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.