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.
A Sizzling, Cutting-Edge, Wildly Funky String Jazz Collaboration in Long Island City
It’s impossible to think of a more capsulizing moment for music in New York in 2021 than the concert in a Long Island City parking lot last Sunday. Overhead, the skies blackened, but on the ground, string quartet the Lotus Chamber Music Collective and jazz quartet Momentum joined in a wild, ecstatic collaboration that spoke to the indomitability of New York musicians creating the newest sounds around.
Lotus’ charismatic cellist, Sasha Ono, didn’t bother trying to hide how amped she was to finally be able to play her first concert since last year’s lockdown. The electricity shared by all eight players – perched on the back of a trailer and the bed of a battered 1963 Ford pickup – was pure unleashed cabin fever. This crew had obviously been playing and refining their chops during the time live music was criminalized here. And a big crowd had come out for the fireworks, defying the thunderclouds overhead.
The quartet – which also included violinists Tiffany Weiss and Emily Frederick alongside violist Gizem Yucel – opened with a mixture of lushness and groove, Ono and Momentum bassist Isaac Levien doubling up on the fat low end riffage throughout most of JJ’s Dance, by drummer Elé Howell. It was a slinky, shapeshifting number that gave the band a long launching pad to rise through a blend of Afrobeat, trip-hop and psychedelic funk that drew a straight line back to Roy Ayers. From the back of the truck bed, guitarist Quintin Zoto drove it to a searing peak with a long, feral but erudite solo, capped off with some savage tremolo-picking.
Cultural Appropriation, by Julia Chen had a coy calypso bounce fueled by Howell’s loose-limbed clave, with a similarly slinky Levien bass solo, vibraphonist Grady Tesch rippling through what the clouds overhead were foreshadowing.
Ono told the crowd that she’d been inspired to come up with her arrangement of Dave Brubeck’s La Paloma Azul as a reflection on the South American refugee crisis, the strings introducing its lustrous initial theme followed by the rest of the ensemble’s lilting, bittersweet, Mexican folk-tinged rhythms.
The most ambitiously symphonic interlude of the afternoon was when the two groups mashed up Swing, Low Sweet Chariot with themes from Florence Price’s Five Folksongs in Counterpoint for String Quartet (her Symphony No. 1 was the most-played orchestral work by any American composer in the 1930s). Ono and Tesch had come up with that idea after doing a webcast focusing on Price, whose gospel and jazz-influenced music is getting a long-overdue revival. The highlight was Yucel’s stark viola solo amid the polyrhythms and the constant dynamic shifts.
The eight musicians closed the first set with a determined, lavishly funky take of Shunzo Ohno‘s Musashi, debuting string parts which the jazz legend had written for this performance. It was akin to a particularly energetic segment on the Crusaders’ live album with B.B. King, switching out King’s string-busting bent notes for a torrentially icy guitar attack channeled through Zoto’s chorus pedal. Welcome to the future of serious concert music in New York, 2021: if this is any indication, it’s going to be a hot summer.
The more-or-less weekly outdoor series in the parking lot out behind Culture Lab, 5-25 46th Ave in Long Island City continues at 5 PM tonight, July 24 with careening, microtonally-tinged electric blues band Jane Lee Hooker. The space is just down the block from LIC Bar, further toward the water; take the 7 to Vernon Blvd.
One of Brooklyn’s Best Jazz Acts Returns to Playing Live with a Vengeance
One of the first bands at the very front of the pack getting busy on the live circuit again is fronted by the guy who might be the best guitarist in Brooklyn. From the mid to late teens, Tom Csatari’s Uncivilized played a careening, highly improvisational but also wickedly tuneful blend of pastoral jazz and psychedelia, with frequent detours into the noir. Their distinctively drifting live album of Twin Peaks themes is an obscure treasure from the peak era of the Barbes scene. The group survived their bandleader’s brush with death (this was long before any so-called pandemic) and have emerged seemingly more energized than ever. Csatari didn’t let all the downtime during the past fifteen months’ lockdown go to waste: he wrote three albums worth of songs. He calls it the Placebo Trilogy, and it’s streaming at Bandcamp.
