Barney McAll
Jazz Standard, New York
Wednesday 8 April, 2009
Flashbacks is the name of pianist Barney McAll’s new recording, its release celebrated with two performances by his sextet at the Jazz Standard in Gramercy last week. It’s also the name of the feeling I had watching him play live, which I have done on and off since the mid-80s when I first started opening my ears to jazz as a Sydney teenager. At first, going along to the Basement at Circular Quay to check out the Vince Jones band – which Barney McAll had recently joined – was like ordering a Kahlua and milk from the bartender in the belief I could stand the taste of alcohol.
Since that time, McAll’s career has grown in breadth and depth, and taken him from Melbourne to Cuba and to New York, where he has lived since the late 1990s. He writes music for film, works in a number of bands as a sideman, and is a bandleader and composer in his own right.
Flashbacks, McAll’s fifth release under his own name, features tenor saxophonist Jay Rodriguez, guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel, trombonist Josh Roseman, Drew Gress (acoustic bass), Jonathan Maron (electric bass) and Pedrito martinez on bata and percussion. At the Jazz Standard CD release, McAll was joined by Billy Harper on saxophone, guitarist Ben Monder, Roseman, Australian bassist Matt Clohesy and drummer Henry Cole.
The late arrival of Harper to the venue – which seemed as much a surprise to the musicians as to the audience – underscored a slight but pervasive nervousness to the band in its opening set. The players wore looks of intense concentration as they followed the music in front of them. After a particularly tricky passage in the second tune of the night, the drummer let escape a visible sigh of relief.
McAll’s compositional style demands attention, both from the players and from those in the audience. His episodic approach intersperses passages full of complex harmonies and melodic fragments with more “restful” moments, often in major chords. While the influence of Kurt Rosenwinkel’s music is evident in McAll’s tendency to build multiple layers on an irresistible anthemic hook, his style more broadly echoes that of Kenny Wheeler.
Billy Harper would have made a commanding stage presence even if he weren’t wearing a dark purple spandex shirt to display the coiled energy of his lithe torso. The pairing of him with McAll, a partnership now of many years standing, is consistently surprising and effective. The angularity of Harper’s improvisations works in bittersweet counterpoint to the melodic impulse behind McAll’s cascading notes. McAll might cut a slight figure at the Steinway grand, but he wrestles the chords from the piano with enormous strength and delicacy.
The third tune of the night reflected the pianist’s immersion in the study of Cuban batarr rhythms. Harper’s soloing over the introduction felt more like an overture to McAll’s own solo, which traveled through a dazzling number of keys as the band played behind him. From a less capable improvising mind this could have sounded like a musical version of a Contiki tour; instead, in McAll’s hands the solo was more like that of a wise philosopher-traveller – a Ryszard Kapuscinski type – lost in a reverie of his meandering adventures as a young man.
That long apprenticeship as musical director of the Vince Jones band set McAll on course towards becoming the band leader he was tonight. Despite occasional confusion on-stage and the under-utilisation of Ben Monder, it is clear that McAll is a strong and distinctive voice in the New York scene, which can too often be drowned out by a chorus of sameness.
McAll introduced the penultimate song by saying that he was undecided as to whether it should be called Poverty or Wealth. Depending on whether he was referring to New York’s current economic conditions or the musicianship on display, it could play as both titles. And as a special treat for this pair of Australian ears, the first set closed with a piece written as a tribute to the late bass player Gary Costello.
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Writer and editor Virginia Lloyd is the author of the the 2008 memoir The Young Widow’s Book of Home Improvement: A True Story of Love and Renovation (QUP) and a former vice-president of SIMA.