A Vivid, Thoughtfully Immersive New Album From Vibraphonist Sasha Berliner
Vibraphonist Sasha Berliner is all about creating a mood or painting a picture: crazed volleys of mallets are not her thing. Instead, she gives you tunes and ideas. Her latest album Onyx is streaming at Bandcamp. She’s got a show on August 31 at 7:30 PM at the Django; cover is $25.
The opening number, Jade, is tone poem of sorts, a warmly wafting Jaleel Shaw sax riff over a fluttery, layered glimmer from the vibes and James Francies’ Rhodes as drummer Marcus Gilmore coalesces from light-fingered flurries toward a mist. Almost imperceptibly, Berliner emerges and spirals around, Gilmore and then Shaw picking up where she leaves off. If Alice Coltrane had been a vibraphonist, she might have written something like this.
Bassist Burniss Travis II’s momentary downward portents introduce Crescent Park (In Elliptical Time), Thana Alexa taking over the mic with a lingering angst. then doubling the bandleader’s spare, moody, increasingly noirish lines.
Switching to piano, Francies delivers stern, spacious modalities to introduce Polaris, Shaw taking a break in the clouds: beneath the steady upward trajectory is a clever study in lithely syncopated rhythm, and the whole band are having fun with it.
Ephemerality is more energetic than the title would imply, piano and vibes mingling with an allusive unease until good cop Shaw busts it wide open. There are two takes of My Funny Valentine here, each a platform for Berliner’s coyly nimble, rapidfire precision. She plays the first solo.
NW, a shout-out to Berliner’s San Francisco home turf, is a lively, emphatic stroll. Those hills take it out of you, but the view from the top is worth the effort, Shaw floating over Gilmore’s shuffling clusters, the bandleader adding sprightly color before Francies leads the charge out. Berliner closes the record with a brief, summery, glistening shout-out to Milt Jackson. This album draws you in and eventually you get lost in it.
A Rare Solo Show and Yet Another New Album by Guitarist Gordon Grdina
Guitarist Gordon Grdina didn’t let the lockdowns in 2020 snuff out his creativity. He kept writing, and fortuitously found a way to keep documenting that creative output, which by any standard has been pretty amazing over the last three years. Grdina has not one but two new albums out., One of them, Pathways – streaming at Bandcamp – is his second with pianist Matthew Shipp and bassist Mark Helias. Grdina’s next New York gig is a very rare solo show tomorrow night, August 28 at 8:30 PM at Downtown Music Gallery. Left to his own devices, Grdina likes dynamics, a full sound and has a flair for the unpredictable: this could be a real treat.
What does the new album have going on? Although Grdina’s defiantly opaque compositions often seem more spontaneous than they actually are, this definitely seems to be one of his most improvisational records. It’s also one of his funniest. It starts with a wryly triangulated conversation that the three voices quickly build into a somber, spacious, allusive blues theme in the first number, Palimpsest. Essentially, they’re overwriting Summertime, sometimes hazily, sometimes hinting at a much more bittersweet ballad.
The album’s second track, Deep Dive expands to an unexpectedly stern quasi-stroll out of a thicket of playful, bubbly riffage punctuated by similarly tongue-in-cheek references to a certain famous and supposedly occult-adjacent children’s movie.
There’s a little palimpsest of My Favorite Things in the album’s title track, even as Shipp crushes rocks, finally luring Grdina into a deliciously noisy inferno that recedes for a rainy-day pavane.
Shipp’s icy incisions and pedalpoint square off with Helias’ slinky bounces and punches as the bandleader plays drummer with his buzzy lines for awhile before joining Shipp on the icepick team in the next track, Trimeter.
Helias holds the center steady as Shipp descends out of an eerie constellation in Amalgam. Flutter is aptly titled, a tightly clustering yet careening exchange of voices and an ending that’s hardly what you would expect. Ossicles is surreal to the extreme, Shipp’s uneasy, carillonesque cascades in contrast to Helias’ mutedly incisive accents and the bandleader’s goofy barnyard antics; they bring it full circle at the end.
The trio have gritty, insistent fun with a simple half-step riff and echo effects in Synapses. In the album’s final cut, Sanctum, the band alternate between anxious ripples and hints at a moody, sparse ballad, Grdina leading the way to what is ironically the album’s most sepulchral interlude. What an inspiring and distinctive body of work this guy is building right now.
