Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares, the small non-profit dedicated to bringing extraordinary live music to western Massachusetts, achieved a high-water mark on October 17. Jason Robinson’s Ancestral Numbers quintet gave a spirited and technically brilliant display of music-making before a packed house at The Drake. Thursday’s event, featuring Robinson (tenor and soprano sax and flute), Michael Dessen (trombone), Joshua White (piano), Drew Gress (bass), and Ches Smith (drums), drew 175 listeners, the second most in the 13 year history of the organization.
Robinson is a Professor of Music at Amherst College, who joined the faculty as a visiting assistant professor in 2008. He has spent the last 16 years invigorating the local jazz scene, building bridges across stylistic and geographic divides. He has not only increased the amount of jazz activity at Amherst, he has laid deep roots where he lives, seeming to have interacted with every major improvisor in the Valley. Robinson is also a charter member of the Jazz Shares board of directors. He is a true home-town hero.
Many in the crowd were Amherst College colleagues of Robinson, including President Michael Elliott, Provost Martha Umphrey and a slew of faculty, staff and students. It was important for them to understand, if they didn’t already, that Robinson is an elite composer, instrumentalist and bandleader. Among the many other friends in the crowd was Michael Musillami, the guitarist and label owner of Playscape Records who released Robinson’s new recordings Ancestral Numbers I and II, and jazz scholar Ben Young, who recently moved to Holyoke. There was a lot of love in the room for Robinson.
The band, who performed as a quartet (minus Dessen) in Northampton in 2021, was embarked on a five date tour that took them to New York, Boston, New Haven and the greater Washington, DC. area. They played material from the two Ancestral Numbers discs, featuring compositions inspired by Robinson’s family history, in particular his grandmother, Ruby Annette Kilbury, who passed in 2022. The composer told us he was the latest (and last) in a line of eldest children born when their mothers were 17 years old going back to his great great grandmother.
Robinson and Dessen are long-time friends and formed the front line of the quartet Cosmologic during the first decade of the 21st century; they met in 1998 at UC San Diego where they were mentored by Anthony Davis and George Lewis. Dessen has taught at UC Irvine since 2006 and is currently chair of its music department. Robinson and Dessen are successful, engaged educators and world class performers/composers; they embody Aristotle’s dictum: “Those who can, do. Those who understand, teach.” Of course they nailed the impossible swing tempos of “Deployment”, grooved the backbeat of “Greyscale”, and breezed through the slinky contours of “Second House”. By the way, Robinson, a veteran of the roots reggae band Groundation, has produced a dub version of “Second House”.
While the demands of academia can make maintaining chops difficult, Dessen’s sound was rich and confident, his facility crisp, and his ability to read down complicated charts undiminished. I’ve been knowing Michael Dessen since the late 1990s when he was studying with Yusef Lateef at UMass, and became friends when he returned to the Valley in 2002 to teach at Hampshire College. I’ve gotten to witness some of his cutting edge forays into telematics or networked concerts, where collaborators in distant locations perform together in real time. Here is an excellent example of his work in this realm.
Pianist Joshua White lives in San Diego and doesn’t get east very often, which made his Amherst appearance even more special. I listen to a lot of pianists and there are very few that reach the heights White does. The crowd at the Drake agreed. His solos consistently generated the loudest yelps and most thunderous applause. When I talked with his bandmates about him the next day, they laughed and shook their heads at how talented he is. I remember getting the same reaction years ago from Vijay Iyer when talking about a little known drummer named Tyshawn Sorey. Hearing some of the best musicians in the world marvel at how off the charts White is, tells you all you need to know about his gift. He played with force, locking hands to add energy and using his dexterity to articulate well crafted runs of single notes. He deserved every minute of the ample solo space he was afforded.
The rest of the rhythm section is crème de la crème. Finding windows of time when both Drew Gress and Ches Smith are available is one of Robinson’s biggest challenges. I met Gress in 1995 when the Magic Triangle Jazz Series presented Tom Varner’s Quintet, and again in 2002 when he was part of Uri Caine’s genre-busting version of Bach’s “Goldberg Variations”. He has been a first call bassist for Tim Berne, Don Byron, John Abercrombie, Fred Hersch and Dave Douglas, among others, and has released a half-dozen projects as a leader. On more than one occasion Robinson has commented how Gress’s deep sound and unerring sense of time provides the ultimate security blanket.
Smith is simply one of the most active drummers and expansive musical minds working today. His last three releases as a leader on Pyroclastic Records (Laugh Ash, Interpret It Well, and Path of Seven Colors) are each wildly different and extremely ambitious, and he has greatly added to the bands of Marc Ribot, David Torn and Dave Holland. He was locked in all evening, playing just loud enough, while adding delicate accents on glockenspiel. Smith will make his Jazz Shares debut as a leader in September alongside Mary Halvorson, Liberty Ellman and Nick Dunston.
Being able to present a dear friend in concert before an adoring home-town crowd was a pleasure to produce. The confluence of good vibes in the room and the high level of music and musicianship is why we do what we do.
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