Darker Than Blue: Darius Jones’ Shades of Black at UMass

After the concert, when I had a chance to talk with Darius Jones about the project he brought to the UMass Magic Triangle Jazz Series, it all began to make sense.

The unrecorded project is called Shades of Black. Jones writes:

The music explores the partial or total absence of light, and the artistry within a dark spectrum. A lack of light can bring about feelings of uncertainty or fear of the unknown, causing some to perceive black or dark things as devoid of beauty and having a certain negative connotation… In the large black textured surface of Chiyu Uemae’s oil painting, ‘Untitled,’ I discovered how rich an environment absence of light could be. I found myself standing in front of the painting and asking, ‘What would this sound like?’

One hundred people inside the UMass Old Chapel on Thursday, October 25 got the world’s first glimpse of Jones’ answer. With the leader on alto saxophone, and Sam Newsome, soprano saxophone, Cooper Moore, organ, and Chad Taylor, drums, Shades of Black produced a 75-minute torrent, producing an intense wall of sound that elicited both exhilaration and distress among the crowd.

Last week, in reaction to the Hearts & Minds concert at the Shea Theater, one Amherst College student wrote, “I was frazzled and awestruck by the music.” That seemed to be a common reaction to Jones’ concert as well. The frazzled fled, while the awestruck were swept up in a vortex of permutating sound. “As you look into the black, you begin to see colors,” Jones told me afterwards. Sometimes I would listen to the music as one overwhelming mass of sound, but as I moved my concentration from one master musician to the other, I began to hear iridescence.

In 2008 I produced a project called Doom Jazz featuring Jaime Saft and Bobby Previte, which utilizes the dark, foreboding aesthetic of Doom Metal. Some people were quite frazzled by that one, too. But while the oppressively down-tempo heaviness of Doom Jazz settled on us like a fog, Shades of Black whacked us upside the head, infusing the room with a barely contained energy.

Since the effect was so intense so often, it was easy to forget that the band consisted of four fully realized creative souls, each playing intensely musical lines. During stretches when both saxophonists were circular breathing and playing multi-phonically and Cooper-Moore was laying forearms and dense chords on his keyboard, the sound was enveloping.

When I changed my focus and tried to discern what Sam Newsome was saying, I was astounded. His control, his references to early jazz styles and his originality, thrilled me. He attached balloons to his soprano; he inserted some tubing into his horn then blew; he used mutes and bells; at one point he played just his mouthpiece. I’ve heard others do that, but I’ve never heard anyone make more music doing it than Newsome. He said he played the Iron Horse decades ago with Terrence Blanchard, probably before he gave up the alto sax to devote himself to the straight horn. We have been in conversation about bringing him back to the Valley.

Drummer Chad Taylor is becoming a regular Valley visitor. He was in town with Hearts & Minds, and he’s coming to the 121 Club on December 14 to perform with tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis. My friend Jon King observed how calm Taylor looked and how relaxed he played while creating mountains of sound. In lieu of taking typical drum solos, he would feed the fire by pushing himself to the front of the rumble and letting loose.

Someone should make a movie or write a biography about Cooper-Moore. Charismatic and endlessly inventive, Cooper-Moore is an instrument maker, pianist, educator, and community organizer, who at 72, continues to influence the music and many lives within it. Jones called him a “unique individual” and told us that Cooper-Moore took him and Chad Taylor to Europe for the first time. At the Magic Triangle concert, he played his Korg keyboard through a Leslie cabinet, giving his sound a Hammond B-3 vibe, at one-third the weight.

In the New York Times, Giovanni Russonello wrote that Darius Jones is “the most visceral and distinctive alto saxophonist of this era.” That unique sound serves a first-rate musical mind, constantly on the look-out for new ideas to explore. He was just awarded a commission from Harvard’s Fromm Music Foundation, so watch out. Jones has previously worked in the Valley with Matthew Shipp at UMass and with Adam Lane and Jason Nazary at the Parlor Room. It’s very exciting for me to build relationships with people who are not only playing at the highest levels, but shaping the music in all its multi-hued splendor.

The Complicated Made Easy: Anna Webber’s Simple Trio at IMA

What happens when you combine evocative writing, instrumental mastery, and inspired imagination on one bandstand? On Saturday, October 20, Anna Webber’s Simple Trio gave us one convincing answer, providing 40 lucky listeners with entre into the musical world of one of the brightest jazz minds to emerge in the last decade. The 35-year old tenor saxophonist, flutist, and composer was joined by pianist Matt Mitchell and percussionist John Hollenbeck. Together they constructed a complex universe of sounds that occupied a sweet spot where composition and improvisation melt into music that moves souls.

The concert in the rustic, well-equipped barn at the Institute for the Musical Arts in Goshen was sponsored by Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, which has hosted three (very different) trios to begin Season Seven. As befits someone awarded a 2018 Guggenheim for music composition, Webber brought sheet music galore. But fear that the results would be academic or dry were quickly put to rest. Elaborate compositions, yes. A formalism that comes from reading, yes. The virtuosity we expect from classical musicians, yes. But this music also had personality and quirk, it had energy, and it swung. In fact, many of her pieces were built on complicated rhythmic figures that had a driving momentum.

Saturday’s concert was their second in a five-city tour. They had one rehearsal before their first show in Montreal. At least half of the pieces performed were new, from Webber’s numbered “Idiom” series. Although Mitchell and Hollenbeck had the music in advance, the level of execution on their third try was more than impressive. There are not that many musicians who can navigate that level of complexity and infuse the music with such life.

