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Last November I wrote about Free Jazz Bitmaps, an intriguing project of musician and designer Nick Butcher. At the time he was celebrating the release of the last of six lathe-cut seven-inch singles of sample-based music he’d created using old Chicago jazz and house records. They were handmade in ridiculously limited quantities (ten each), but Butcher wasn’t really making the seven-inches to sell records: the music’s most important function was to inspire improvisations (Butcher prefers the term “reinterpretations”) by six of the city’s best jazz players. This week the project reaches its conclusion with the release of an album collecting those improvisations along with the six tracks that inspired them. On Friday night Saki Records hosts a reception for the release of the album, called Free Jazz Bitmaps Vol. 1—produced by the superb Hometapes label—and an exhibition of related prints.
