Inzinzac Sat., Jan. 21, 8pm. $6. With Zvoov, Mi Head Ur Head. Angler Movement Arts Center, 1550 E. Montgomery Ave. 215.922.0866 www.museumfire.com
It’s not easy to categorize the raw, cerebral music of this trio, but “highbrow garage” is a start. The band name alone offers a kind of onomatopoeic clue. But what, really, is “Inzinzac”? Philly guitarist and composer Alban Bailly, originally from France’s Brittany region, named the trio after a small town where his brother lives. He and his partners, soprano/tenor saxophonist Dan Scofield and drummer Eli Litwin, cite progressive rock, free jazz and Balkan music among their myriad influences. If that doesn’t explain it, their 2011 High Two debut Inzinzac will. It’s raging stuff, with links to the music of Many Arms, Normal Love and others in Philly’s experimental underground. — David R. Adler
Yesterday was hard. About a hundred of us gathered for your memorial, and spoke of how you touched our lives in so many ways.
We are wounded. But even from where you are, you’re bringing people together. It was so good to connect with dear Julie, Jess, Angela, the gang from Rivington Street. And your mom and dad, and Charles. So many new friends, too, since we were together. It was inspiring to see, all these connections, all this love. They all probably felt the sorrow I felt on New Year’s 2012, the first day of the first year without you.
You and I met in late 1990, October I think. At a party on East 7th Street, not far from your memorial. And you became my first real love. We lasted until about April 1994 and the end was not easy, but it’s all in the past. What I’ll keep with me is the sunshine and the joy — your middle name. And the music.
At some point your mom came up to New York from Memphis for a visit, and the three of us were walking down East 7th (that street again). We passed by the little jazz club Deanna’s, and a band was playing “Monk’s Dream” by Thelonious Monk. You and your mom began singing the difficult melody, accurately. I’m thinking you first heard Monk through me, maybe I’m mistaken, but it wasn’t long before Monk became one of your favorite songwriters. Of course! You loved him enough to get your mom hooked too.
I took you to Bradley’s to hear Benny Green and Christian McBride, smoking piano and bass duo, way before McBride became a star. We went to hear Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra at the Village Vanguard. They played “N’kosi Sikeleli Africa,” the anthem of the African National Congress. John Stubblefield was in the band, Ray Anderson, Tom Harrell. You knew about Harrell’s struggle with schizophrenia, and you were awed by his triumphant trumpet solo. You were rhapsodic after the show, about how jazz is life-giving, transcendent in spirit, open to the humanity in everyone.
Remember the drive to Memphis? We started seeing confederate flags and scary knives in the gas station shops in Virginia, almost ran out of gas in the hills of West Virginia, picked up your dad and spent the night in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, before driving straight across Tennessee to your hometown. Visited the Lorraine Motel, site of King’s assassination. Then there was our Adirondack trip — fantastic sights, left the mountains for a bit and stumbled on Lake Champlain. Nothing on our agenda, so we hopped on the Port Kent ferry to Burlington, Vermont. The water was gorgeous, the sky dark gray on one side, pure sun on the other. Drove across Vermont to New Hampshire, spent a half-hour watching a moose (!) wade in a roadside creek, stayed in a crap motel with mirrors on the ceiling. We watched a brand new MTV show, “Beavis and Butthead,” and didn’t get it at all. (Later I became a zealous convert.) The next morning it rained, so we hit the road again for Montreal, the big city. I loved those travels with you.
We weren’t in close touch for a long time, but I got the wonderful news of your marriage to Charles, and the birth of your darling Lily. And much too soon after that, the evil, unfathomable news of your disease. And the accounts of your incredible and valiant fight. We messaged on Facebook for months about getting together with our daughters for a play date. I’m thanking heaven every day that we actually did it, around August 2010, the last time I would ever see you. I was about to teach my first course; you gave me great feedback and insight. Tess wasn’t walking yet, but Lily was rocketing around the playground at 18 months. You looked good, and as far as I could see you felt good. I spoke to Charles yesterday about future play dates. I want that to happen. I want to watch Lily grow and do her mother proud, and I know she will.
