Jon Irabagon Quintet: Talent + Inspiration

When you are supremely talented and can scale any technical challenge, the trick is to not hide behind your skill but to create meaningful work that moves people. The members of the Jon Irabagon Quintet: Irabagon (bass saxophone), Peter Evans (trumpet), Matt Mitchell (piano), Chris Lightcap (electric bass) and Dan Weiss (drums), are savants who can play anything on their instruments. But they are also musical, by which I mean they convey emotion and capture the imagination.

On November 23, these five geniuses did just that, impressing 65 patrons of the arts at the Community Music School of Springfield. The concert was the culmination of a mini-tour that included a Brooklyn gig at Ornithology Jazz Club, a concert and a recording session at Firehouse 12 in New Haven, and the Pioneer Valley Jazz Shares concert in Springfield, MA, all supported by a Chamber Music America New Jazz Work commissioning grant.

There was plenty of technical dazzle on display. The new book of Irabagon compositions was demanding. With the exception of a beautiful ballad, the pieces were fast, intricate, quirky and swinging. There are not many musicians on the planet with the chops to ace difficult material at such a very high level, but we saw five of them on Sunday.

Nate Wooley was supposed to play trumpet, but a lip problem forced him to bow out. Another super human trumpeter, Peter Evans, jumped in with two weeks’ notice and just nailed it. Wooley’s absence, however, eliminated some poetic symmetry: the bass saxophone Irabagon used belonged to Wooley’s father, who played saxophone and repaired instruments in Nate’s home town of Clatskanie, Oregon. About three years ago, Irabagon flew to Oregon, bought a few saxophones from Mr. Wooley and drove them back to Chicago. In fact, because the bass saxophone is so massive (6 feet tall and 19 pounds), flying with one is near impossible, so he drove the 12 hours from his home in Chicago to the northeast for these gigs.

Irabagon played the big horn exclusively. Throughout his career, the 46-year old saxophonist has often devoted entire albums to one instrument. He has produced all tenor, alto, soprano, sopranino and soprillo releases, and one expects to hear his bass saxophone record in the next year or so. For these old ears, the low frequency of the horn made certain unison passages hard to pick out, but Irabagon’s clear articulation mitigated the problem. I can only imagine the subterranean frequencies of the contrabass and the subcontrabass saxophones (one and two octaves lower than what we heard.)

This band has lots of shared experience. The Quartet (minus trumpet) has been an item since 2010 when they released, Beyond This Point. We heard the group when they played a live streamed concert at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke on April 18, 2021. Irabagon and Peter Evans go back to 2003, when the iconoclastic quartet, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, first formed. They make one of the most impressive front-lines in the present era.

The rhythm section was a joy to listen to. Like the 2021 hit at Wistariahurst (played without an audience during the pandemic), Lightcap played electric bass, which he does with unassuming agility. The 54-year old Williams grad was the glue guy, keeping the structural integrity of Irabagon’s compositions intact. Lightcap is equally impressive on double-bass, which he played at the Shea Theater in September with the Darius Jones Trio, at the Iron Horse last year with Nels Cline’s Concentrik Quartet, and in Greenfield in 2016 with his own celebrated ensemble, Bigmouth.

Pianist Matt Mitchell is also a recurrent guest in western Massachusetts, having performed over the years with Dave Douglas, Anna Webber, Dan Weiss and Miles Okazaki. He’ll be back next week in a duo with vocalist Sara Serpa, and again in early May with the Ralph Alessi Quartet. Mitchell keeps getting invited to participate because he is creative, adaptable and adds value to any musical situation. He took full advantage of his considerable solo space on Sunday, playing with hand independence that suggested two pianists.

Dan Weiss, one of the most in demand drummers in jazz, is also well known to area audiences. His solo came during the evening’s final piece, “hokší-hakákta” (?), a Lakota word meaning the youngest child in a family. Weiss built his solo from a simple, elemental phrase that spiraled into a complex statement, changing subtly over time. It brought the house down.

