Guitar Advances in Holyoke: Brandon Seabrook

Over the years, I’ve been honored to present solo concerts by some of the world’s most outstanding jazz guitarists, including Marc Ribot, Fred Frith, James ‘Blood’ Ulmer and Elliott Sharp. But the November 20 concert at Holyoke Media featuring Brandon Seabrook now occupies a special place in my pantheon.

The technical display was dazzling, breathtaking even. Moments of astoundment, sometimes grounded in provocation, sometimes bathed in beauty, flowed into one another, as Seabrook danced across his fretboard at impossible speeds. But it wasn’t only the prodigious proficiency that wowed us, as impressive as that was. It was his playful approach and fearless attitude that made the concert so memorable.

Peter Margasak nailed it in 2017 when he wrote of Seabrook’s, “complex, idea-packed instrumentals with wildly shifting time signatures, rapid-fire chord changes, sinister riffing, and characteristically spastic solo explosions”. Wednesday’s 60-minute recital was as exhausting as it was exhilarating.

This was the 13th concert Seabrook has played since his new solo recording, Object of Unknown Function (Pyroclastic Records) dropped last month. For each of these solo concerts, he told me, he covers the same material in the same order, with lots of room for improvising, of course. In fact, he does the same thing for all his bands: every concert in a particular tour has the identical set list. The better to fully explore the possibilities within each composition, I suppose.

He played material from the new record, which is full of overdubbed guitar and banjo parts. On Wednesday he stuck exclusively to his 1998 Jerry Jones Neptune 12-string guitar. But nothing felt missing. With the help of various pedals and effects, Seabrook coaxed a universe full of sounds and textures from his instrument. Without resorting to loops, he created the illusion of multiple performers.

He told the 30 of us smart enough to show up, that the music he composed and performed was inspired by this particular 12-string guitar. He joked that the next time he was invited he’d just play banjo. (I might just take him up on that.)

Seabrook grew up near Gillette Stadium in Foxbrough, MA, about 20 miles south of Boston. Some of his older musician friends went to UMass, so while still in high school he’d come out to western Mass on weekends to play house parties and other assorted gigs. So even though the last time Seabrook performed in the area was in 2019 with Tomas Fujiwara’s Triple-Double, he has spent time in the Valley and knew his way around. One of those UMass friends, Kevin Delano, made the trip from Attleboro with his wife and son. For Kevin and his cohort, Seabrook is like the sandlot teammate who made it to the pros. He was demonstrably proud and marveled at Seabrook’s intrepid instincts and mind-boggling dexterity.

Seabrook has a well-developed sense of humor. At his insistence, his vocal mic had lots of reverb on it. He mused what it would be like to have that be his voice at home. “No” he bellowed into the microphone, followed by a much meeker “yes”. The titles of his pieces: “Historical Importance of Eccentricity”, “Perverted by Perseverance”, “Gawk Fodder”, “Some Recanted Evening”, reflect his whimsical nature. Here is his piece “Gondola Freak”. When he played it in Holyoke, he dedicated his performance to Jazz Shares Vice President Priscilla Page and yours truly.

Seabrook, now 40, is becoming an essential member of a generation of forward-thinking wunderkinds; he’s already collaborated with many of them. His trio with Cooper-Moore and Gerald Cleaver has produced two fantastic releases on Astral Spirits. His 2023 Pyroclastic release, brutalovechamp, written for octet, “demonstrates Seabrook’s remarkable abilities as a composer and conveys the breadth and imagination of his palette,” writes Stuart Broomer.

Seabrook’s virtuosity as a string player is firmly established, and his composing and bandleading skills are fast catching up. Like half of the artists we present these days, Seabrook now lives in Brooklyn, not so far from us here in western Massachusetts. We look forward to seeing his development up close in the years ahead.

New Friends Appear: Arun Ramamurthy Trio at The Blue Room

The confluence of Indian music and jazz has a rich history that extends in many directions. Back in the day, artists like Yusef Lateef, John and Alice Coltrane were interested in Indian music, while composer John Mayer was seriously exploring the melding of these two immense musical worlds. In the recent past, Badal Roy, John McLaughlin’s Shakti, L Subramaniam, Trilok Gurtu and Zakir Hussain have all contributed to the integration of Indian music and jazz.  Today, musicians like Rudresh Mahanthappa, Debashish Bhattacharya, Arun Ghosh and Sunny Jain continue to move the needle in all quadrants. Add violinist Arun Ramamurthy’s name to this list.