You insisted that your memorial include “Happier Than the Morning Sun” by Stevie Wonder. As we all sat and listened to the track, and watched photos of you float by on the screen, I thought back to those Rivington Street days. In that apartment with probably a half-dozen roommates, we had Stevie’s ’70s albums in constant rotation, a soundtrack to all our lives. I’ve been revisiting Stevie Wonder in recent years and learning a lot of his music on the guitar, but I’d never thought to study this one, so close to your heart. Getting home from your memorial, I cracked open my case and learned it right away. A far from perfect rendition, but then, you weren’t a believer in perfect. It’s my goodbye to you, Diana Joy.
Eldar Djangirov Fri., Jan. 13, 5pm. Free with museum admission. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and JFK Blvd. 215.763.8100.philamuseum.org
Great jazz pianists have emerged from hotbeds like Detroit and Philadelphia—and how about Bishkek, in the seldom-noted former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan? Eldar Djangirov is a young and fearsome player who landed a major-label deal at 17 and showed great poise and creativity on his 2005 debut, simply titled Eldar. Since then, he’s ventured into complex electric post-fusion with Re-Imagination and Virtue, but he hasn’t abandoned the acoustic sensibility at the heart of Eldar and the sophomore release Live at the Blue Note. His latest, the solo-piano keeper Three Stories, veers between jazz repertoire and treatments of Bach and Scriabin. It’s the work of a traditionalist in the best sense of the term. — David R. Adler
I’m back writing previews for Philadelphia Weekly — this week’s entry below…
Helena Espvall/Marcia Bassett Duo Sat., Jan. 7, 8pm. $6. With Fursaxa + Zaïmph. Highwire Gallery, 2040 Frankford Ave.museumfire.com
This ongoing series, curated by Fire Museum Records, has become a haven for local and visiting avant-gardists. To kick off 2012, the label welcomes Philly cellist/guitarist/vocalist Helena Espvall, whose music evokes the Arctic climes and austere expanses of her native Sweden. Marcia Bassett, of New York, brings a much freakier template of processed vocals and noise to the party. How will she play off of Espvall’s calm folkloric melodies and looped and layered legato cello? Only one way to find out. Tara Burke, another Espvall collaborator, is slated to appear with her Fursaxa project, and Bassett will venture a solo set under the moniker Zaïmph (a Flaubert reference). -David R. Adler
Ilhan Ersahin’s Istanbul Sessions Night Rider (Nublu)
By David R. Adler
As founder of the club Nublu, tenor saxophonist Ilhan Ersahin has had a notable impact on live music in New York, increasing the creative traffic between jazz improvisers, beatmakers, world music bands and avant-gardists of all stripes. Ersahin’s reach also extends to Istanbul and the nightspot Nublu Istanbul@Babylon, where jazz and club music come into contact with the sounds of Turkey and the surrounding region. The quartet project Istanbul Sessions is solidly representative of these efforts. It features the leader with Alp Ersönmez on electric bass, Izzet Kizil on percussion and Turgut Alp Bekoğlu on drums.
Ersahin has a rich and full tenor tone and good instincts as a soloist, but he’s not pushing to be the sole focus of these nine tracks. He plays through a variety of electronic effects, distorting and manipulating his sound and rendering the horn as an element in a sonic mosaic. Thanks to smart post-production and mixing, each instrument yields unexpected sounds, different ones on nearly every track. Yet the group’s previous effort, Istanbul Sessions with Erik Truffaz, featuring the renowned “nu-jazz” trumpeter, had a more alluring tonal and harmonic palette, and stronger compositions.
At a tight 40 minutes, however, Night Rider is a good listen, with vibrant beats and subtle interlocking patterns from Bekoğlu on full kit, punctuated by Kizil’s dumbek and frame drums. Ersönmez combines low bass lines with a more guitaristic and polyphonic approach, overdubbing a slick wah-wah part on the opening “Etnik” and starting his own composition “Gece Inerken” (“night descending”) with beautiful rubato fingerstyle passages. “One Zero” growls with distortion, while “Hadi Gel Artik” skips along with poppy syncopation and “Huzur” (“peace”) sounds like spacey but energized indie-rock. Is it Turkish? Somehow, yes, but this is music that wears its cosmopolitanism on its sleeve.
On releases such as Orange Blossom, Herculaneum III and Olives and Orchids, the Chicago sextet Herculaneum fashioned a sound full of urgent, percolating rhythm and well-placed dissonance — a horn-heavy aesthetic with echoes of Blue Note’s ’60s avant-garde wing. Their newest, UCHŪ, is true to form, with eight concise tracks held together by the powerful work of bassist Greg Danek and drummer Dylan Ryan.
