Restraint in fury. While much of free improv is built on explosion to exhaustion, the really good players in the post-Trane era realize that the power is found in the spaces between. Each member of this strong trio knows the value of stopping to listen, allowing something to develop without being pushed from all sides.
Louie Belogenis is very much a free classicist. He is the rare player who really deserves the 'post-Trane' epithet. Not Trane redux, but bringing the school of hard notes into contemporary contexts (he has even played in Coltrane repertory projects), adding to the mix his own low drones and scattershot phrasing. He tops the list of those undeservedly left behind when downtown came up.
For Wednesday night's set, he had a remarkable ("hot" just doesn't describe their sinewy calculations) rhythm sections around. Mephista is one of the great advances in percussion music in quite a long time: three woman, a laptop, a prepared piano and a drum kit playing swirling, engaging, complexly (un)structured sounds. Here, Belogenis had two-thirds of the group (drummer Susie Ibarra being the third), and pushed them in a very different direction than in their own trio.
Belogenis blew soaring lines and stacatto bursts from his tenor, playing hard but rarely fast and seeming to pull Sylvie Courvoisier out of the piano case and into a piano trio (although her keyboard chops were more conservatory than cabaret). She is a great piano preparer, blocking off whole sections of strings to give herself notes and nuances within muted scales. She built up her piano, blocks and tape altering the strings, as the set progressed, but her pure pianism was on display throughout the set. She can at once exhibit strength and delicacy.
Mori, for her part, remains one of the most consistently strong improvisers in town. She has an uncanny ability to plug any hole, allowing her bandmates total freedom while giv ing them a strong foundation to play against. She doesn't, and for this set didn't, disappoint. Mori has seemed to work with more melodic phrasing recently, but still remains in her own, very organic, laptop world. Bugs, birds and spring showers all seem to inhabit her Powerbook. She builds fast, quiet backdrops which inform, without overwhelming, any project she's a part of.
Listening is crucial, for the players as well as the audience, in this kind of deep improv. Where the trio came together was not in what they played but in reacting to when they didn't. The music was almost measured in rounds, each showing that they were willing to listen until they had something to say.
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