better than either one of us doing it by ourselves,” Hopkins says. It helps that they’re close musical collaborators. Hopkins plays in Clark’s band, and Clark in Hopkins’. “We’re always together playing,” Hopkins affirms. “If we go have a drink after the show … none of that stuff feels like work.”

One forthcoming release that illustrates their chemistry as a rhythm section is Clark’s pandemic-inspired composition, “Dawn & Dusk.” Clark premiered the long-form jazz suite — his first to feature vocals — last February to a rapt Black Iris Social Club audience. The same ensemble played “Dawn & Dusk” a month later at a Spacebomb House Concert, and a download of that performance will accompany the studio cut as part of the album’s vinyl release later this year.

In that sense, “Dawn & Dusk” embodies two complementary sides of Out of Your Head Records: thoughtfully composed, lovingly packaged studio works and more spontaneously captured, nimbly shared live recordings. Following the onset of COVID-19, they launched the “Untamed” series, in which friends and collaborators could send along live sets of varying levels of fidelity for release on Bandcamp. “As musicians, everybody has live recordings just sitting on hard drives,” Clark says. “Let’s just put it out,” he remembers thinking, “instead of it just sitting on your hard drive. Let people enjoy it.”

Cultivating a catalog

They worked with frequent album art source TJ Huff on a template that would shorten the cover design turnaround to as little as a day. Doing so meant the label’s output actually increased during the pandemic, generating income for artists at a time when shows weren’t possible. “It sort of snowballed,” Hopkins says. “It was cool to be able to put out music during that time, when nobody was getting in the recording studio … We were pretty intentional about letting people know that some of them were a little bit more lo-fi, but we just really love the music.”

Though each Out of Your Head album is beloved by its curators — “They’re all amazing to me, that we’re in a position to be able to put this stuff out,” Clark says — the emotional resonance of one stands out. With just two months left in his 17-year battle with cancer, avant-garde bassist Mario Pavone tracked an album entitled “Blue Vertical.” Trumpeter Dave Ballou, one of the artists featured in the “Untamed” series, reached out to Adam Hopkins in hopes Pavone’s final album would have a home at Out of Your Head.

“As a bass player, I’ve loved Mario’s music for a really long time,” Hopkins says. “I remember calling Scott … We just couldn’t believe it. It was so unexpected and so touching.”

“It’s mind-boggling to me that ever happened,” Clark adds.

To those who are new to free jazz, much of Out of Your Head’s catalog may seem unexpected or mind-boggling. These albums push the boundaries of music in every direction, whether it’s the label curators themselves, heroes of theirs like Tim Berne and Michael Formanek, or next-generation luminaries like Anna Webber and Richmond’s own Curt Sydnor. As a result, it’s refreshingly hard to predict what the next release will sound like. Kind of like their new “Second Monday” series. But one thing is certain: Clark and Hopkins will keep pushing for people to listen.

“We get so excited about this stuff,” Hopkins says. “We’re going to keep doing it until that excitement isn’t there, but I hope that never happens.”

Out of Your Head Records’ “Second Mondays” series kicks off on Monday, Feb. 13 at Artspace. Doors open at 7:30 p.m. and music starts at 8 p.m. A $10 donation is suggested. For more information, visit artspacegallery.org. To hear the latest Out of Your Head releases, visit outofyourheadrecords.bandcamp.com.

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