Colorful Guitar Icon Jim Campilongo Continues His Rockwood Residency
It took a long time after the lockdown, but Jim Campilongo made it back to one of his oldest haunts, the Rockwood, where he’s played an on-and-off monthly residency, practically since the venue opened in 2005. Revered in guitar circles, Campilongo is not quite as well known as Bill Frisell, but the two have much in common beyond erudite and eclectic chops. Each player infuses jazz with Americana and a frequent noir sensibility. And each has his shtick: Frisell with his loop pedal, Campilongo using the neck of his Telecaster for a wammy bar effect by bending it ever so slightly. His next Rockwood gig is in the big room on August 29 at 7 PM; cover is $15.
Right before the lockdown, Campilongo was spending a lot of time in low-key, intricate duo situations. But one of this blog’s favorite Campilongo albums, Heaven Is Creepy, goes all the way back to 2006 and remains one of his most picturesque releases to date. An added element of creepiness is the tragic loss of bass player Tim Luntzel, who was stricken by Lou Gehrig’s Disease and died eight years later. Like a lot of musicians have been doing, Campilongo has discovered the utility of Bandcamp as a marketing tool and has put most of his albums up there, including this classic.
The first track is The Prettiest Girl in New York, a cheery lattice of bluegrass licks and coy harmonics over drummer Dan Rieser’s shuffle beat. Track two, Monkey in a Movie is a wry, slightly skronky strut with moments for the rhythm section to gnaw on the scenery.
There are two versions of the album’s first cover, Cry Me a River. The first is an instrumental. Campilongo’s surreal, slipsliding, lapsteel-flavored licks never quite coalesce out of an increasingly agitated, psychedelic thicket, shades of Dave Tronzo, until the very end. The second, with Norah Jones on vocals, is faster and more straightforwardly haunting, even if it isn’t on the same level as Erica Smith‘s shattering version with Dann Baker on guitar.
The album’s darkest and best track, Mr & Mrs Mouse veers all over the place, from Campilongo’s bracing wide-angle chords, to horror surf, to a cynically tiptoeing cha-cha that could be Big Lazy. Then the trio bring it down with the skeletal, brooding rainy day theme Because You Like Trombone.
Hamster Wheel (Slight Return) is a swampy trip-hop theme. Menace is less outright creepy than sardonically skronky, when Campilongo isn’t leading the trio scampering through Django Reinhardt’s shadow. The album’s chromatically snarling title track could just as easily be called Creepy Is Heaven: it’s the most enigmatically ominous, disquietingly strange tune here.
Nellie Bly, as Campilongo seems to see the prototypical investigative journalist, is a Beatles fan with a vintage country streak. The final cut on the album is Pepper, part lullaby, part suspense film theme. It says a lot about how much ground Campilongo can cover in under five minutes. There’s also a brief, aptly Victorian-flavored cover of Beautiful Dreamer with Martha Wainwright on vocals.
Back at Mona’s For a Hot, Moody Evening of Swing Jazz
Last night Mona’s was pretty crowded by the time the rotating cast from the house band gathered in the corner at the end of the bar. Which from an audience perspective was actually a good thing. Drinks at Mona’s are expensive: invisibility in a crowd has its advantages.
It wasn’t always that pricy fifteen years ago when Mona’s Hot Four played their first gig here. Little did they know that after a break for a plandemic, they and the bar would still be here keeping a well-loved New York oldtimey swing tradition alive.
This time out they were a quintet. An interesting opening number that shifted between minor and major proved to be a great launching pad for solos from bandleader and clarinetist Dennis Lichtman, pianist Jon Thomas and bassist Jen Hodge, who mined that uneasy terrain for all the edgy passing tones they could find. Sax player Jay Rattman bolstered the phantasmagorical hi-de-ho harmonies as they wound it out.
Rattman switched to clarinet for a dusky, Ellingtonian frontline on the moodily shuffling second number of the night, I’ve Got a Right to Sing the Blues, Thomas supplying starry curlicues in the upper registers: his sense of irony and counterintuitive phrasing were rich throughout the evening’s first set. An unidentified guitarist who is still stuck in 2020 hygiene theatre played spiky Django riffs and clustering minor-sixth chords, and took a turn on the mic to sing a couple of verses through a thick black muzzle. You’d think that members of an ostensibly sophisticated New York artistic community would be awake by now…but, pseudoscience.
