Jazz Condition -- UPI Arts & Entertainment

Drummer Bobby Previte believes that music at its most pure is all about the honesty of the people who are making it. In his case, that means injecting it with an uncompromising exuberance, a hard sense of swing and more than a bit of humor.

"Just Add Water," a new recording by his Bump the Renaissance band, released by the Palmetto label, is a case in point. It shows his music is not for the faint of heart, but can be quite a ride for those who are willing to jump on board.

Bump dates to 1985, when it was a trio consisting of Previte, bassist Steve Swallow and pianist Wayne Horvitz. In its new life, the band has taken on an added dimension with the horn work of trombonist Ray Anderson and saxophonist Marty Ehrlich.

With song titles like "Put Away Your Crayons (and pick up that mutual fund brochure)," "'53 Maserati," "Stingray" and "Theme for an Imaginary Denouement," there's a tendency to credit Previte with a comical sense -- or at least a song title creativity inspired by the eclectic genius Charles Mingus.

The Niagara Falls, N.Y., native, a fixture on Manhattan's "downtown" loft scene since the late 1970s, takes a different view.

"I don't hear the humor in my music. To me, it is serious," he said. "There is playfulness. I like my song titles to mean something to me first -- and if they mean something to someone else ... that's fine, too. You deal with who you are. They are part of the things that makes you.

"Each of us has our own viewpoint. What makes us individuals is that all the colors aren't there. Whatever something is -- it also is what it isn't.

"There is all this talk about going past 100 percent. Yet the one thing we admire in art is the flaw -- it's the human quality," Previte said. "When you go see something and it takes your breath away, it is because of the accomplishment, and that it was made by a human.

"That is always working behind anything that we experience in life. It is just another human who has managed to do that. It makes a connection with you. A little bit of you is that artist, that ski jumper. That is very important for the making of art -- and experiencing it."

Previte put the Bump band back together in 1998 for what he anticipated would be one brief tour of Europe. He added the two horn players and dug out music from the band's first two recordings in 1985 and 1987.

But Previte says the band and the music took on a new life, and led to five European tours and an outpouring of new music. When Anderson couldn't make one tour because of a schedule conflict, Previte hired trombonist Joseph Bowie to fill in. Bowie's otherworldly sound is featured on a Horvitz composition called "Leave Here Now."

"The chemistry is why the band still exists," Previte said. "It is a seasoned band that has been on tour many times and has been through many things together -- and brings all of that to the recording studio.

"As Wagner said, 'Comfort has nothing to do with art.' I like to push them and shove them a bit to places they don't expect. That brings out things in people. Earlier, the music was more about me. Now, I have been able to trust the 'me' that is there and to get a little bit more of 'them'."

A funky New Orleans shuffle beat is one of the bubbling undercurrents of Previte's latest Bump project.

"Ray Anderson got me into the New Orleans feel through his Pocket Brass band," Previte said. "It is an area I had never checked out before. I feel like a neophyte. I hybridized it. But the way they play is so beautiful -- the drag, and the fact that the beat is about eight miles wide."

Previte says he was first drawn to jazz as a teenager from hearing the music of Miles Davis, then John Coltrane. But when he heard Mingus's music, things really clicked.

"It had everything," he said. "It was soulful; it was intelligent. There was something in the composition. It wasn't a vehicle for soloists -- they always had to play on the tune, not the (chord) changes.

"I gravitated more toward Mingus because he wasn't the soloist. He didn't play a lead instrument and had to get his 'sound' another way. He drove his musicians to always have his composition in their heads. That clicked with me. But I would never put myself in the same class of Mingus -- even in my song titles. I just put him on the highest ground."

Previte is also busy these days as the drummer in soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom's band, and as a member of Ponga, a West Coast-based electric, all-improvised project. He is also resurrecting his Voodoo Orchestra, which plays the music of Davis's "Bitches Brew" fusion period.

Last fall, Previte released a very different recording project. "The 23 Constellations of Joan Miro," composed for eight musicians, was released as part of Tzadik Records' "Composer Series".

Previte describes it as a "concerto for electronics" based on the painter's series of 23 "constellation" paintings. "The paintings are scattered throughout the world but they were gathered in 1993 at the Museum of Modern Art and I just flipped when I saw them," he said. "So I got a commission and wrote it out. It was very different to be so compositional."