Their next show is June 26 at 8 PM at the new San Pedro Inn, 320 Van Brunt St. (corner of Pioneer) in Red Hook. You could take the B61 bus but if you’re up for getting some exercise, take the F to Carroll, get off at the front of the Brooklyn-bound train and walk it. Nobody at this blog has been to the venue yet but it gets high marks from those who have.
All three records are Csatari solo acoustic, often played through a tremolo effect. The first one, Placedo-Niche has a couple of numbers with a distantly Elliott Smith-tinged, hazily bucolic feel, the first steadier, the second more spare and starry. Csatari packs more jaunty flash and enigmatic strum into D’art in less than a minute thirty than most artists can in twice as much time: one suspects that this miniature, like everything else here, was conceived as a stepping-off point for soloing.
Morton Swing is an increasingly modernized take on a charmingly oldtimey melody. And Extra could be a great lost Grateful Dead theme – who cares if this singalong doesn’t have lyrics.
The second record, Placebo-ish begins with Fresh Scrabble, Csatari’s gritty, nebulous chords around a long, catchy, descending blues riff. As it unwinds, he mingles the same kind of finger-crunching chords into a southern soul-tinged pattern, explores a moody Synchronicity-era Police-style anthem, then sends a similarly brooding variation through a funhouse mirror. The most John Fahey-influenced number here is titled Sad-Joy, both emotions on the muted side.
The last album is Placebo-Transcendence. The gentle, summery ambience of the opening track, Valentino, suddenly grows frenetic. Sugar Baby vamps along, warm and hypnotic. The wryly titled Civilized is…well…exactly that: it sounds like Wilco. The funniest song title (Csatari is full of them) is Silicone Transcendence (Tryin’ to Transcend), the closest thing to Twin Peaks here.
There isn’t a jazz guitarist alive who gets as much mileage out of a chord-based approach than Csatari, and there aren’t many people writing tunes as hummable as these in any style of music. Yet they tease the ears at the same time. If you want to learn how to write using implied melody, there isn’t a better place to start than these records.
Allstar Jazz Crew the Analog Players Society Slink Into Psychedelic Territory
The Analog Players Society live up their name in a way: they definitely are players. Check out this lineup: Donny McCaslin on tenor sax, Orrin Evans on piano, Dezron Douglas and Ben Rubin splitting the bass duties and Eric McPherson on drums. With officially sanctioned gigs hard to find outside of Sweden, they’ve joined the brave few making new records these days. Their three-song ep Tilted – streaming at Bandcamp – is the first in a planned two-part series and it’s actually like nothing you would expect from this an allstar cast. Is this lounge music? Psychedelia? Trip-hop? Acid jazz? Postbop? All of the above – and it’s not totally analog either.
They open it with a twelve-minute version of Jobim’s One Note Samba. McCaslin starts out airy and wary over Evans’ judiciously expanding modalities, then brings his echo pedal into the mix while McPherson introduces some slinky funk. They bring it down to a mutedly dancing, hypnotic bass solo while McPherson edges into trip-hop, Evans suddenly breaking the mesmeric mood with tinkling phantasmagoria. One of those “this is why we love jazz” moments.
Evans opens the second number, a wry reinvention titled Epistrophe, on toy piano, as McPherson more or less loops a New Orleans funk riff. McCaslin figures out echo effects both analog and digital over the circular groove. Evans’ restraint and commitment to keeping the mood going with just a handful of sudden “are you awake” riffs is pretty amazing for a guy with his chops. Taking Monk tunes apart and reducing them to most basic terms is fun!
For now, the final cut is Freedom is But a Fraction of Humanity, the quartet fading up into misterioso, triangulated piano/bass/drums polyrhythms before McCaslin expands beyond uneasy loopiness, only to back away for Evans’ darkly glittery cascades. Everything coalesces over a spring-loaded, rumbling groove: then everybody backs down for a whispery bass solo as McPherson finds the clave with his woodblock and Evans pedals his upper-register chords. This is a very fun and often very funny album.
