Saxophonist and composer Darius Jones is at one of the fieriest, most mercurial players on New York’s massive jazz and improvised-music scene—he’s a freedom seeker with a strong sense of history but a healthy disregard for orthodoxy. In brutally precise noise-jazz juggernaut Little Women, a group he cofounded, Jones blows serrated fury alongside Travis Laplante (Battle Trance) over postpunk guitar and drums, and in 2014 he released an album called The Oversoul Manual on which he didn’t play at all, instead enlisting four skilled vocalists to sing his emotionally intense work of post-opera.
Jones doesn’t make it to Chicago very often as a leader. In fact, he last did so in 2012, when be fronted a trio with Adam Lane and Jason Nazary (who plays with him in Little Women). He was here as a sideman last summer in a band led by drummer Gerald Cleaver, and five years ago Little Women played the Hideout. But Jones is back in town on Saturday to lead a strong group of Chicago players at Constellation: cornetist Josh Berman, bass clarinetist Jason Stein, bassist Jason Roebke, and drummer Mike Reed. Their sets will focus on Jones’s compositions.
