Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Arcade's Collective Improvisation



Arcade
Improvised Music
Joe Morris, guitar
Pat Kuehn, bass
Andria Nicodemou, vibraphone
Jake Baldwin, trumpet

Sunday, April 14, 2013 4pm
Project Storefronts
756 Chapel Street
New Haven

On Sunday afternoon, I drove down from the west hills straight into 1971. In a storefront on Chapel Street, Joe Morris talked about the new music scene in the neighborhood since that time, vowing to keep it fresh with young, new excellent musicians with something to say. Gray longhair Joe Morris on guitar, and three young players on trumpet bass and vibes.
I soon felt I was listening to Chick Corea's Circulus, spacey, trippy clipped lines dancing in your head, virtuosic runs interspersed with noise. Bass fretted with a card under the strings to buzz and rasp. Vibraphones strummed with the stick end of the mallet, or bowed. Trumpet turned over, blowing into the bottom of the valve holes. Joe making classic avant-modern jazz runs, all incredibly of the moment, in the present, 2013.

The first piece could have been John Cage playing Carl Stalling's Looney Tunes melodies. The second piece started with a bowed bass solo, like a deep, in-tune Rochester sawing back nad forth. Joe jumps in clear and bright, polished in tone and line, beyond lightning fast. The pocket trumpet – just like Don Cherry used to play – starts screeling along the top, interrupting himself with Miles-like cold, echoing peels. The final touch, atmospheric vibes.

Vibes solo starts the next piece, a melodic theme. Phrases reminiscent of bebop hooks and old standards. Then the bass and trumpet mix it up. Joe adds neck-length runs while the bass player threads a long metal rod between the strings, sometimes scratching with it or just letting it dampen the notes he plucks. Vibist drops ping-pong balls on the keys, letting them bounce away. Joe frets a drone on his lowest string. The bass is exploring – high screeches and mid-range bowing while really bending the strings, pulling and yanking. Soon it becomes an all-out jam, a flood of notes. Joe goes all raspy, first by scraping his pick fast against the strings, next by slipping a card under his strings and finger picking.


After a break, the second set started with some percolating popcorn guitar sounds, then Joe scraping his strings with a raspy loop of a wire spring, and the bassist drumming his strings with the metal rod. More legacy of John Cage. Remember prepared piano? These musicians are preparing everything. There were times, after the ping pong balls, that the vibist bent down and played the vibe tubes hanging beneath the keys, hitting strumming with sticks and with a plastic credit card.

Anyone who has picked up an instrument has tried to make pure sounds, learning to fret and pluck a guitar string so it plays long sustained and clean without buzzing against the fret, or blowing pure notes from a horn instead of a raspy squawk. But modern artists in every idiom eventually break it down, deconstruct things so they aren't quite so “pretty” in paint, sculpture, and sound. The rock guys overdrive their tube amps so those clean tones get thick and fuzzy with texture. The avants, like the Art Ensembles of Chicago's Certain Blacks, “do what they wanna” making whatever kind of noise they can. It's not unique to this quartet. I've heard it at the Yale Music School and at Firehouse 12 and lots of other places, not defined by labels like jazz, or New Music. All parts of the instrument are fair game, not just the strings but necks and bodies of guitars, not just the skins but rims and sides of drums. And this is why I said it felt like Circulus – Chick Corea's quartet with Anthony Braxton, Dave Holland and Barry Altschul. Not the sound, but the feel. http://youtu.be/GrKGv142LuE 

After the show, I talked to Joe Morris about what he meant by the scene in the 70's – standing as we were in the original Goldie & Libro Music Center storefront. He talked about seeing Anthony Davis and Loren Mazzacane Connors, and otherwise long-forgotten performance spaces. We also talked about a outdoor show Real Art Ways show in the early 80's, Joe filling some gaps in my memory. The aptly named Firespitters, with Jayne Cortez and the band that did double duty those days as part of Ornette Coleman's Prime Time, Charlie Ellerbee and Bern Nix on guitars, her son Denardo Coleman on drums, and probably Al McDowell on bass. Here's her classic There It Is, with a slightly different lineup: http://youtu.be/G6bKgljhvR0
And more:
And this, which is what I heard that day in Hartford:

But just like Arcade, I digress. I've heard Jesse Hameen II describe jazz as a method of communication, and that applies to all of the above and especially Arcade. Communication is the core, among the players, with themselves and with the audience, in another language. It's not a new concept. Langston Hughes talked about Jazz as Communication in 1956. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/essay/237856 And it's not limited or defined by labels like jazz. Arcade was not billed as a jazz show. On Sunday afternoon they communicated, sounds coordinated with some looks and nods. These kids were young – at least 2 out of 3 are New England Conservatory of Music class of 2013, so they're half Joe's age – playing with the confidence and impetuousness of youth yet with the grace of ages.

Joe Morris plays Sunday 4/21 3pm at Real Art Ways with Stephen Haynes and Matt Maneri. Next week he's back in the neighborhood at Cafe Nine with his electric band Slobber Pup, which he described as the complete opposite of what we had just heard with Arcade, loud and electric. Tuesday 4/23 8pm. 
See you there.