Speaking about Julius Hemphill in his authoritative book, Visions of Jazz: The First Century, Gary Giddins writes, “originality indemnifies him against his influences, allowing him to borrow freely and transform accordingly.” The same can be said of Jon Irabagon and his bandmates, who have secured a prominent place in jazz’s second century.

Leap Into the Unknown: Elliott Sharp & Janene Higgins

Elliott Sharp, 74, has been experimenting his whole life. “In popular usage it denotes exploration,” Sharp writes in his new book, Feedback, Translations from the IrRational, “an action without predictable results, an ascent into the unknown for the purpose of discovery or illumination. But its usage in labeling music is often pejorative and meant to marginalize the work and explain why most people consider the experimental unpleasant to listen to.”

His performance at Holyoke Media on November 13 with visual artist Janene Higgins, which they called "Entanglement Suite", consisted of 50 improvisational minutes of colliding sound and image, a clear “ascent into the unknown”. Twenty-five fearless individuals braved the unpredictable and experienced a change in body chemistry.

Seated on either side of a large screen, Sharp, with his 8-string electric guitar, and Higgins, with her laptop, created a dizzying, ever changing media landscape. But the evening began with Sharp reading excerpts from his latest volume, published by Wesleyan University Press. He launched the evening with An Asymptotic Manifesto (“Your goal is in sight and you will approach it but you will never reach it. Relax and enjoy the journey.”) He followed with an essay titled Future of Mind (“With every positive advance in knowledge of the physical and chemical workings of the brain, in a paradox worthy of Zeno, humans remain woefully distant from complete knowledge of the nature of our own consciousness.”) Sharp is an inventor, a self-described science geek, and a smarty-pants. When he was 65, his mother, now 99 and still living independently, asked him if it was too late to enroll in medical school.

E#, as he’s long been known, produced a plethora of other worldly sounds by tapping strings, manipulating pedals, inducing feedback and taking liberties with the equal tempered scale. Not a blues lick or major chord to be found, and not a predetermined note to be had. While Higgins had a finite number of images at her disposal, the order and manner of display were determined on the spot. Pictures of birds and warplanes moved across the screen, fading into each other. Desolate landscapes juxtaposed with endless oceans, a cosmic abyss morphing into celestial tumble. Abstract squiggles in split screen with a mass of humanity. Almost all of it devoid of color.

Ivor Miller said the performance reminded him of Koyaanisqatsi, Godfrey Reggio’s non-narrative documentary. While the 1982 film, with a score by Phillip Glass, also had no dialogue, its message of a world out of balance - imbedded in the title - had a clear intent. Thursday’s event, while equally evocative, left us each to draw our own conclusions.

Sharp has been an iconoclast since his career launched in the late 1970s. His recorded legacy, including dozens of solo projects, duos with Bachir Attar, Nels Cline, Christian Marclay and Tracie Morris, operas, film scores, string quartets, his hardcore band Carbon, his blues band Terraplane, and his collaborative efforts with John Zorn, Andrew Cyrille, Vernon Reid and others, provides a pretty complete 45 year survey of the New York avant guard. He continues to be a fearless innovator. I hosted him in 2005 as part of the UMass Solos & Duos Series, soon after the release of his solo acoustic record, The Velocity of Hue (Emanen).

Janene Higgins, Sharp’s partner on and off stage, is a renown graphic designer and video artist whose video and projection design were part of Sharp’s operas Binibon, Port Bou, Filiseti Mekidesi, and Die Grosste Fuge. She was the art director at Vanity Fair and RCA Music Group, and has exhibited and organized events at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, Documenta, MOMA’s PS 1 and Lincoln Center. She designed the cover of Sharp’s new book.

As usual, Higgins and Sharp were both dressed in black. Twenty years ago Marty Ehrlich, a long time East Village neighbor, reported seeing Sharp pushing a stroller with his two toddlers, also dressed in black.

Sharp and Higgins are quintessential hipsters who come by their cool naturally, without pretense or airs. They are fashionable because being curious about the world is always in vogue. Unconcerned about generating legions of fans, they are immersed in art experiments that bring them closer to wherever the eternal truths take them, without fear or favor.

