Literally Otherworldly, Entertaining Sounds From Sarah Weaver

OK – you open your new album with an almost nineteen-minute drum solo. Career suicide attempt?

Actually, Gerry Hemingway’s performance of Sarah Weaver’s gamelanesque hailstorm of a composition is vastly more interesting than most drum solos, and in a way it sets the stage for the entertainment to come on her latest, deep-space inspired album Synchrony Series. It hasn’t made it to the usual spots on the web, although there are bits and pieces at Weaver’s youtube channel..

Bombast is happily absent; what we get is a a very subtle upward drive from a steady drizzle on the cymbals and some neat accents on what seem to be extremely detuned tom-toms. People with short attention spans will not be able to handle much of this music, but for those dedicated to what Pauline Oliveros called deep listening, it’s a treat. It’s very psychedelic, by the way.

Long before the lockdown forced musicians to use the web to collaborate, Weaver was patching in people around the world to create ensembles that otherwise never could have existed. There’s some of that here on the record. The second number, Symmetry of Presence features bass trombone legend David Taylor playing a ridiculously funny series of ideas through an increasingly surreal series of Weaver’s effects – although his vaunted extended technique really gets a workout before the electronics kick in. So much of this kind of music is mannered and fearful: this is 180 degrees from that.

An allstar eleven-piece ensemble play the darkly sprawling, practically forty-minute suite Interhere, a soundscape in the AACM tradition. Min Xiao-Fen’s spiky pipa first takes centerstage over Mark Dresser’s keening bass overtones and the massed horns of Taylor, trumpeter James Zollar, soprano saxophonist Jane Ira Bloom, reedman Ned Rothenberg, bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck and oboeist Julie Ferrara. Denman Maroney’s piano introduces icy menace; it’s not clear what or who pansori-influenced singer Yoon Sun Choi is addressing, if at all. More than a hint of franticness; squirrelly dissociation; Tower of Babel chatter from all points; quasi-baroque lockstep; ominous swells on the low end; cold spring desolation fried into 5G microwave shriek: does this feel vaguely familiar?

The album’s disorienting fourth number is just the composer on vocals and Joe McPhee’s trumpet, running through a maze of effects, challenging both themselves and the listener to find a calm center. The final, practically hourlong epic was recorded by most of the large ensemble here, bolstered by an online cast utilizing samples from the Kepler space telescope.

These melodies, created by the orbits of stars and planets millions of miles away, have a stately, gamelanesque quality that validates Johannes Kepler’s theories about celestial harmonies, but almost droll oscillations as well. Is humor implicit in the physics of planetary and solar mass? It would seem so. The musicians respond to those motives with a playful aplomb, bringing to mind Gil Evans as his most celestial as well as Anthony Braxton in galactically tectonic mode – as well as the most primitive video games.

The long liftoff sequence midway through is a lot of fun; the outer-space drift elsewhere is just as entertaining, while the increasingly pensive exchange afterward is a sobering reflection on our ultimate place amidst the dust of stars. This magnum opus has a lot to get lost in.

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Mighty Swing from Trombonist Ryan Keberle’s Big Band Living Legacy Project

Trombonist Ryan Keberle recently commented in the New York City Jazz Record that music educators like himself ought to spend more time figuring out how to get their students to find “the zone,” where they can improvise at the highest level. One way to do it was how Keberle did it at Hunter College last night with his Big Band Living Legacy Project, surrounding himself with a crew of big band jazz legends, many of whom had mentored him or inspired him to transcribe and learn solos they’d played on albums over the past several decades. With this group, Keberle spent most of his time conducting rather than soloing, but when he did – especially during his own luminous, Gil Evans-ish arrangement of Summertime, which he sheepishly told the crowd he’d decided to reinvent as a trombone feature – he very tersely and poignantly headed straight for “the zone” and stayed there. And no wonder. Who wouldn’t be inspired to take it to the next level, surrounded by the players onstage?

This is an amazing band. The show was mostly upbeat swing blues tunes, the majority from the Basie book, with a trio of numbers associated with Ellington along with boisterous, brass-fueled takes of JJ Johnson’s Say When, Thad Jones’ Big Dipper, Sy Oliver’s Looselid Special and the old Benny Goodman chestnut King Porter Stomp. Scott Robinson stood in for Goodman, as Keberle wryly put it, with his whirling clarinet and then his blues-infused tenor sax work. Baritone saxophonist Joe Temperley (of the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra) showed off a period-perfect, mile-wide tremolo on an achingly lyrical take of Ellington’s I Like the Sunrise, from the Iberian Suite. James Zollar delivered crescendos that ranged from sizzling to droll from behind his mute alongside his fellow trumpeters Bob Millikan, Earl Gardner and Greg Gisbert. Altoist Jerry Dodgion got a couple of soulful spots late in the show, up front in the sax section alongside Billy Drewes and Bill Easley.

Watching bassist Rufus Reid move from the simplest pedalpoint on the oldest numbers to a majestic stroll on the more recent material was a capsule history of big band jazz rhythm. Likewise, Carl Allen’s trip through beats from across the decades, from shuffles on the ride cymbal through more artful, unexpected ka-THUMP syncopation on the more blazing tunes, while pianist Alan Broadbent colored the songs with ambered blues tones and the occasional misty interlude way up in the highest octaves.

Bass trombonist Earl McIntyre – whose mighty gravitas anchored the Arturo O’Farrill band’s sensational show a week ago at the Apollo – drew plenty of laughs as he faked out the crowd with pregnant pauses in a romp through Thad Jones’ The Deacon, one of the Basie tunes. His fellow ‘bone guys Mike Davis and Clarence Banks also got time in the spotlight later on, no surprise considering who the bandleader was. The highlight of the set might have been a richly gospel-inspired take of Mary Lou Williams’ wickedly catchy Blue Skies. Or it could have been the majestic version of Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder, or the nimble, incisive run through Isfahan a few numbers later. With this kind of material and these kind of players, you just sit and sway in your seat and take it all in and remain grateful that you live in an era where people still play this kind of music – and pass it on to another generation.