Monday June 16 * doors at 7, music at 7:30 * $15-25
Tomeka Reid, cello
Mary Halvorson, guitar
Jason Roebke, bass
Tomas Fujiwara, drums
"It’s a challenge to think of many high profile cellists in the worlds of jazz and free improvisation. Go back to the bebop era and you have Oscar Pettiford, pioneer of the cello as a solo instrument in jazz. Fast forward a bit and you come to Tristan Honsinger, an artist at home in free jazz and improv who played extensively with Cecil Taylor in the 1980s and 90s. On her second album leading her eponymous quartet, Tomeka Reid proves conclusively that she’s comfortable occupying both ends of that stylistic spectrum – often in the same tune – while pushing further into even less familiar territory.
The quartet is essentially an updated string band, featuring Mary Halvorson on guitar and Jason Roebke on bass, plus Tomas Fujiwara on drums. It’s a configuration that oozes a kind of sepia old-time charm, harking back to the early days of jazz when string bands were at their most popular. At the same time, many of Reid’s compositions have a puckish 20th century bop sensibility. “Sadie” is a sweetly swinging ditty with walking bass and sighing brushes, while “Wabash Blues” leads with a tartly melodic head that could easily be the score for a swing-era silent movie showing Model Ts trundling down the streets of black and white Chicago.
Yet, nothing is ever quite as it seems. “Wabash Blues” for instance breaks out of that demure beginning into a broiling energy with bullish bass and drums, and Reid taking a wild solo that roars and shrieks. Then there’s Mary Halvorson: utterly unmistakable in her solos, full of trademark smears and swoops and wonky runs. Even when she’s playing pert unison lines with Reid, she can’t help leaking outside the melodic frameworks with warping blurs and slippages, like a child deliberately colouring outside the lines just to see what it looks like.
Reid, too, reveals herself as a soloist of fierce imagination, moving from fingertip bends and scuttling pings in the freeform opening of “Aug 6” to crazed, soaring arco stridulations in “Ballad”. On “Peripatetic” the quartet even come across like King Crimson circa Larks’ Tongues In Aspic, with sombre, lumbering charts giving way to a frenzied freakout and Halvorson’s guitar crunching through overdriven ecstasies. It’s an album that is convincingly both ‘in’ and ‘out’ at the same time, straightfaced yet self undermining, serious yet playful – and always heaps of fun." – Daniel Spicer / The Wire
https://cuneiformrecords.bandcamp.com/album/old-new
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