Possible Music
Vivek Narayanan
to the rules of the set in BRIC Studio’s experimental series, Possible
Fireworks, a
well-known innovative musician is invited to pick a band of people that she or
he admires but has never played with before, tune up with them a little, then
play. It ought to be a terrifying thought, to have to arrive on stage and form
something solid and legitimate out of thin air, to the scrutiny of a paying
audience; the series makes explicit what is already an established tradition of
“see what happens” in avant-garde jazz, but must continue be an edgy experience
for its participants. If you were, like Janine Nichols, the curator of such a
series, you’d start by picking musicians who would in turn pick musicians who
were so highly skilled and experienced they would never misstep under pressure,
but even then you’d have to take a chance on how willingly and ably they might
communicate.
In fact,
the same quality that makes experimental improv music often exhilarating and
unrepeatable is also what can sometimes make it unreliable or, worse, too
predictable.
Luckily,
the first Possible Fireworks jam, led by cellist Jane Scarpantoni, began okay,
and then slowly got to be very, very good: when a show features experimental
cello playing, you really can’t go too far wrong. Roy Nathanson played sax,
Stomu Takeshi played fretless bass guitar, and John Hollenbeck drums. The star
of the show was surely Nathanson, its most decorated member, founder of the Jazz
Passengers; who
played his horn with great seriousness and a stunning array of different moods
and ideas. Scarpantoni herself was a solid and strongly felt anchor, now
bowing, now picking, drawing her ideas, in at least one luminous solo, from
traditional West African melodies. The two of them could have carried the show
by themselves and, indeed, it took a cello-sax duet mid-way through the first
set before the group as a whole really started to cohere. Takeshi was a
trickster figure who doled out blips and bloopers on his bass, incorporated
theatre and monkeying around, and worried us by slowly crushing the shards of a
plastic bottle with his bare feet at the beginning of the first set. As you
might guess from this description, he was nice to have around, but also
occasionally too distracting, almost a one-trick pony. Hollenbeck, on the other
hand, was virtuosic but perhaps a little too eager to please. Nevertheless, the
musicians were able to give the music many surprising turns, much beyond the
kind of paint-by-numbers, deliberately hysterical jazz improv one too often
encounters and, by the last piece they were conjuring some truly unusual
textures. It made me feel happy to have a genuine community space like BRIC
(with a glass factory upstairs for character) and a continuing series of events
that could turn out to be memorable. The next Possible Fireworks
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’> bill includes the legendary Peter
Apfelbaum.
