My All Jazz Weekend

I'm still in the process of figuring exactly how I want to revamp this blog but in the meantime I wanted to get down my impressions of all the music I saw this weekend:

I retired from my job on August 29 and although I didn't plan it that way I ended up celebrating  after a fashion by seeing live music all this weekend, something I wouldn't have dared done while I was working.

Friday I went to a concert in  the Capitol Bop DC Jazz Loft series, something that's been going on for a couple of years but which I had never attended before at their home base in DC's Northeast market/warehouse district.  The lead performer was Todd Marcus, a bass clarinetist who plays that instrument with amazing facility and skill and led a quartet that also featured a fire-breathing saxophonist in Gregory Tardy.

The eye opener for me at that show though was the opening act, pianist Dwayne Adell who was amazing. Adell plays with astonishing speed and dexterity in a style that combines stride bass, classical ornamentation and gravity coming off like some mad cross between Art Tatum and McCoy Tyner.  His hands flew along the keyboard at 100 miles an hour with improvisations that seemed incredibly complex but always had weight, drive and logic to them.  Even more impressive he chose to do this on mostly standard fare like "Stella By Starlight" and a Jobim bossa nova from Black Orpheus. The man's playing was scary.

Saturday I went to the Rosslyn Jazz Festival, an outdoor event that usually comes up with one or two acts every year that I want to see.  This year the heat was so intense I couldn't hang for the whole show but I did manage to see Brian Carpenter's Ghost Train Orchestra,  a unit of New York players that plays the music of jazz bands from the 20's and 30's.  They dig deep into the repertoire unearting pieces by the likes of Tiny Parham, Fess Williams and Don Redman and play the work with modern panache and a touch of anarchy coming from banjo player Brandon Seabrook and a tuba player and violinist whose names I didn't catch.

On their most recent CD the orchestra went up the timeline a bit and played "novelty" pieces from the 30's and 40's by composers like Raymond Scott, Reginald Forsyth and Alec Wilder.  I was a little disappointed that they didn't pull out any of that work live but what they did play went down nicely.

That brings us to Sunday and a show I had been circling ever since I heard about it months ago, the

Laubrock and Rainey

Ingrid Laubrock Quintet at Bohemian Caverns.  Laubrock is a German-born player who spent a few years as part of the London scene before moving to New York.  I'd seen her twice before in groups led by Anthony Braxton and Kris Davis and was impressed both times by her mastery of all facets of the tenor saxophone.  Here she was the leader and her composing turned out to be ferocious as her playing.

The group consisted of herself on tenor sax, Tim Berne on alto sax, Ben Gerstein on trombone, Dan Peck on tuba and Tom Rainey on drums.  Laubrock's work uses a wide spectrum of sound ranging from high-pitched squeals to static low drones.  She often broke down the band into subunits of two or three with the two saxophones bubbling together or Gerstein blaring and roaring all over Rainey's endless carpet of rolling rhythms, something he created as often with his bare hands as his drum sticks.  Berne played lovely flowing lines with his usual energy,  Peck was constantly keeping the bass part going and Gerstein made hair-raising sounds, especially when he attached a reed to his trombone mouthpiece and made very un-trombone like wails,  but the most commanding figure was Laubrock herself.  She has a unqie way of playing that utilizes barks, whinnies and other wild sounds, sometimes even taking off the entire tenor mouthpiece and blowing right into the metal horn.  She particularly sounds simpatico with Rainey, who it so happens is her husband.  Their rattling and thumping sounded like a hailstorm.  Then in the middle of all that sturm und drang she laid back and played a stretch of lovely pure melody thsat sounded like the sun coming out after a downpour.

The first set was taken up completely by a suite that traveled all over the place and the second had some bits of time playing, ending up in a parade march rhythm playedjmostly straight by Rainey and the brass while the saxes flew around frantically throwing monkey wrenches into the groove.

Ingrid Laubrock is one of the most exciting composers and saxophonists around today and Tom Rainey is a criminally underrated drummer.

Braxton

You don't often get to say you've seen a genius perform, but just off the top of my head, I've done that four times.  Once was seeing Cecil Taylor's trio at Blues Alley several years ago and the other three have been performances by Anthony Braxton, two long ago in a quintet with the Rova Saxophone Quartet and a duo with George Lewis, and the third tonight at the Kennedy Center.

Braxton is one of the most celebrated and far-ranging figures in modern jazz/new music/what-have-you, a composer, player, and teacher who, over five decades, has pioneered the solo saxophone album, written for ensembles of every size and even composed operas.Tonight Braxton played DC's usually staid home of Official Culture with his Diamond Curtain Wall Quartet made up of the man himself on reeds of every size, Mary Halvorson on guitar, Ingrid Laubrock on saxophones and Taylor Ho Bynum on brass. They were brought there by pianist Jason Moran, the Center's forward thinking Artistic Advisor for Jazz who sat in with the group, making it a quintet.  I've heard Braxton recordings in many different settings but this was the first time I'd experienced the intricate ensemble music he's been making in recent years live. The show was amazing.

For this group Braxton starts by cueing up sound files on a laptop, then turning over an hourglass ("It helps us" he said to the audience) to start the performance.  The group then weaves over, under, around and through the computer sounds for the next seventy-odd minutes. Everybody in this group is an imaginative and experimental leader in their own right but they had no trouble in fitting right into Braxton's concepts.  Sometimes the horns shrank to whispers and barks, sometimes there were gorgeous bits of melody.  Halvorson, who studied under Braxton at Wesleyan University, would cut through the haze with heavy power chords and underscore the overall sound with delicate picking. Bynum, who has been releasing much of Braxton's recent large scale work on his Firehouse 12 label, barked, growled and smeared on cornet, various trumpets and even trombone.  Moran, who to my knowledge was new to this music, stayed in the game admirably, filling in rhythms behind the others and occasionally playing agitated free solos. Laubrock, another fairly new participant to this world, played forceful tenor, alto and soprano and added her own arsenal of vocalized sounds and squeaks. 

The leader himself was awesome to behold, playing everytihing in the sax family from a small sopranino to a huge contrabass instrument he wheeled into position on a tripod.  Braxton is so celebated as a theorist and composer today you forget that he is also a hellacious sax player and, though 67 years old, he was playing tonight as beautifully and intensely as he ever has.  He had a couple of solo passages on soprano that were so hair-raising they nearly had me screaming with joy. I kept my cool though because the audience stayed respectfully silent throughout the proceedings.

That silence seemed to be a good one.  The typical Kennedy Center audiences tend to prefer safer fare so I wondered how they would take to this wondrous madness. A few people did leave during the show but I'll give most credit. They stayed until the end.  A friend told me later that there were not a lot of the usual faces at this show so many people probably knew what they were in for. I'm sure there were a few Center regulars though who were exposed to something radically new tonight.  Hopefully the Center will continue to allow Moran to bring in "out there" masters like Braxton in the future.