A Wildly Majestic New Double Live Album and a Vanguard Stand from High-Voltage, Individualistic Drummer/Composer Johnathan Blake
These days pretty much every phone can capture at least some of a concert in various degrees of dodgy audio or video. But what’s the likehlihood of being at a transcendent performance that ended up being released as a live album? For anybody who might regret missing out on drummer Johnathan Blake‘s transcendent, torrential trio performances with Chris Potter on tenor sax and Linda May Han Oh on bass at the Jazz Gallery earlier this year, good news! You can hear the group in all their dark, majestic, wickedly catchy glory on Blake’s marathon new double live album, Trion, streaming at Bandcamp. Blake has been on a creative tear this year: he’s making his Vanguard debut as a bandleader tonight, Dec 3 with his similarly exhilarating Pentad featuring Joel Ross on vibes and Immanuel Wilkins on tenor sax on a stand that continues through Dec 8, with sets at 8:30 and around 11. You might want to get there early because it’s going to be intense.
For anyone who might scowl snarkily at the idea of a seventeen-minute chordless jazz version of the Police’s Sychronicity I, you have to hear the album’s opening track – to be fair, the original is actually a decent new wave tune and fertile source material. The bandleader kicks it off with a judicious solo tour of the drumkit, like a tabla player making sure everything’s right: Blake’s unusually musical tuning instantly identifies him. All the other tracks here are as epic, if slightly shorter, i.e. around the ten-minute mark. If you want to kick back with an album that’s going to keep you up all night, this is it.
Potter playfully throws a spitball or two before launching into the tune head-on with the rhythm section tightly alongside. From there they motor along, leaving a lot of space and elbow room for Oh’s gritty propulsion, Blake’s adrenalizing outward expansion and Potter’s artful variations. The saxophonist teases the crowd until a searing trill in response to an evil Blake roll; Oh’s long solo has a remarkably austere, balletesque grace.
Oh introduces Trope, her lone composition here, with an expansive yet darkly terse, distantly Appalachian-tinged solo intro, taking the implied menace introduced by the Police tune to the next level; then Potter enters hazily over her warily pulsing chords, which will give you goosebumps. The rest is equal parts gorgeousness and latin-tinged gravitas, which Blake seizes on: it’s arguably the highlight of the night.
Likewise, Oh’s funky intro kicks off the scampering shuffle One for Honor, by Charles Fambrough, the bassist who took a young Blake under his wing early in his career in Philadelphia. This song without words is just about as catchy and unsettled, Potter working the unease of the passing tones for all they’re worth, up to an enveloping hailstorm of a Blake solo.
Blake’s first anthem on the album, High School Daze, will resonate with anyone who couldn’t wait to get the hell out” Potter channels soul-crushing tedium balanced by guarded hope and then playful defiance. Oh subtly runs a hip-hop-tinged loop; Blake makes a second-line groove out of a simple rap riff; then Oh takes a biting solo that brings to mind mid-70s Stevie Wonder. No Bebop Daddy – an incisively waltzing shout out to Donny McCaslin’s kid, who really knew what he didn’t want to hear on the morning drive to school – has a delicously dark, pointillistic Oh solo and a long climb to an aching, livewire Potter crescendo.
Tne second record also gets a solo Blake intro, the subtly leapfrogging Bedrum, leading into the first of the Potter ompositions, the bouncy, hypnotically crescendoing, vampy Good Hope, with a long climb to a mighty sax solo. His second tune is the warmly saturnine Eagle, Oh’s twilit, folksy riffs setting the stage for the saxophonist’s lyrical drift toward wary, modal JD Allen-esque intensity and back. The trio stay in a similar, slightly more carefree latin-tinged vein for a sprawling, impromptu encore of Charlie Parker’s Relaxing at the Camarillo.
The debut recording of the catchy but enigmatically shifting Blue Heart, by Blake’s dad – the distinctive and underrated jazz violinist John Blake Jr. – has a loose-limbed, syncopated strut and Potter’s most casually genial work here. The album’s final number is West Berkley Street, a jaunty shout-out to Blake’s hip-hop-infused childhood stomping ground. What a treat to be able to revisit such a magic couple of nights.
