Real Time Dynamics: Josh Sinton’s Predicate Trio

In John Corbett’s handy book, A Listener’s Guide to Free Improvisation, the Chicago writer and producer talks at length about “interaction dynamics,” advising us to pay attention to how musicians engage with one another in performance. When players are freely improvising, the usual signposts: steady rhythm, conventional harmony, melody, are missing or obscured. The juicy part, the thing that makes this music so special and so different from other types of music, is the lack of prearrangement. Because they are making it up as they go along, improvisers must listen deeply to their partners and be comfortable interacting in different ways on multiple levels.

Josh Sinton’s Predicate Trio: Christopher Hoffman, cello, Tom Rainey, drums, and the leader on baritone saxophone and bass clarinet, had some serious interaction dynamics going on Sunday, February 24 at the Northampton Center for the Arts, courtesy of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares.

Although there was composed material, like “A Dance”, “Bell-ell-ell-ell-ells” and “Propulse,” that was tuneful and swung like mad, most of the 70-minute set had an open quality that emphasized spontaneous, non-idiomatic improvising by three accomplished instrumentalists.

The Trio’s recent Iluso release is called, making bones, taking draughts, bearing unstable millstones pridefully, idiotically, prosaically, which Sinton made acrostically from the nine track titles. The band used Sinton’s bare compositions to create sound worlds with distinct colors. There were small delicious moments when a single instrument filled the room, and other times when one musician would drop out, letting us eavesdrop on a dialogue. But what I focused on much of the time was how the three would share the spotlight, continually moving from background to foreground, and back again. Supporting each other, bringing up new topics, kibitzing, commenting, commanding attention with an unusual sound.

Tom Rainey is calm behind the kit (he’s from California,) but has a restless energy that has served bandleaders like Tim Berne, Nels Cline, Tony Malaby, and Ingrid Laubrock well. After years of service as a valued side man, in 2010 he started his own band, a trio with Laubrock and Mary Halvorson. They appeared at the Institute for the Musical Arts two years ago. On Sunday he was unfussy and just loud enough. His time was perfect. “He’s like the Fred Astaire of the drums,” Sinton said.

“I first met Chris before he started working with Henry Threadgill,” Sinton said, “and I loved his playing right away, its clarity, musicality and avoidance of cleverness for its own sake.” Hoffman is also a film maker and has worked with Yoko Ono, Iron & Wine, Ryan Adams, Marc Ribot and Anat Cohen, and played in the musical Spring Awakening. Over dinner, his description of life in a Broadway pit band was a rude awakening. The fact he’s been a member of Threadgill’s inner circle since 2011 tells you all you need to know about his musical IQ.

Josh Sinton is deservedly gaining reputation for his double-barrel baritone saxophone and bass clarinet playing. His Steve Lacy-inspired project, Ideal Bread, which was part of season one of Jazz Shares, remains one of my favorite contemporary ensembles. His work with Nate Wooley’s Quintet is also noteworthy. Sinton’s keen intelligence and prodigious technique serves a sly humor and a fearless approach to improvising. The 75 of us bearing witness to the performance were forced into fearlessness, too.

“I feel strongly that free improvisation will eventually be seen as one of the great contributions of Western society to world culture,” Corbett writes at the end of his field guide, “on par with cubism’s introduction of multiple-point perspective or abstraction’s renewed attention to materiality and plasticity over observation and representation. What those early twentieth-century artistic concepts opened up in terms of image, vision and form, improvised music has cracked open in terms of time…Improvised music has contributed something deeply profound to the world, a new way of thinking about sound and space and temporal experience and personal interaction.”

Josh Sinton’s Predicate Trio cracked us open a little bit so we could think in new ways about time and personal interaction. As Albert Ayler reminds us, “Music is the healing force of the universe.”

The Open Asking Hand: Matt Wilson’s Honey and Salt

Using typical yardsticks, Matt Wilson is one of the premier drummers in jazz. He’s been voted Musician of the Year, been awarded Album of the Year, graced the covers of leading jazz magazines, won polls; he works constantly and shares bandstands with the world’s leading musicians. But what makes Wilson so special within the jazz community is the joy he spreads wherever he goes.

Wilson’s Honey and Salt ensemble performed in the UMass Old Chapel on Wednesday, February 6, as the Magic Triangle Jazz Series continued its 30th season. Within the last five years, Wilson has lost his wife, Felicia, and his brother, Mark, and is raising his four teenage children. But those travails have not diminished the ebullience of the drummer or his music. During both an afternoon UMass workshop and on stage that night, Wilson inspired and entertained while making everyone in his presence feel like a valued friend.

Wilson has the witty, down-home know-how of the poet Carl Sandburg, the instigator for Honey and Salt. They were born a town apart in west-central Illinois, are distantly related, and share a straight-forward unstuffiness that is charming and disarming. Both are media savvy, prodigiously talented, and love jazz.

The concert, which featured the poetry of Sandburg set to music by Wilson, followed the contour of his celebrated 2017 Palmetto recording. The lynchpin of the project is singer and guitarist Dawn Thomson, whose gorgeous voice gave life to the words. Elsewhere during the 75-minute set, Priscilla Page, Marty Ehrlich, John Sinton, Michael Schurter and yours truly recited short poems.