Alone Together: Ned Rothenberg at Wistariahurst Museum

Since Coleman Hawkins’ 1946 recording of “Picasso”, there has been a long history of solo saxophone recordings. Antony Braxton’s impactful 1968 record, For Alto, has been followed by  a proliferation of full length solo albums by iconoclasts like Steve Lacy, Joe McPhee, Hamiet Bluiett and David Murray. Some musicians, like the British reed players Evan Parker and John Butcher, have devoted considerable time to pursuing solo work. But no one has spent as much effort or developed as complete a language for solo wind instruments as Ned Rothenberg.

Playing alto saxophone, clarinets and shakuhachi flute, Rothenberg gave 50 listeners who assembled at the Wistariahurst Museum on November 2 a master class on unaccompanied performance. The 69 year old, Boston-born reed player was celebrating his new release, Looms & Legends (Pyroclastic), his latest in a long line of solo recordings. In fact, Rothenberg’s first two recordings under his own name, Trials of the Argo (1981) and Portal (1983), were solo efforts. (Reissued as The Lumina Recordings on Tzadik Records.)

Rothenberg explained the title of the new record as a focus on texture (looms) and narrative (legends). It was the perfect framing to appreciate his 60 minute recital, which was full of both applied sound science and storytelling. The marble Music Room of the venerable Holyoke landmark provided the perfect acoustic setting for the concert.

He began the afternnon with a lengthy exploration on B-flat clarinet. Using circular breathing and his leg as a mute of sorts, Rothenberg created a complete sound world full of melody and multiphonics. What struck me throughout the performance was how he was able to sustain and develop ideas that kept my attention. Where was he going next? Although forged through a lifetime of studious refinement, he made it look natural, if not easy.

He then switched to alto sax for another long sonic investigation. Fully evolved extended techniques allowed him to create multiple lines simultaneously, as if in dialogue with himself. It was astounding and very musical.

Rothenberg’s extensive use of circular breathing, which allowed him to produce a continuous sound without pausing to take a breath, resulted in thick cascades of notes. The technique is achieved by storing a small amount of air in the cheeks and using those muscles to push air out through the mouth while simultaneously inhaling new air through the nose.

After these two long salvos, his third piece, also played on alto sax, changed the dynamic. He told us this was the closest he had come to writing an anthem, and the composition, “Resistance Anthem”, unfurled as a short, unadorned hymn. The piece is found on Looms & Legends, and as he writes in the liner notes, “the focused attention on sonic expression might help the individual keep a connection with their humanity and reinforce positive human endeavors – love, empathy and truth-seeking.”

Next he picked up the A clarinet, which is a semitone lower than its B-flat cousin, is slightly longer, and has a darker, more mellow sound. He mentioned that Mozart and Brahms composed with the A clarinet in mind, and indeed it has a rich tradition in classical music. On this improvisation, and throughout the concert, Rothenberg displayed a technical level of control and command that has very few parallels in creative music. We were witnessing genius at work.

Sunday’s concert concluded with a succinct reading of Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight”, played on shakuhachi. (The new recording ends the same way.) An end-blown bamboo flute developed in Japan in the 16th century, the shakuhachi has only five finger holes, but changes in blowing angle, embouchure and fingering can produce rich variation in tone color. Rothenberg spent a considerable amount of time in Japan, including a 6-month residency during which he studied the instrument with two of its foremost masters, Goro Yamaguchi and Katsuya Yokoyama. It's been part of his performance practice for almost 40 years, and today he is regarded as one of the most accomplished, western practitioners of the instrument.

I first met Rothenberg in 2009 when I produced a memorable duo concert with Evan Parker at UMass. I invited him back in 2016 with his project, Inner Diaspora (Jerome Harris, Mark Feldman, Erik Friedlander, Satoshi Takeishi), and he made a cameo appearance during Sylvie Courvoisier’s concert in Northampton last year. Rothenberg is a serious musician with an open invitation to return to western Massachusetts, with or without colleagues. Everything he touches turns to music.