Jazz Standard, New York
29 April 2009
Watching an elite improvising musician perform at the top of his game is always a mesmerizing experience, even if the music produced isn’t the listener’s preferred cup of tea.
That was the case with the impressive set last week by multi-instrumentalist Chris Potter and his band Underground, during a week-long residency at Jazz Standard.
The band, which takes its name from their first CD, The Underground (2007), is a tight-knit ensemble of virtuosic musicians: Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes; Adam Rogers, guitar; Nate Smith, drums. The bass-less unit now performs all over the world with Potter, who is one of the most-recorded of contemporary jazz musicians. As a sideman he appears on dozens of recordings, and as a bandleader he has already clocked up 12 releases. The busy chap hasn’t yet turned 40.
Potter’s project with Underground seems to be to find a musical path between his twin passions of free improvisation and funk-inflected grooves that engages musicians and audience alike. While this might reflect in part his desire to encompass the diverse musical worlds of the bands in which he has played (as different as the ensembles of Dave Douglas and David Holland), Potter’s search for his own distinctive musical territory feels so urgent and heartfelt as to be visceral for those of us listening to the journey in real time.
One thing was very clear from the first minutes of the set: Potter is a musician in control of his band and his material. As he dipped his head slightly to begin playing, he offered us a quietly confident smile, and I was struck by how physically relaxed he was. I have rarely seen a horn player so effortlessly calm in front of his audience.
The band formed a tight groove from the first piece (Underground), and a particularly enjoyable aspect of their interaction was the polyphonic play between guitar and keyboard. Rogers and Taborn worked solidly to create the gritty post-funk texture around which Potter’s improvisations could become looser and more free. For example, Potter’s first solo mixed up more conventional arpeggio-style play with musically complex flights of tumbling notes. Switching to the guitar for the next solo provided a refreshing change, with Rogers employing noticeably fewer notes within a smaller range to start. He used fragments of melody to ground his solo and build tension before picking out a few high notes later with such dramatic power they sounded as if they had been stung, rather than played.
Over the course of the set Potter played tenor and soprano saxophone, and on an exquisite arrangement of Bob Dylan’s It Ain’t Me, Babe, the bass clarinet, producing the most gorgeous controlled lush tone on that instrument.
Potter said nothing to the audience until well into the set, when he briefly introduced the musicians and back-announced the pieces they had played. In a way it seemed that all his words had been swallowed by the many notes he produced – and I have to confess that in that sense I sometimes wished he did not “talk” quite so much; I felt there were simply too many notes, as if Potter had so many musical ideas competing for air and attention that he wanted to express them all together. His playing was often so musically dense that I couldn’t process all that he was trying to communicate, with the result that ultimately I felt a bit remote from his music. I also felt Potter’s dominance left the marvelously skilled Taborn out in the cold a bit – all dressed up at the Fender Rhodes with nowhere to go.
By the way, aspiring and professional jazz musicians alike should take note of Potter’s website, www.chrispottermusic.com, which is a lesson in 21st century music marketing. Over and above the usual online activities, you can follow the band on tour, get an “online lesson” from Potter himself and download free sheet music of some of his compositions. While other musician’s websites offer similar features, this is the most impressive individual jazz musician’s website I’ve seen.
————————————————————————————
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.