Just Friends: Advancing On a Wild Pitch in Greenfield

Bands produce better music when it’s made by friends. That’s not always the case, of course. There was no love lost between Stan Getz and Chet Baker, for instance, and tensions within various Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis ensembles have been well documented. Despite conflict, those ensembles made some beautiful (and important) music, but because jazz is highly interactive and requires such intense listening, it stands to reason that musicians who get along off the bandstand will have a better chance of making good music on it. Moppa Elliott’s quintet, Advancing on a Wild Pitch, is a case in point.

Bassist and composer Moppa Elliott, joined by friends Sam Kulik (trombone), Charles Evans (baritone saxophone), Danny Fox (piano) and Christian Coleman (drums), made some outstanding music for the 60 of us gathered at Hawks & Reed in Greenfield, MA on May 3. Playing material from their 2024 release, Disasters, Vol. II, on Elliott’s Hot Cup imprint, the quintet tore through the music with a surplus of spirit and technique.

The music, all written by Elliott, largely consisted of what we used to call light swingers: mid-tempo, toe tapping pieces with straightforward form. Recalling the luxurious, bottom-heavy sound of Gerry Mulligan’s Quartet with Bob Brookmeyer, Advancing On a Wild Pitch treated us to a satisfying and mellifluous evening. It was a standard deviation away from Elliott’s iconoclastic, polyglot band Mostly Other People Do the Killing (originally featuring Jon Iragabon, Peter Evans and Kevin Shea.)

The compositions we heard on Saturday, like many of Elliott’s pieces, were named after cities and towns in his native Pennsylvania. His current obsession highlights places in PA that have endured man-made disasters of one kind or another. There is no shortage of misfortune; Disasters, Vol. III is coming soon.

“Powelton Village” and “Cobb’s Creek” began the concert. They were places where John Africa’s anti-capitalist, Afro-centrist MOVE organization had confrontations with the Philadelphia Police Department. In 1985, the mayor and the police dropped two bombs on their Cobb’s Creek home, killing 11 people and destroying an entire city block. These pieces, and the others, were not programmatic, they didn’t reflect the title’s subject matter. They had, in fact, a relaxed demeanor and were full of low register cheer.

“Marcus Hook”, a small borough along the Delaware River, was the unfortunate location of a 1975 collision between two tankers carrying oil and chemicals that created a 50-mile oil spill and a fire that raged for three days. The piece was a slow blues featuring succinct solo statements from Fox and Evans. “The Donora Smog” commemorates an industrial town south of Pittsburgh that was the site of a rare weather event in 1948 when pollution from a steel mill and a zinc works plant combined with fog to create a toxic smog that killed upwards of 70 residents over several days. It provided easy listening, sending us back to the pre-revolutionary jazz of the early 1950s.

There were other disasters on the bill: a coal mine explosion, a train collision, a poisoned water supply among them, all delivered with élan and the polish of conservatory trained musicians.

The provocative premise of Elliott’s Disaster series is in keeping with his puckish nature. He named his celebrated band, Mostly Other People Do the Killing, by lifting a phrase of Leon Theremin's discussing Josef Stalin. A series of remarkable MOPDtK album covers faithfully mimic the design of classic records like Ornette Coleman’s This is Our Music (This is Our Moosic) and Keith Jarrett’s Koln Concert (The Coimbra Concert). And in 2014, they produced Blue, an uncanny note for note recreation of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, that stumped experts in blindfold tests and resulted in many heated discussions. Elliott’s inclusion of Jorge Luis Borge’s short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”, as the only album note, sent a sly message about hero worship and the role of re-creation in art.

There was little irreverence displayed as the band relaxed before and after the show. Just the usual banter, jokes and needles between friends. Elliott and Charles Evans grew up together in Pennsylvania, and the baritone saxophonist took over for Elliott as band director at Tuckahoe (NY) High School. Elliott and Kulik met at Oberlin and live near each other in Queens, NY. (Kulik lives in Astoria, where I went to high school. Elliott lives in Sunnyside, where I spent the first 10 years of my life.) The Danny Fox Trio has released two recordings on Hot Cup Records. Bonding over the jazz canon and a love of baseball, this group of same-aged dudes all get along. You can hear it in the music.