E-Mail This Article to a Friend Lifers David Caruso and the Fringe fanatics BY JON GARELICK

I was going to begin this piece by saying that David Caruso is like a lot of Fringe fans. But that wouldn’t be entirely true. How many fans are there for Boston’s longest-standing avant-garde trio who have been faithfully following the band’s live shows — okay, with the occasional six-week or six-month lapse here or there — for nearly 30 years of the band’s 34-year existence? And how many of those fans have bankrolled the production of a Fringe CD? So, you see, in a lot of ways, Caruso isn’t all that typical. In others, he’s perfectly true to form.

"It was 1977 or ’78," Caruso tells me over the phone, on the road for his job as a corporate-software consultant, "and there was an all-night jazz event at Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street." Caruso had heard of the Fringe, "but other than that they were playing some pretty free jazz, I really didn’t know that much about them." He had been brought up in Maynard, in a house with a heavy collection of big-band swing — Gene Krupa, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw. His taste in rock ran to classics like Jimi Hendrix and the Allman Brothers. But around the time of his initiation into the Fringe, Caruso describes himself as "into a heavy Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp thing." The Coltrane tended to be "the later-period stuff, not necessarily Ascension, but Interstellar Space, beyond-Crescent kind of stuff. So the whole notion of exploration gassed me." Still in his early 20s, a UMass-Amherst dropout working a factory job, Caruso discovered that "music didn’t have to have this formal structure, you could just kind of uncork the thing and let it go."

You could also argue that the sax-bass-drums trio the Fringe have always played with structure — bop progressions, Tranish arpeggios (those "sheets of sound"), riff-based bluesy numbers. A walking bass against dotted rhythms on the ride cymbal was a regular feature of those ’70s Fringe gigs, which took place every Monday night for the better part of a decade at the old Michael’s Pub on Gainsborough Street. The band had their own book of original material, and they would also regularly pop out a "standard" like Archie Shepp’s riffing, bluesy "Keep Your Heart Right." It didn’t matter that those "walks" were often like frenetic runs (and still are), or that the music could explode with ear-piercing harmonic bowing from bassist Rich Appleman or extended passages of multiphonic shrieks from saxophonist George Garzone. When a friend of mine who is another long-time Fringe fan recently checked into the Albert Ayler box, remembering the late-’60s revolutionary as rather forbidding, his first thought was, "It sounds like George Garzone."

The venues have changed several times since then — Monday nights at the Lizard Lounge for five years, and for the past year or so at Zeitgeist Gallery (a place drummer Bob Gullotti especially likes because, with no liquor license, it’s an all-ages hang). And Boston MVP bassist John Lockwood has been with the band since the mid ’80s. These days, they don’t announce tunes, and everything is spontaneously improvised. Occasionally, a phrase from a standard will sneak into the set or, as on a recent Monday night, what I could swear were a couple of choruses of Fields & McHugh’s "Exactly like You." And Garzone occasionally finds his way into some familiar ballad changes. But the band’s unpredictability — along with their daunting mastery — is intact.

Caruso said that a few years ago he resolved to get the first two Fringe albums — which had never been reissued — converted to CD. By chance, in October 2003, after a night at the BSO (where he is a season subscriber), he headed to a neighborhood bar to catch the end of the fateful seventh game of the Red Sox–Yankees series. There was Garzone, and Caruso, who’d lost touch with the band since they’d decamped from the Lizard, made his proposal. "George said, ‘Listen, I don’t know if you’ve seen the band lately, but we’ve been playing as well as we ever have. . . . Why don’t you record us as we are right now?’ "

So Caruso contacted the veteran engineer Toby Mountain, who set up for two nights in November 2003, one of which included Joe Lovano sitting in as special guest. Live at Zeitgeist (Resolution Recordings) is prime Fringe: gentle, ferocious, boppish, free, with one of their improvised Coltrane-like devotionals, "Tonight’s Prayer," a high-spirited chase between Lovano and Garzone on a couple of tracks, and their now standard, horribly titled, "A Fringe Tribute to the New England Patriots," a genuine stadium-cheer riff tune with a stop-time for the audience to chime in "Football!"

After that night at Emmanuel Church, Caruso estimates that he spent the "next 32 weeks straight at Michael’s on Monday night." That was typical — the conversion experience, the almost religious devotion, which you can still find among the 25 or so folks, most of them in their 20s, who make those late-Monday-night trips to Zeitgeist.

The Fringe play a CD-release party this Monday, March 21, at Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street in Inman Square; call (617) 876-6060.