Ultimately, what this group does is dance music. Early in the evening, people typically dance in their chairs, although it gets a lot wilder as the night goes on, both musically and audience-wise. Admittedly, that perception dates from a previous decade before fear had been fully weaponized in this city.
They did I Ain’t Got Nobody as a brisk, staccato shuffle next and went back toward moody terrain with the next number: having the two clarinets out front enhanced that vibe. Lichtman’s signature, liquid-crystal arpeggios and cascades were as distinctive and spine-tingling as always.
The group expanded to a sextet with the addition of Mike Davis on trumpet for the last couple of tunes. The first, High Society, had a martial, W.C. Handy flair, which Rattman brought down to earth with a silky sax solo. Davis put his mute in for the final, coyly shuffling number.
Mona’s Hot Four, or Five, or Six – as they were a week ago – play the Avenue B bar just south of 14th St. every Tuesday night starting at nine sharp.
The Sun Ra Arkestra Make a Welcome Return to a Laid-Back Outdoor Williamsburg Space
As far back as the 90s, the Sun Ra Arkestra had become a fixture on the New York summer outdoor festival circuit. A Central Park twinbill with Sonic Youth earned the sprawlingly cinematic jazz ensemble a brand new audience with the indie rock crowd. In the years immediately leading up to the 2020 lockdown, they’d been scheduled to play a more intimate space than usual, the courtyard at Union Pool. As it turned out, it took a few cancellations and some rescheduling to get them there. That’s where they’ll be this August 28 at around 3 PM. Under ordinary circumstances, it would make sense to get there early. But the circumstances we face today are anything but ordinary, and in a city that by some estimates has lost a quarter of its population, there probably won’t be an overflow crowd (and if there is, you’ll be able to hear the missing link between P-Funk and the Art Ensemble of Chicago just fine from the sidewalk around the corner).
The Arkestra were DIY pioneers, releasing much of their legendarily voluminous output themselves. Today, most of those original recordings, along with limited-edition pressings on long-defunct European free jazz microlabels, command auction-level prices on the collector market. Serendipitously, the group have been digitizing and re-releasing select albums from throughout their career. The latest one to hit their regularly updated Bandcamp page is the 1983 recording The Sun Ra Arkestra Meets Salah Ragab In Egypt, a collaboration with the Cairo Jazz Band. It’s noteworthy for being a slinky, sometimes haphazard, utterly psychedelic collection of compositions by pioneering Egyptian jazz composer, percussionist and bandleader Salah Ragab.
The first track is Egypt Strut, a surreal mashup of a New Orleans second-line groove, a chromatic Middle Eastern-tinged theme and the blues. In Dawn, the second track, the groups combine to balance a blithe flute tune against galloping percussion, followed by a cantering, hypnotically circling theme echoing sounds from the southern end of the Sahara.
Ramadan begins with a muezzin-like call-and-response, then the ensemble flesh it out with darkly dramatic vocals, horns and tumbling drums followed by a biting solo from the bandleader – who went back to Saturn to stay in 1993 – and a spirited flute outro with a nod to Take Five.
Oriental Mood is the catchiest and hardest-hitting track here, with jajouka-like brass, animated sax solos and piano. The ten-minute Farewell Theme is a more robustly orchestral series of variations on that theme, and considering the length, about twice the fun. Throughout the album, Sun Ra switches between glimmering, echoey Fender Rhodes and organ, backed by punchy massed horns, and sailing and spiraling solos. How does all this sound compared to the group’s sound now? Much the same, if you leave out the distinctive Middle Eastern and North African references.
The last time this blog was in the house at a show by the Arkestra, it was at the Union Pool courtyard, over the Labor Day weekend in 2018. The crew onstage were a mix of veterans, some of whose time in the group went back to around the time of this album or before, along with some more recent additions. The yard was crowded but wasn’t completely sold out, and the group’s long, slowly crescendoing trajectories kept everyone on their feet.