The music was exuberant, elegiac, and accessible. As Wave Follows Wave, (“As wave follows wave, so new men take old men’s places”) is also the title of Wilson’s 1996 debut album featuring Dewey Redman, Larry Goldings and Cecil McBee. It unfurled as a lovely dirge featuring the brushed flugelhorn of Nadje Noordhuis and acoustic bass guitarist Martin Wind. We Must Be Polite, with its Fats Domino-like groove, included an Ayler-inflected tenor saxophone solo by Jeff Lederer. Offering and Rebuff (“I could love you as dry roots love rain. I could hold you as branches in the wind brandish petals. Forgive me for speaking so soon,”) would have sounded right at home in a Nashville night spot. Choose (“The single clenched fist lifted and ready. Or the open asking hand held out and waiting. Choose: For we meet by one or the other,”) was delivered as an impish march. Fog, (“The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over city and harbor on silent haunches and then moves on,”) perhaps Sandburg’s most famous line, featured a recorded reading by the poet, in synced dialogue with the drums.

The poems were simple, profound, well integrated into the music and easily understood by the 125 attendees. All praise to Thomson, the readers, quality microphones, and sound engineer Sam Johnson.

Although Honey and Salt is a distinctly American project, three-fifths of the band was born elsewhere. Thomson, who spent a summer studying with Ted Dunbar at UMass’ Jazz in July, is from Montreal. Noordhuis, who was subbing for Ron Miles, has been through the Valley a few times with Maria Schneider’s Orchestra; she’s from Sydney, Australia. Wind, one of Wilson’s longest-standing collaborators, is from Flensburg, Germany. Together with the Los Angeles-born Lederer, also a veteran Matt Wilson bandmate, the group inhabits the music like a well-worn farm tool.

There is a rich history of jazz and poetry interacting in performance, from the Harlem Renaissance, to the Beats, to hip-hop. In 2016, the Magic Triangle Series hosted the world premiere of “Wild Lines”, Jane Ira Bloom’s work using the poems and letters of Emily Dickinson. Bloom and Wilson both embarked on their projects after winning Chamber Music America New Works grants. Honey and Salt will be added to the small but growing list of multi-disciplinary masterpieces. We got to see it live, in person.

Rockin’ Gateway: The Makanda Project featuring Michael Gregory Jackson

A homecoming for guitarist and vocalist Michael Gregory Jackson and a return Valley engagement for the Boston-based Makanda Project came together to rock Gateway City Arts in Holyoke on Saturday, January 26 as Season 7 of Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares rolled on.

The guitarist, who has reclaimed his last name after dropping it years ago, lived in the Valley for decades, and there were lots of old friends among the 130 people transfixed by some powerful, blues-drenched music. I suspect Jackson also made more than a few new friends over the course of the evening.

The 13-piece Makanda Project was founded in 2005 by pianist and arranger John Kordalewski to expand the legacy of the Boston-born, internationally-recognized reed player and composer, Makanda Ken McIntyre (1931–2001.) They gave a riveting Jazz Shares concert at the Springfield Community Music School in 2014. In recent years they have begun to reach out to a few special guests such as Ricky Ford to collaborate with the ensemble. Concerts this spring in Roxbury, featuring Marty Ehrlich and Chico Freeman, are on tap. Long-live the large ensemble.

Over his 40-year career, Jackson has had one foot in the avant-garde jazz world (Wadada Leo Smith and Oliver Lake are two long-time associates), and one foot in pop/singer songwriter territory. Kordalewski used Duke Ellington’s oft-cited phrase, “beyond category” to describe Jackson’s place in the music. Even so, I was unprepared, but very pleased, that the program contained so much blues.

On Jackson originals such as “Heart and Center” and Ku-umba Frank Lacy’s “Settegast Strut”, I heard echoes of Magic Sam blowing over a horn section, full of funk, jump blues, and that great wail. The evening closed in dramatic fashion as all of the horns: Paavo Carey, Jason Robinson, Charlie Kohlhase, Kurtis Rivers and Sean Berry (saxophones), and Haneef Nelson, Ku-umba Frank Lacy, Alfred Patterson, Bill Lowe and Jerry Sabatini, (brass), left the stage to wind through the crowd towards the end of Jackson’s “Blue Blue”, leaving the excellent rhythm section, John Lockwood (bass), Yoron Israel (drums), Kordalewski and Jackson alone on the dais. It was a joyful, life-affirming moment.

What made things even more exciting was the creative riffing of horns behind Jackson’s solos. Often, baritone saxophonist Charlie Kohlhase, bass trombonist Bill Lowe or Kordalewski would increase intensity by conjuring odd little figures for their mates to play while Jackson tore it up. Excitement was further amplified by consistently excellent horn solos. Typical blues bands allot highly prescribed 8 to 16 bar solos for instrumentalists. Because the Makanda Project is populated by accomplished jazz musicians, individual statements transcended the perfunctory, adding fervor and a surfeit of interesting ideas.

Jackson’s two other original compositions, “Just Another Day” and “We Are”, featured dulcet vocals from the New Haven-born guitarist, providing beautiful sonic respite from the extroverted drive of the rest of the offerings. That I could clearly hear the lyrics was a testament to both the sensitivity of the band and the engineering acumen of sound man Jared Libby.

The evening’s penultimate piece, McIntyre’s “Spectrum”, provided a welcome cacophony. The tricky head quickly gave way to a jarring slab of sound that pinned us to the back wall. After spending all evening in a feel-good place, the dissonant energy was oddly refreshing, invigorating even.

Kudos to John Kordalewski, who despite current trends and against all odds, has managed to keep a top-level big band together for over a decade, while spreading the gospel according to Makanda.