While the Herculaneum lineup — four horns and rhythm section — remains big and compelling, UCHŪ lacks some of the timbral variation of the band’s earlier efforts. One misses the crisp guitar of John Beard and the occasional vibraphone of Ryan, which gave the group a moody chamber-jazz dimension. And yet other changes are afoot: for the first time, alto saxophonist David McDonnell, tenor saxophone/flutist Nate Lepine and trumpeter Patrick Newbery weigh in with original compositions (Ryan is normally the band’s sole composer).
“Dragon’s Office,” by McDonnell, starts the album in a springy 5/4, with snaky trombone/tenor unisons expanding into four-part voicings, lush yet wonderfully acidic. Danek bows the bass on the heavily African groove of “Elmyr” to mimic the squeaking percussion of a guica. On both these cuts McDonnell takes charge as a soloist; he returns with Dolphy-esque fire on Ryan’s “Little Murders” and Newbery’s heavy metal closer “Rumors.” Lepine’s tenor solos on “Chianti” and “Fern” also have a satisfying balance of logic and intensity. Broste’s moment comes on “Age of Iron,” a slow-swinging line by McDonnell, ideal for the lonely trombone rumination that continues as the track fades away.
Lepine’s “Fern” is the standout: unhurried, insistently grooving, with a thick harmonized horn passage that bookends the piece. Bass and drums play along the first time through, but in the final 30 seconds it’s the horns alone, laying bare the counterpoint’s nasty inner workings.
In a cheerful and loquacious introduction at Bar Next Door (Dec. 4), guitarist Peter Mazza announced his plan for the evening: arrangements of standards, reflecting a passion for rich and intricate harmony. Flanked by Marco Panascia on upright bass and Roggerio Boccato on a scaled-down percussion kit, Mazza quickly made clear that he is indeed a chord-hound. His treatments of “Skylark,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Someday My Prince Will Come,” “My Romance,” “Darn That Dream” and “Stella By Starlight” were packed with capricious chord-melody voicings, darting counterlines and written bass parts that Mazza and Panascia often played in unison. Even if the potential for guitar/bass muddiness was there, the sound remained light and nimble. Boccato saw to that with his dumbek, woodblocks and other accessories, which still allowed for a solid jazz feel on ride cymbal and brushes. Mazza got a clear and tailored sound from a Gibson archtop and played to Boccato’s strengths with Brazilian-inspired rhythms, waltzes and other spacious feels. The single-note solo passages were inventive, sparking empathic trio interplay, but ultimately Mazza’s pianistic block chords and bold contrapuntal devices were the most consistently absorbing part of this music. Never did his arrangements detract from the original melodies, or even the underlying harmonic logic that made these songs great. On “Stella,” the tour de force closer, one heard extravagance, but also simple good taste. (David R. Adler)
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Bassist Michael Bates, in a well-deserved showcase at Ibeam (Dec. 10), took charge with two contrasting yet intimately related lineups. He began with music from the new album Acrobat, performed by most of the original in-studio cast: Chris Speed on reeds, Russ Johnson on trumpet, Russ Lossing on piano/Wurlitzer and Jeff Davis (standing in for Tom Rainey) on drums. In a welcome twist, trombonist Samuel Blaser joined the Acrobat group as well (he also partnered with Bates as a co-leader in the second set, debuting a new quintet with tenor powerhouse Michael Blake). The Acrobat music, all inspired by or adapted from Shostakovich, rose to new imaginative heights with the third horn. Leading off with the Intermezzo from the Piano Quintet in G Minor, Speed played slow and high-pitched clarinet, summoning the lonely quality of the original violin line. Finishing with the Allegretto movement of the Piano Trio No. 2, the band dug in with a grinding beat and captured the work’s deep inner tension — its Russian-ness, if you will. Bates’ originals were full of improvised fire and sonic flux, with Lossing’s tweaked Wurlitzer adding jolts of electric post-fusion on “Silent Witness” and the uptempo “Strong Arm.” Johnson’s unaccompanied solo with mute on “Talking Bird,” hushed in volume yet full of unbridled urgency, was a thing of wonder. From the brash “Fugitive Pieces” to the legato balladry of “Some Wounds,” the music was unsettled, precise and poignantly lyrical all at once. (DA)
