A thing that rings

“The thing rings,” Adasiewicz said. “That all it does. You can dampen it, like you can dampen a piano, but I like to embrace the fact that it likes to ring, and ring loud.”

Adasiewicz (pronounced “a-da-SHEvits”) brings the exploratory sound of Chicago’s wide-open jazz scene to a crowded slate at East Lansing’s Summer Solstice Jazz Festival, June 19-20.

The twinkling, prismatic patterns Adasiewicz weaves on vibraphone are a stark contrast to the traditional bop, Latin, big band and blues that fill the rest of the festival, centered on two tents in downtown East Lansing.

Fittingly, Adasiewicz and his quartet will play in a metallic, angular venue perfectly suited to field vibraphone vibes. The group will kick off June 20’s slate with the second annual Kozmic Picnik at 1 p.m. in the Broad Art Museum Sculpture Garden.

Adasiewicz will be joined by longtime collaborators Mike Reed on drums, Josh Berman on cornet and Jason Behnke on bass.

Adasiewicz was a high school drummer, schooled in jazz tradition, when he discovered a vibraphone in his teacher’s studio. (He still plays that same instrument.)

“I didn’t know there was something that looked like that,” he said. “Something that had aluminum bars and a dampener bar, that was incredibly loud, and rang, like a cymbal can ring, so the overtones can just get super crazy.”

The sight of a vibraphone rang a new bell in his head.

Growing up in Crystal Lake, northwest of Chicago, he did a lot of time in his high school big band.

“I got into college because I could play jazz drums,” he said. “I did all those district all-state bands at school.”

Luckily, Rick Embach, the man who is now Crystal Lake’s second most famous vibraphonist, lived across the street from Adasiewicz’s high school and was willing to take on some work. Adasiewicz was his only student.

He took like mad to swinging on the vibraphone — not in the traditional sense, but an intense, Quasimodo-on-the-bellropes sense.

Embach is a fan of vibraphonist Gary Burton, who is known for using four mallets at once, and instantly had Adasiewicz mastering the “Burton grip.”

“When it came to digging into the vibraphone, I had no interest in regurgitating the tradition of learning tunes, learning tunes, learning tunes,” he said. “You do that when you’re a kid, and you have time to do it, and don’t get jaded and bitter about it.”

Despite several CDs and wide critical acclaim as one of jazz’s most distinctive new voices, Adasiewicz admits he still hasn’t grasped the “traditional language” of the vibraphone, as he did on the drums, and he likes it that way.

“I don’t know if I’ve created my own language, but I hear (the vibraphone) differently,” he said.

The quartet Adasiewicz will bring to the Summer Solstice Jazz Festival is an extension of his most recent group, a trio dubbed Sun Rooms by drummer Mike Reed. (Both Reed and Adasiewicz are gardeners.)

As a composer, Adasiewicz is a prodigious weaver of musical fabric. His tunes range from butterfly-fast bebop blitzes to hypnotic melodies that turn slowly, like mobiles by Alexander Calder, to reveal different shapes and colors.

The Sun Rooms trio, with three CDs in the can, is the purest expression of Adasiewicz’s art yet. The trio was a big leap for him after playing with a quintet, Rolldown, and another big project, Living by Lanterns.

“I was kind of scared of the trio,” he said. “The idea of being so exposed as the dominant melodic instrument — I guess I was hiding behind other people playing my music.”

He won’t be quite as exposed at the East Lansing Jazz Fest gig, with the addition of cornetist (and Rolldown alumnus) Josh Berman, but the music will come mostly from the Sun Rooms albums.

Adasiewicz is among the brightest of a glittering constellation of Chicago artists — from trumpeter Rob Mazurek to drummers Frank Rosaly and Reed to bass clarinetist Jason Stein — who move in and out of traditional lines with a breeziness befitting their home town. You get the feeling that unlike some avantgarde and free jazz warriors, they don’t spend much time sitting around fuming about Wynton Marsalis. They just do their thing.

“Hey, the cat can play,” Adasiewicz said of Marsalis.

Adasiewicz plays frequently with another jazz legend, German free-jazz icon Peter Brötzmann. For a jazz musician, that’s like painting with Jackson Pollock.

“It can be incredibly free,” Adasiewicz said. “But I also love to embrace simple harmony and the beauty of a tune. I feel like I straddle that, and Chicago straddles that.”