Melissa Aldana Brings Her Simmering Intensity to the Charlie Parker Festival
This year’s concluding installment of the annual Charlie Parker Festival, which returns to Tompkins Square Park on August 28, has something for everyone. Purist postbop guitarist Pasquale Grasso, who continues the tradition in a Peter Bernstein vein, opens at 3 with his group. At 4, swing trumpeter and singer Bria Skonberg revisits an era from a decade or two before. Representing newer styles, tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana brings many different levels of meaning with her group at 5. A multi-generational band including sax legend Archie Shepp and pianist Jason Moran with the irrepressible and brilliant Cecile Mclorin Salvant on vocals close out the show.
Aldana is the wild card in this deck. In recent years the scion of a major Chilean jazz legacy has fine-tuned a laser focus that has always been far more American than latin simply because that’s where her interests seem to be. There, and the tarot deck, which she explores musically on her latest album 12 Stories, streaming at youtube. It’s a relentlessly unsettled, distantly haunting record, a potent reflection on a society at the brink of a totalitarian abyss. The level of control, yet also the microtonal woundedness in Aldana’s attack, will hold you rapt in many places here.
She opens the first number, Falling, with a simmering, brooding intensity, underscored by guitarist Lage Lund’s icily ominous chords and pianist Sullivan Fortner’s judicious, incisive accents in tandem with bassist Pablo Menares as drummer Kush Abadey chews the scenery. Aldana’s clustering modalities finally give way to a characteristic phantasmagorical flourish and then a similarly uneasy solo from Fortner.
Aldana follows a similar template with the second number, Intuition, this time working the upper registers as the rhythm section punch in and out with an enigmatic tension. Lund provides a surreal, lingering solo intro to Emilia, a delicately spare ballad, carefully moving the clouds away as Fortner builds an enigmatically reflective gleam on Fender Rhodes. This time it’s Aldana, with her steady lines, who resists any hint of resolution.
The rhythm section play tug-of-war as Aldana strolls with a pensive, bittersweet intensity through the beginning of The Bluest Eye. Finally, she lightens with a series of increasingly ebullient spirals, Fortner playing sly leaps and bounds much as he does with Salvant. Lund’s percolating solo fuels a darkly swirling coda that fades out almost cruelly – we know how this ends, but the details would be helpful!
The Fool – a reference to the tarot card, which is actually a rugged individualist archetype – has a moody sway, Fortner and Lund’s allusively churning bolero over Abadey’s grimly triumphant, crescendoing drive. Aldana chooses her spots on the way out.
Los Ojos de Chile is the most animated number here, Fortner rising out of variations on a cheery riff with his usual saturnine energy, Lund setting up Aldana’s determined drive out. The hazy title tableau leaves the listener wondering what’s coming next: may we all survive to hear Aldana’s next album after this brilliant, career-best collection.
Uneasily Enveloping Sonics in a Midtown Park With Rafiq Bhatia and His Trio
“I want to give you permission to just lie down if you want,” guitarist Rafiq Bhatia said to the crowd who’d gathered on the lawn at Bryant Park for his show yesterday evening with trumpeter Riley Mulherkar and drummer Ian Chang. The latter had just opened with a mildly diverting set of solo loopmusic utilizing a variety of electronic patches.
Bhatia has been a prime mover in electroacoustic music in New York for several years. He, too, had plenty of ghosts in his machines, although it was generally easy to tell what he was actually playing and what was just microcircuitry.
His opening number evoked whalesong and birdsong, spiced with gentle volume-knob washes and harmonic plucks, in a Bill Frisell Jr. mode. Chang, having emerged from the metaverse, iced the sonic sculpture with his cymbals as Mulherkar peeked his way in. Bhatia continued to build a brooding, lingering pastorale as the loops behind him flitted further into white noise.
As the night went on, each player left plenty of room for the other, from acidic clouds of overtones, to echoes of noirish Bob Belden-style post-Miles improvisation when Mulherkar would run variations on his own judiciously circling phrases. Bhatia hit his octave pedal (or octave patch, more likely) for minimalistic bass punches as Chang flitted around gracefully: the chemistry between the two was clear, considering their time together in Son Lux.
Swooshy electronic clouds unleashed a gentle quasi-shower from which Mulherkar goodnaturedly emerged into a gently comedic interlude while Bhatia remained attentive, bent over his mixer. But it wasn’t long before the sci-fi noir ambience returned and the trio built to a cold industrial stomp. As the music rose and then Bhatia brought the show full circle, it was all too easy to imagine that this was just another muggy August evening in Manhattan circa 2019, when dystopia was just a theoretical construct that musicians and writers could have fun with since there was a comforting reality to return to when the show was over.