Ramamurthy’s Trio, featuring electric bassist Damon Banks and drummer Sameer Gupta, performed a Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares concert on November 9 before a full house at the Blue Room at CitySpace in Easthampton, MA. Touring in support of their recent Greenleaf recording, New Moon, the Trio supplied a much needed respite from recent unsettling election news.

The “New Moon Suite”, which formed the backbone of both the concert and the recording, was composed by Ramamurthy with support from a Chamber Music America New Jazz Works grant. Like Jason Robinson’s compositions for his “Ancestral Numbers” project which Jazz Shares produced last month, the inspiration for “New Moon Suite” comes from a beloved maternal grandmother.

Ramamurthy’s music brought us many places. There is a mournful, blues-like thread that weaves its way through much Indian music. There were parts of “Aaji”, named for his grandmother, and “Sri Valli”, which concluded the evening, where plaintive melodies were bent in sorrow song. “Amavasya” had a powerful backbeat and a funky refrain, perhaps not surprising from a composer raised on A Tribe Called Quest and Radiohead. The music had open sections filled with indeterminate rhythms and harmonies, but in the main had well-defined contours, anchored by the brilliant efforts of Banks and Gupta.

The Arun Ramamurthy Trio is a real band; they inhabited the material as if they had each wrote it. That cohesion is the result of long shared history and a number of live concerts since this music debuted in 2022. Ramamurthy and Gupta go back to 2006 and are co-founders of Brooklyn Raga Massive,  a progressive genre-bending collective of musicians rooted-in and inspired-by the classical music of India. Ramamurthy and Banks have shared history in Adam Rudolph’s GO: Organic Orchestra. Brooklyn Raga Massive is featured with GO: Organic on the outstanding 2019 release, Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas. This 30-piece juggernaut performed the last Magic Triangle Jazz Series concert at UMass in April, 2022. Ramamurthy, however, had COVID at the time and missed the date.

After living in New York for over 15 years, Gupta moved his family back to his hometown in the SF Bay area a few years ago to care for parents. Ramamurthy is reluctant to use other drummers in the Trio, which means they have to be strategic about scheduling work. Gupta, who is also an accomplished tabla player, told me about his relationship with pianist Marc Cary, whom he called “family”. When Cary recruited him to be a member of his Focus Trio almost 20 years ago, he went to the Gupta home to assure his parents that allowing Sameer to move to New York would advance his musical career. Gupta, who has also worked with Grachan Moncur III, Sonny Simmons and the poet Sekou Sundiata, was masterful, precisely tossing off double and triple time figures with ease. His unaccompanied solo towards the end of the concert elicited a rousing response from the throng of 100.  

Like his bandmates, Damon Banks is engaging and kind. His role was as essential to the sound of the Trio as Aston Barrett’s was with the Wailers. He provided ballast for Ramamurthy’s sailing violin, and with judicious use of pedals and effects, created drone-like sound beds for the band’s soaring discourse. Born and raised in the Bronx and educated at the High School of Music & Art and Fisk University, Banks has provided services for artists ranging from George Benson and Arto Lindsay, to Hassan Hakmoun and Angelique Kidjo. He will be back in the area on March 8 performing with Aaron Shragge’s Whispering World, and will be tagging along on January 4 when his wife, the violinist Gwen Laster, brings her New Muse4tet to Springfield.

The New Moon Suite is a meditation on multiculturalism. Studying South Indian Carnatic music while growing up in New Jersey, Ramamurthy had one foot in two very different musical cultures. “It was Aaji who reminded me that there was only ONE me,” Ramamurthy writes in the liner notes. “That there actually are no lines.” That oneness permeated the music we heard on Thursday. Ragas, spiritual jazz, the vast openness of the avant-garde, the funk of urban America, were all clearly present, happily co-existing in one organic form.

The Arum Ramamurthy Trio was at Next Stage Arts in Putney, VT on October 18, and performed at the Iron Horse in late September, as part of the Northampton Jazz Festival. I was glad Festival organizers Ruth Griggs, Paul Arslanian and Carol Abbe Smith, who were so busy running around that day they didn’t get to hear the Trio, were in the house and able to sit with the music. For all of us, it was a balm for battered souls.

Love Fest: Jason Robinson's Ancestral Numbers in Amherst

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.