I went and heard "The Roswell Rudd/Rob Scheps quartet plus John Tchicai" Monday night at Yoshi's. The place was packed! Local musicians were thick on the ground. The band was the aforementioned, with Tchicai on tenor and alto, plus two fellows from Portland, Oregon, which is also the home of Scheps (not Shepp, although he's a tenor player): bassist Dan Schulte and drummer Alan Jones. It was so good. Rudd said he hasn't appeared in the San Francisco Bay Area since the sixties when the Shepp group recorded "Live in San Francisco" at the Both/And on Divisadero Street. They started with one tune from that album, something with "heart" in the title. Rudd was strong. What a great sound! And how bluesy he is. (Wardrobe note - Rudd was wearing blue balloonish pajama pants with big polka dots, and a CIMP t-shirt.) Scheps is a real fine sax player, with a vocabulary from bebop and Ornette and some Coltrane. He plays pleasing melodies. Monk's "Green Chimneys." A piece by Tchicai that started off with the 3 horns playing stuff that sounded like bird calls - each player having only a few notes to repeat, then had a lot of other sections, including long free parts. I loved the big choral sound that the two saxes and trombone got on this and several other tunes. What a full front line! And I really started to appreciate how unique Rudd's sound is, and how right he sounds at the bottom of these voicings, and to realize how indispensable he was in Liberation Music Orchestra's "We Shall Overcome," and so many parts of C. Bley's -Escalator Over the Hill-, among other places. Rudd sang a slow blues called "Slide, Mister Trombone." He says he likes it because it's "the only song in the cosmos that elevates the trombone and the trombonist to a love machine of the highest degree." Thoroughly lascivious lyrics. Roswell Rudd singing is like Roswell Rudd playing: accurate, expressive, subtle, and hilarious. Herbie Nichols's "Old 52nd Street Rag." This was possibly my first Nichols. It sounded pretty retro. I'm guessing there's a lot more to him that this. A gorgeous ballad by Scheps named "Gifts," with that 3 horn choir sound again, and a piece by drummer Alan Jones with a lot of cool rhythms in it. People in Oregon and Washington, this band's heading your way.