"Guggenheim fellow and 2011 Downbeat International Critics Poll 'Alto Saxophonist of the Year'" reads the Jazz Standard's promo blurb for Rudresh Mahanthappa,who played at the club tonight with an ensemble consisting of guitarist David Gilmore, bassist Rich Brown, and drummer Damion Reid. The Italian-born, Indian-influenced Berklee graduate and his band cooked up an evening of wild riffs, electronics and complex rhythms. The band often swerved from the harmonic scales of Eastern music directly into bluesy solo lines and back to your basic modal jazz, with significant touches of fusion from time to time. Indeed, if I had closed my eyes at certain moments I could have believed I was at a Mahavishnu Orchestra concert, especially when Gilmore took over, which was often. If they were not covering tunes from Inner Mounting Flame or Visions of the Emerald Beyond they might as well have been. But no sooner did that impression take hold than they landed squarely in some other mode, or explored electronic echoes (apparently mediated by a MacAir notebook that almost had the role of a fifth performer).
Overall this was not revolutionary stuff - few if any moments of pure atonality, no dissonant free jazz free-for-alls, but an idiom that was a bit more contemporary than post-bop without getting carried away. Mahanthappa seems content to play the instrument, without exploring the tonal possibilities of screeches, screams, reedy harmonics or tortured glissandos. None of which I missed very much, in case you were wondering. On the other hand, while he cannot be accused of lacking variety, by about halfway through the set I felt I had heard enough notes for two sets, and wished he would just slow down and dwell on something - that is, something other than the machine-gun repeated-note motifs that popped up from time to time. A little too much of "that saxophone thing", as I once heard someone express it. The effect was that of listening to someone run through his exercises as rapidly as possible - the musical content often seemed vanishingly thin, as the notes poured out in waterfals of sound that seemed as if they could have dwelled in a hundred different pieces equally well.
About the same was true of the very talented David Gilmore, whose style could not contrast more sharply with that of his near-namesake from Pink Floyd. The latter Gilmour has one main virtue - the ability to unfold a slow, intense, profoundly melodic lead line at crucial points in the music. The present Gilmore is all stabs and jabs, skips and amazingly technical runs. Though his stylistic range seems more strictly modal and traditional jazz than that of Mahanthappa, he jumps around the fingerboard and pulls off sequences that, if they are basically finger-training exercises, are still too complex for even a standard guitarist (I guess I can call myself that) to understand just what he is doing. Sometimes he trades lightning-fast riffs with Mahanthappa; sometimes he cross-picks and sounds like Pat Metheny or McLaughlin in his more meditative moments; sometimes he pops out jagged rhythmic lines that suddenly manage to converge on what the band as a whole is up to. It's fascinating stuff, but to haul out the old saw, perhaps technique was so front and center as to overshadow basic musicianship.
Rich Brown, the bassist, plucked a six-string instrument and managed to keep a solid bottom in music that shifted styles as often as it did rhythms. He stood out in one piece, performing several minutes of more or less solo bass that involved some fingerstyle fretwork with an almost classical sound. Damien Reid tore through some impressive solos when he was not keeping the rest of the band on course during their eastern rhythmic excursions and extended solos.
This was a fun evening, with a lot of impressive playing. It could perhaps have been improved by a steadier focus of one sort or another: I would have been interested to see a deeper exploration of the Indian classical connection, or a concerted effort to bring 1970's fusion into the 21st century in a coherent way, or even more development of the electronic elements. As it was, there were a lot of satisfying moments, but a somewhat diffuse evening overall. These are brilliant musicians who just need a little more self-control - they've got the architecture of a solo down pat, but the architecture of a concert is a taller order.