Pianist Mara Rosenbloom Leads a Magically Hypnotic Trio at the Jazz Gallery
At the Jazz Gallery Wednesday night, there was a point where singer Anais Maviel unleashed a serrated, descending, diamond-cut glissando straight out of the Coltrane playbook while bassist Adam Lane pedaled a low E and pianist Mara Rosenbloom filled out the space between with a lingering lustre. Coltrane would have been hard-pressed to replicate that kind of precision. Maviel would do that later, and again the result was spine-tingling.
Rosenbloom came up with the night and the concept: to improvise on the theme of Adrienne Rich’s poem “I Know What I Dreamed.” It’s part of a suite loosely exploring the possibilities of love without exploitation. A challenge, musically or otherwise, under ordinary circumstances; more so by far in the post-2016 election era. To what degree did the music reflect that struggle?
Maviel did the heavy lifting and made it seem effortless, even when pushing the limits of her extended technique via meticulously articulated sputters, playful detours toward scatting or building an accusatory mantra with the poem’s title. Meanwhile, without missing a beat – literally – she played taut polyrhythms on a tom-tom, whether with many shades of boomy grey or a rat-a-tat on the hardware. Was this a cautionary tale to hold onto our dreams lest they be stolen by the trumpies and their dream police? Maybe.
Lane was the center of the storm, whether pulling elegantly against Rosenbloom’s lingering center, bowing stygian washes or pulsing higher up the neck over the piano’s dense but sparkling chordal washes. Rosenbloom didn’t reach for the churning firestorm of her most recent album Prairie Burn, instead orchestrating what seemed to be very Indian-inspired themes. Has she been hanging with the Brooklyn Raga Massive? What a great collaboration that would be.
She opened with a classy, distantly bluesy Gershwinesque resonance and grew much more minimalist early on, with judiciously exploratory righthand against a steady river from the left. Tersely and methodically, she directed a series of wavelike crescendos, Maviel the wild card who’d push one over the edge without a split-second warning. Bass and piano were always there to catch it in a reflecting pool and then bring it to shore: sympatico teamwork as unexploitative love? Rosenbloom finally encored with a solo piece that reverted to echoes of both Gershwin as well as earlier, deeper southern blues, in a Matthew Shipp vein.
There aren’t any upcoming shows by this auspicious trio, but Rosenbloom will be at I-Beam on on Aug 11 at 8:30 PM with Guillermo Gregorio on clarinet and Omar Tamez on guitar; cover is $15. Maviel is at the Freedom Music Fest in Copenhagen, solo, on Aug 31.
Lincoln Center’s 2018 Midsummer Night Swing Series Opens With Potent Relevance and Breathtaking Musicianship
At the risk of getting into serious trouble saying this, there hasn’t been such a stunning display of jazz talent on any New York stage this year as there was last night at the kickoff of Lincoln Center’s annual Midsummer Night Swing festival. The inspiration for the mighty big band, the Sisterhood of Swing, was the International Sweethearts of Rhythm, the first integrated, all-female swing group, who debuted eighty-one years ago. As bandleader, trumpeter and singer Bria Skonberg took care to remind the audience who packed Damrosch Park, those women risked their lives playing music together.
The members of this group weren’t risking their lives, but arguably the majority of them were out of their element. And few among this allstar cast play regularly with large ensembles, fewer still with a group the size of this one. The majority are bandleaders who play their own material rather than bouncy 1930s swing. Yet everybody seemed to be pretty much jumping out of their shoes to be involved in this project.
In two lengthy, hard-swinging sets that spanned from standards to cult favorites and an obscure gem or two, the fourteen-piece ensemble offered tantalizing glimpses of pretty much each member’s personality, yet in a completely different context considering where they’re usually found.
The audience responded most explosively to tenor saxophonist and singer Camille Thurman’s serpentine climb to the vocal stratosphere in one of the night’s few ballads, quite a contrast with her rapidfire scatting in a Benny Goodman diptych during the first set. Another big hit was tapdancer Michela Lerman’s nimble solo over Savannah Harris’ irrepressibly boisterous, tropically-tinged tom-tom syncopation, mirroring the drummer’s rambunctious drive in the second set’s opening number, Lady Be Good.
