At the launch, as opposed to the opening performances of SIMA’s new venue (The Sound Lounge)—which they share with Cafe Carnivale downstairs at the Seymour Centre—we heard brief performances by a Carnivale ensemble and the Aaron Ottignon Trio. I enjoyed the first despite the excessive amplification and the highly brittle quality of the sound. The second I scarcely heard as a performance because the sound now had me worried sick. Cameron Undy’s bass was a thud and Felix Bloxom’s drums seemed to emanate not from the stage but from various reflective surfaces elsewhere. This set was too loud too, or at least too loud in the wrong tonal areas. The piano was sometimes peripheral to the precedings where it was meant to be central.
Despite assurances that with the right sound set up the room was good, worry was my companion as I entered the place for the opening night of the SIMA program. As soon as Gerard Masters Trio began playing all this evaporated in a heady cloud of relief and adrenalin.
I tried a few different positions in the room, all with happy results. In the closer and more central spots the piano seemed to be playing, with marvelous tone and sheen, in the air before me, yet there was never any sense that it was emanating from anywhere but the stage. That tone and sheen of course is simply what Gerard Masters’s playing always has in any reasonable acoustic space. We have so many distinctive piano players. Masters is right up near the top of my list. Just staying with the element of sound, he has an outstanding touch; he has strength and bright projection with no recourse to hammering. There is great tone at all volumes.
Cameron Undy’s bass sounded the way we know it does, only perhaps even better. He really is Mister Propulsion in both swing and funky feels, but with the most singing tone, with a deep gravity or affecting high tessitura. Evan Mannel played the singular role of the drums in this trio as to the manner born. In some bands Mannel plays with a ‘Here I am!’ exuberance and flourish that is exciting, highly likeable and humorous. This is a different music and he showed versatilty and empathy of a high order.
There are few things I love more than a piano trio that just swings hard all the way, but this trio does something I love just as well. There are time changes and spacey interludes and glittering races of swing as well as funky grooves. This was a rounded recital, deeply satisfying and often exciting.
Perhaps they tightened or tensed up a little part way through but I enjoyed the whole thing, and so did the large audience. All tables were occupied and a number of people sat or leaned against the perimeters or beside the bar. The bar people were very pleasant and seemed to be enjoying the music, which always helps.
There was another great relief for me here. It’s one I’ve experienced many times over the years. Will anyone still enjoy the experience of contemporary jazz when there is so much DJ-ing and rapping and funking, such an emphasis on being up and moving? So little faith in the sublimity of music itself that everything must be a show sold to the audience with admonitions to groove, with entrepreneurial spieling and gesture? Why, otherwise would they come out of the clubby clamour of the night and sit down?
Ze movink und groovink is not something I’m hostile to at all, but something came off the stage that is different. Some of the above physical elements were part of it (quite a large part in, say Steve Hunter’s band, which played with, I am told, great success here the following night) but it was subsumed in a play of elements that can grip you in a very different way.
It is a magic of a different kind, and I felt it run out into the audience like a fire, subtle and potent and, lacking the rapping and gesturing, invisible.
And again when the Bernie McGann Trio played. They opened with Dexter Gordon’s Fried Bananas, demonstrating once more that you don’t have to sound like Ornette Coleman when you play a freely-accented swing feel with no piano. This trio is unique. There were, however, signs that McGann might not have been feeling in tip top form, to quote P.G. Wodehouse. Some of his phrases got a little rubbery, beyond relaxation, and the ends of phrases were sometimes barely there—but his sound and ideas and placement against the very in-form John Pochee and Lloyd Swanton were outstanding.
Something both disturbing and inspiring happened when they played McGann’s Spirit Song. Here, the great alto saxophonist almost left a couple of notes out of the familiar and always glorious lines and barely finished a couple of phrases, but the solo he played was a masterpiece of construction, starting with a little group of soft phrases that he moved ingeniously about, and opening into a series of magnificent sweeps and flurries, with brilliant and dramatic reactions from Swanton and Pochee. After that he had to call it a night. Perhaps it was a virus, perhaps a recurrence of a mysterious heart quibble he’s had without any diagnosable problem.
Mike Nock stepped in and played the night out, and we were treated to a second impromptu piano trio full of creative interplay.
Another chapter opens.
Incidentally, you should drop into Birdland and get a copy of the Gerard Masters Trio’s Jazzgroove disc, Island Life. You might notice a certain influence from the Alister Spence trio, whose CD Flux is briefly but eloquently reviewed elsewhere on this site by David ‘Disco’ Theak.