The great John Hollenbeck, who in recent years has performed in the Pioneer Valley with his Claudia Quintet and his Large Ensemble, as well as with Tony Malaby’s TubaCello, has lived in New York, Berlin and Montreal. Webber has also lived in those cities, but only at the Jazz Institute Berlin, where Hollenbeck taught and Webber studied, did they co-locate. Hollenbeck was an exacting technician, and when appropriate, used two tables worth of little percussion to chatter and create mess. For Webber to have her endlessly creative mentor in her band must feel very good.

At the post-show reception, Hollenbeck talked about Russell Black, his early mentor in Binghamton, NY, a rigorous teacher who insisted his students be able to read music. As head of the local musician’s union, Black would funnel a variety of jobs to his young drummer. Playing experience with polka bands, the circus, and jazz gigs, added to a first-rate education.

One can easily understand why Matt Mitchell is a valued member of the bands of Tim Berne, Dave Douglas, Dan Weiss, Jonathan Finlayson, Steve Coleman, Kate Gentile, Mario Pavone, Ches Smith and Dave King. He was glue, sticking landing after demanding landing, nailing oddly shaped melodies and idiosyncratic ideas as if he’d been playing them for years.

There were no solos in the conventional sense, just passages where one or the other musician would be foregrounded. As a result, it was the compositions that took center stage. They were each highly individual pieces, with intricate twists and distinct turns. The degree of difficulty was off the charts, but made to look easy by these masterful artists. The improvising on these tunes made clear how thoroughly they inhabited the written material.

After the concert I asked Webber how the Simple Trio got its name. Her chuckle acknowledged the obvious irony: the music was anything but. Turns out the first of her two recordings (both on Chris Speed’s Skirl label), was called Simple, and the name stuck. While predicting success in a field as precarious as creative music is a fool’s errand, Anna Webber seems destined for great things. I have to believe her Simple Trio will be a big part of it.

Hearts & Minds Dance in Turners Falls

Hearts & Minds is a good name for the trio that performed at this season’s second Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares concert on Saturday, October 13. The music made by Jason Stein, bass clarinet, Paul Giallorenzo, keyboards, and Chad Taylor, drums, appealed to both body and brain, confirming what non-Westerners have known for millennia: that the separation between mind and body represents a false dichotomy. Their Shea Theater performance engaged all facets of what makes humans human.

Featuring music from their brand-new release, Electroradiance, the Chicago-based ensemble ripped through an 80-minute set that included long stretches of funk and groove-based playing over which some very modern sounds were laid.

“Splatter and squawk meet slithering keyboard riffs,” is how Ben Remsen described their music in the Chicago Reader. With Giallorenzo’s left hand laying down the law on synth bass and Taylor sub-dividing infectious beats with the ease of an Olympian, the music was rooted in an earthy swing. That freed Giallorenzo’s right hand to color and smudge, or play unison heads with Stein on his e-pianet. For his part, Stein improvised across stylistic decades and myriad moods, employing a full range of honks, double-tonguing, tone-splitting and other extended techniques, along with a rich, mahogany sound as warm as fine sherry.

It’s not often I present a concert that so closely follows the contour of a recording, down to the order of the pieces. But the compositions, by each of the members, were so catchy, and so memorable, that the formula was quite welcome. My subsequent dive into the CD (also released on cassette by the fabulous Austin, Texas-based label, Astral Spirits) confirms the magnitude of the accomplishment.

Although there was plenty of density and swirling cacophony throughout the evening, I kept thinking how accessible these songs would be to a young, Indie-pop listening audience. Perhaps that’s not so surprising given the age of the musicians (early to mid-40s), the ready ways the Chicago rock and jazz scenes rub shoulders (Taylor has toured with Iron & Wine,) and the skills Stein developed playing to large arena-size audiences, opening for his sister, comedian Amy Schumer.

It’s all about understanding hooks, things that stick in the mind; appreciating the importance of melody, little phrases, snippets of sound we end up humming. Hearts & Minds gets it. Stein’s “Frencher Frosty’s Book,” which came roughly half-way through evening (track 5), was a beautiful, open-hearted anthem that welled me up.

Giallorenzo’s four compositions all had that certain something. In his band GitGo, his memorable lines fit largely within the hard bop world. With Hearts & Mind, Sun Ra, Larry Young and Hermeto all figure.

We happened to be listening to Hermeto at my house before the performance. Chad Taylor told us about a chance airport meeting he had with the brilliant Brazilian musician, whom Taylor admired but did not know. Hermeto wrote some music on a napkin for him, which sat in his pocket for a long time. When he found it sometime later, Taylor was blown away. His composition, “Hermeto,” based on those napkin notes, is found on Boca Negra, a recording by the hugely influential Chicago Underground Duo, a band Taylor co-founded with Rob Mazurek.

Taylor related another tale from that airport encounter: Hermeto told Taylor that in the late 1960s, he would follow Miles Davis everywhere around New York. One day, Davis finally talked to him, asking if he could box. Hermeto, cross-eyed from birth, said sure. In the ring, Davis was having his way with the ill-prepared neophyte when Hermeto landed a haymaker. Next thing you know, he was asked to join the band. Hermeto appears on and contributed three tunes to Live/Evil (1971.)

That storytelling ability, which many jazz artists possess, translates to the stage, where the trio wove an exuberant narrative about the joys of taking risks and the triumph of beauty. Our Jazz Shares concert was the third of ten celebrating the release of their new recording. I’m sure while the song’s details changed from night to night, the impact on hearts and minds remained.