At the piano, Champian Fulton delivered purist, masterfully spacious, blues-drenched lines that fit the material perfectly, especially when the band threw her what could have been the night’s longest solo. In her first turn on the mic, she projected with a surprisingly steely intensity, then a second time around worked knowingly triumphant, bluesy, Dinah Washington-inspired melismas.
Lead trumpeter Jami Dauber joined with her brassy bandmate Linda Briceño and Skonberg as well in a wildly crescendoing, tightly spinning exchange in the wryly titled Battle of the Bugles, one of a handful of numbers from the catalog of Sweethearts of Swing creators Kat Sherrell and Natalie Wilson. Bassist Endea Owens benefited from excellent amplification, giving her a forceful presence. Chloe Feoranzo stood out most noticeably with her gritty baritone sax work; trombonist and singer Emily Asher also got time in the spotlight to channel some goodnaturedly wry humor. Lead alto saxophonist Lakecia Benjamin played punchy soul alongside her fellow reedwomen Thurman and Sharel Cassity.
On clarinet, Anat Cohen spun silky arpeggios on the less breathlessly pulsing numbers and delivered joyously dancing dixieland when the pace picked up, notably alongside violinist Regina Carter in A Woman’s Place Is in the Groove, a deliriously frantic obscurity by 1930s vioinist Ginger Smock. The two worked more calmly and majestically in a new instrumental arrangement of My Baby Just Cares for Me. The group closed with a joyously edgy take of the klezmer-tinged romp Doin’ the Uptown Lowdown, made famous by Mildred Bailey with the Tommy Dorsey band. The crowd didn’t want to let the band go after discovering this new sensation.
This year’s Midsummer Night Swing series continues through July 14 with a more eclectic series of dance bands than ever. Tomorrow at 7:30 PM it’s salsa pioneer and “El Rey de la Pachanga” Joe Quijano y Su Conjunto Cachana. It’ll cost you $17 to get out on the dance floor, something an awful lot of people last night were doing.
An Early Morning Blaze From the Uncategorizably Brilliant Klazz-Ma-Tazz
Pianist Ben Rosenblum hit a sharks-teeth minor-key spiral, echoed with slithery precision by bandleader and violinist Ben Sutin. Meanwhile, bassist Mat Muntz dipped and swayed, a monster truck spring at peak tension crossing a ravine in some remote Chernobyl forest. Behind them, drummer Tim Rachbach worked tense variations on a clave groove as guitarist Rafael Rosa held back, deep in the shadows, saxophonist Elijah Shiffer waiting for his moment. That would come about fifteen minutes later. At this point, it was about quarter to noon on Sunday morning.
The album release show by Sutin’s phenomenal band Klazz-Ma-Tazz transcended a lot of things, including but not limited to genre specificity and time of day. While Sutin’s compositions and arrangements draw deeply from the vast well of classic Jewish folk music from east of the Danube, they’re hardly limited to that. What they play is jazz, but it’s also dance music. You could also call it film music, considering how deeply they can plunge into noir. But they didn’t stay there, or anywhere, for long.
Musicians tend not to be morning people. But watching this band blaze through two ferocious, sets made it more than worthwhile to sit there glassy-eyed after spending most of the previous evening at the Brooklyn Folk Festival. Interestingly, Sutin launched his epic Letting Go suite, from the band’s new album Meshugenah, just two songs in. Its allusive, chromatically electriified rises and falls foreshadowed the feral but expertly orchestrated intensity they’d save for the second set, veering from panoramic desertscapes to hints of samba and some Cuban flair.
Shiffer’s moment was a coda. Before then, he and Sutin had built a briefly heated conversation, but even that didn’t hint at what the saxophonist had up his sleeve. Working his baritione to what seemed the top of his register, he dropped it and reached for his alto. The choreography wasn’t perfect, but the effect was irresistibly fun as he went for the jugular…then put it down, picked up the bari again and took that big horn to heights nobody expected, or probably imagined were possible. Sure, it was a show-off move: to see somebody actually pull it off at such an early hour was really something else.