The next free concert at Bryant Park, on August 26 at 7 PM, could be one of this year’s best. Billed as a “habibi festival,” it features three artists and their groups exploring cutting-edge Middle Eastern sounds: North African dancer Esraa Warda & the Châab Lab, eclectic kanun virtuoso Firas Zreik, and haunting French-Tunisian saxophonist Yacine Boulares’ Ajoyo trio.
A Well-Loved New York Oldtimey Swing Tradition Resumes in the East Village
Last night at their Avenue B home base, Mona’s Hot Six delivered a typically animated evening of hot 20s swing and dixieland as part of their ongoing weekly Tuesday night residency there, which they’d begun as a quartet in the late zeros and had continued until they were interrupted by the global totalitarian takeover in March of 2020. Their lineup of usual suspects from the traditionalist party animal contingent in the New York jazz scene fluctuates depending on who’s in town and who’s not. Clarinetist and ringleader Dennis Lichtman was gone last week but he was back this time around alongside Jon-Erik Kellso on trumpet, Dalton Ridenhour on piano, Jerron Paxton on banjo, plus guest trombonist Charlie Halloran and an unidentified bass player tucked into the corner.
They opened with a romp through a midtempo take of what sounded like Sweet Sue, kicking off with a little jaunty trumpet/trombone conversation and a spiraling Lichtman solo. Ridenhour’s ragtime-flavored piano solo (in what might be charitably be called saloon tuning) gave way to some feathery tremolo-picking from Paxton, and eventually a couple of modulations to a lively dixieland interweave. That set the stage for the rest of the night’s first set.
Lichtman, who until the lockdown led a fantastic and almost as long-running western swing outfit, the Brain Cloud, has been a good clarinetist for a long time but obviously spent the dead months of 2020 and 2021 practicing. There were some moments where his liquid-crystal spirals were nothing short of breathtaking. Halloran was in town from New Orleans and got a lot of time in the spotlight (as well as a turn on the mic in an upbeat take of Dreaming the Hours Away). For him, sometimes that meant balmy and soulful; other times that meant chewing the scenery, as music like this eventually makes you do if you’re a trombonist.
Ridenhour anchored the songs with a steady, imperturbable stride and a few devious excursions to the upper registers while Paxton drew on the deep well of antique guitar voicings that inform his status as one of the world’s great acoustic blues guitarists. The bar wasn’t very full when the band first assembled in the back, but by the end of their opening set a crowd had grown around them and the vibe was contagious. Mona’s Hot Four (or whatever the weekly number is) play there every Tuesday night starting pretty much at the stroke of 9.
Rafiq Bhatia Brings His Surreal Soundscapes to a Summer Series in Midtown
It’s hard to think of a guitarist who personifies the state of the art in ambient jazz more individualistically or interestingly than Rafiq Bhatia. He’s just as much at home reinventing Mary Lou Williams tunes with his longtime collaborator Chris Pattishall as he is creating an immersive electronic swirl. Bhatia’s next gig is outdoors at Bryant Park at 7 PM on August 19.
Bhatia had the good fortune to release his most recent album, Standards Vol. 1 – streaming at Bandcamp – in January of 2020. It’s a characteristically outside-the-box series of interpretations of iconic jazz tunes. He opens it by transforming In A Sentimental Mood into a disquieting series of sheets of sound, running Riley Mulherkar’s trumpet and Stephen Riley’s tenor sax through several patches including an icy choir effect.
Cécile McLorin Salvant sings The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face with alternatingly coy charm and outright menace, enhanced electronically by Bhatia’s minimalist textural washes. The only track that Bhatia plays guitar on here is Ornette Coleman’s Lonely Woman, which he reinvents as an utterly desolate, surrealistically looped, raga-tinged nightscape, Craig Weinrib a fugitive on the run with his palms on the drum heads. The two horns take it out with a dusky wee-hours conversation.
The album’s final number is The Single Petal of a Rose, Pattishall’s spare, raindrop piano licks subtly processed (and maybe cut and pasted) to flit into and out of the sonic picture. It’s a prime example of how Bhatia builds a space to get lost in.
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