Fat Kid Wednesdays

"The telepathic avant-jazz trio of Michael Lewis (saxophone), Adam Linz (bass), and JT Bates (drums) is respected internationally for their hearty stew of post-bop, free-flow freedom, and of-the-moment fervor. Open your ears and dig the next generation of jazz influenced equally by (Ornette Coleman, Bjork and Oval) by the young titans of the increasingly vital Twin Cities scene." - the Walker Art Center

One French critic described Fat Kid Wednesdays as the "incarnation of the exact hope that jazz can be in its full force and meaning in a nowadays troubled world." As opposed to the (so well) established ideas that jazz would not have any future unless outside its borders, the three musicians of Fat Kid take the crazy risk to "believe" in the virtues of the eternal regeneration of this music. Rejecting most of the options of those who carry on playing jazz as a "game" (mannerist distanciation, academic deference), the Fat Kids find naturally some essential values (lyricism, vital energy, commitment) and sign a music that is so strongly anchored in the present that it touches timelessness. It is in this vein that the group offers their first studio recording, The Art of Cherry. Michael Lewis, Adam Linz and JT Bates, three “kids” from the Twin Cities, met at school and began to create Fat Kid Wednesdays while they were very young. Without ulterior motives and with a freedom that one had thought forgotten, the three fellows are making great the evenings at the Clown Lounge, an old joint of the Prohibition years that now sees the young guard of the Twin Cities, shining. If each of them has other occupations (Michael Lewis plays with Happy Apple, Fog and Red Start, Adam Linz with George Cartwright and Oliver Lake, JT Bates with Anthony Cox and the drum & bass group Poor Line Condition), Fat Kid Wednesdays is their basis, the place of the oath of those young musketeers. At the Sons d'Hiver festival where they offered their first European concert, the proof was dazzling and the audience refused to let them go, encoring them on and on. French legend, pianist François Tusques, asserted at the gig that he "didn't know that people were still playing like that, with that fervor that lighted so many jazz heroes."