Sutin told the crowd that Sunrise, Sunset was one of his alltime favorite songs, then reinvented it as lush, plaintive, latin-tinged syncopated swing, a Lynch film set somewhere in the Negev. His version of In Odessa pounced and charged, possibly mirroring Putin-era terrorism there, Rosenblum’s bittersweet accordion holding its own against the stampede.
The second set showcased the band’s sense of humor as well as how feral they can get. Muntz’s quasi-Balkan dance Cyberbalkanization had a relentless, tongue-in-cheek faux EDM whoomp-whoomp beat, Sutin and Shiffer trading terse, acidic phrases overhead. From there they ranged from brooding and mournful to cumulo-nimbus ominousness in their version of Tumbalalaika, segueing into a majestically careening, turbocharged take of the classic Misirlou – but without much in the way of surf.
They saved the guest rapper and singers for the end. Sheyn Vi Di Levone is best known as a schmaltzy ballad, but singer Astrid Kuljanic worked its coy internal rhymes for all it was worth, the band making perfectly decent, uneasy midtempo swing out of it. Then guest Zhenya Lopatnik opened their version of Bei Mir Bist Du Schön with a suspenseful, moody rubato vocal solo before the band swung it, hard. Thank You, from the band’s sizzlingly good debut album, was one of the closing numbers, awash in slashing modal riffs and shifting meters. That the band managed to play one of the best shows of 2018 so far, so early in the day, speaks for itself. Sutin’s next gig is a low-key trio show tomorrow, April 11 at 7 PM at Sidewalk.
Dave Douglas Leads a Killer Quartet Through Eclectic Americana Jazz Themes at the New School
It figures that trumpeter Dave Douglas would eventually collaborate with Carla Bley. At his show last night at the Stone’s future fulltime home in the New School’s Glass Box Theatre, he enthused about how Bley’s music tackles “big life events,” and how much narrative, and purpose, and color it has. He could just as easily have been describing his own catalog: both he and Bley are connoisseurs of American sounds far beyond the jazz idiom.
Leading his calmly spectacular Riverside quartet, he opened with an uneasy, careeningly shapeshifting Bley number lit up with some valve-twisting microtonal bite from Chet Doxas’ tenor sax, and closed with a turn-on-a-dime highway theme of his own, where he traded boisterously flurrying eights with drummer Jim Doxas over six-string acoustic bassist Steve Swallow’s practically motorik pulse.
The Stone is the kind of place where on any random night, you can see something like a Swallow world premiere – it wasn’t clear if this was the actual debut of this particular brand-new, balmy-yet-saturnine jazz waltz, but the band were clearly gassed to tackle it. From the composer’s own pensive, spacious solo intro, the quartet worked their way to judiciously crescendoing solos from both horns. They went considerably darker later for the night’s best number, an allusively slinky Douglas tune akin to a more elegant Steven Bernstein/Sexmob take on Nino Rota noir, the bandleader taking it further outside until the drums finally put a spotlight on its shadowy clave.
Another rarity was a Bley number from the early 60s written for but apparently never played by Sonny Rollins. Douglas’ saxophonist had a lot of fun with its flares and flights early on; the bandleader had even more fun with a bizarrely carnivaleque, dixieland-flavored interlude that appeared out of nowhere.
A similarly irresistible mashup was Douglas’ cheerily bucolic new tune Il Sentiero (Italian for “The Path”), a triptych of sorts that rose from a warm pastorale to a bouncy bluegrass drive where Swallow played a familiar Appalachian guitar strum, peaking out with a triumphant “we made it” mountain-summit theme.
Likewise, an audience peppered with many of Douglas fellow soprano valve trombone players voiced their approval. Since Douglas’ axe contains the name of an infamous demagogue, that’s Douglas’ new term for it, at least until the guy in the wig gets impeached. Douglas’s next stop is at 8 PM on July 5 at the Grand Theatre in Quebec City.And the next Stone show at the New School is July 14 at 8:30 PM with progressive jazz sax icon Steve Coleman.
Lucid Culture 