A Love Supreme
I went and saw Confusatron play at the Black Dog last Thursday. I was pleasantly surprised: these days, they're playing tunes with more than perfunctory changes -- probably the result of the always-musical keyboardist Justin Pate's input -- and their music has a nice ebb and flow that it didn't back when their modus operandi was simply to start playing and blow up against the back wall. Amid the clamor and clatter of the eight (count 'em, eight) musicians onstage, I could hear thematic development in Brian Batson's Maceo-cum-Ornette sax solos, Matt Skates' very fonky bass sounded better for having more just than his imagination in the moment to direct its flow, drummer Lucas White sounded a lot more comfortable than he did when he was playing just a little over his head in Keith Wingate's trio, and bluesy guitarist John Stevens has realized every bit of potential he ever showed when he was aping Stevie Ray Vaughan in Smokehouse or shoehorning his sound into Nuthin' Special's Dead/Phish jam-band thang.
Confusatron's music has the same silly-shit quotient that the best Fort Worth bands all seem to have (their "theme song" and the goofy shades Batson donned while singing Curtis Mayfield's "Pusherman"), and that's a good thing, I think -- a sign that they haven't yet succumbed to the Sin of Seriousness. Occasionally, when they broke it down, the boys lost their groove and lapsed into the kind of aimlessness that comes from kicking an idea around for longer than it can sustain, but overall, I was reminded of how enjoyable it can be to watch a local band develop over time. These guys have come a long, long way from the days when Batson and Skates used to play for tips in front of the Coffee Haus in Sundance Square. Seeing the sizable crowd that showed up to hear them (and White assured me that it was "a little slow" that night), I had to smile remembering Skates' initial surprise when Tad Gaither offered them a regular, paying gig. They've got a live CD now. You can buy it at their shows. It's only three bucks -- real value for money -- but it's not as great as the one I know these guys are gonna make someday.
What Confusatron is not: a jazz band, although they might easily be mistaken for one by civilians who think any music that features improvisation and saxophones is automatically jazz. Sure, Batson and Skates are products of the jazz program at Weatherford College (and Skates' guitar-playing brother, whose first name I'm sorry to say eludes me, studied jazz at TCU). But the music they play is more jam-band rock and streetcorner funk than it is jazz. And there's nothing wrong with that. Audiences dig what they dig, and if musicians can find a crowd that happens to pick up on the form of expression that's most organic to them, it's a win-win, as they say in CorporateAmerica. These guys are a natural for the groove-hungry crowd that digs local heavyweights like Pablo and the Hemphill 7, Sub Oslo, Bertha Coolidge, and even the mighty Spoonfed Tribe (and indeed, Spoonfed's front guy Egg Nebula was in the Black Dog crowd that night).
Still, it saddens me that a band like Dave and Daver can only draw a fraction of the crowd Confusatron routinely pulls to the same venue -- on a good night. I'll admit to being a sucker for the kind of jive Daves Karnes and Williams and crew purvey: specifically, the kind of post-bop, tune-based, modal improv for which the archetypes are John Coltrane's classic quartet, the Shorter-Hancock-Williams edition of the Miles Davis quintet, and a slew of classic Blue Note sides that drew from the same pool of musicians, as well as gifted contemporaries like Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard. These days, the jazz masterworks of that era seem to be on the verge of attaining the status of classical repertoire, which is usually a precursor to any art form losing whatever vitality it had left. Why, in the last few months, both the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra -- brainchild of pompous didact Wynton Marsalis, the last Great Black Man to be annointed by Columbia Records -- and the less-evil Marsalis brother Branford have essayed Coltrane's A Love Supreme -- for my money, the most fervent prayer ever committed to tape with the possible exception of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On -- on stage or disc.
But A Love Supreme IS classic, dammit, more for the individuality with which the original musicians invested it than for the sanctity of its structure. When I was in Korea back in '82-'83, I had a cassette I used to call my "sanity tape." On one side was A Love Supreme. On the other, Miles' In a Silent Way. Although I'm no longer thousands of miles from my family, being constantly reminded of a hostile adversary waiting just a few minutes' flight time away, I still listen to both of those records when the stress of life is about to put me over the edge. One of the things I pay the closest attention to on both records is the drumming. I love the way Elvin Jones invested everything he played (in Trane's band and elsewhere) with the deepest pulse imaginable, all the while listening and responding to the forms and the soloists. And I dig the tension between the pastoralism of the other instruments on the Miles record and the static cymbal patterns Tony Williams plays against them. (Anywhere else I've ever heard him, on records or the one time I saw him live -- in '77, with his New Lifetime -- Tony played like a force of nature, albeit a very intelligent one.)
Both Elvin and Tony are dead now. Elvin died from congestive heart failure last May at age 76. He stayed on the road until nearly the end, even though reports say he could scarcely hold a stick in his last days. Tony died of a heart attack during routine surgery back in 1997. He was only 51. Both of these men seemed larger than life to me, and I remain in awe of their musical accomplishments. No one has ever played drums in a way that melded subtlety and finesse with power as well as these two did. My point in bringing all of this up is, Dave Karnes knows about this shit. When he was at Berklee, he studied with Alan Dawson, who was also Tony's teacher. And everytime he hits the stand, those guys are present. I used to hear them in Dave's playing even before I knew him, and we've talked about them a lot since then.
Sure, there's limited utility in playing repertoire of any kind, but then again, jazz isn't the music of constant (well, once a decade, at least) innovation it used to be. There's more to Dave and Daver than "just a bunch of guys playing tunes," too. Not only does Dave Williams blow tenor sax with authority and taste, he writes good originals, melodies with the opaque abstraction of someone like Wayne Shorter. Musically, these guys might not be pushing back any boundaries, but they're bringing their own ideas to the table, which is rare in any idiom. They just finished their own CD, which gives you a chance to hear 'em playing a dozen of Dave Williams' tunes. So I'll keep going back and hearing Confusatron, and I'm sure I'll enjoy their continuing evolution. But I'll keep digging Dave and Daver just as much, and hoping that sooner than later, some other folks will catch on, too.
Confusatron's music has the same silly-shit quotient that the best Fort Worth bands all seem to have (their "theme song" and the goofy shades Batson donned while singing Curtis Mayfield's "Pusherman"), and that's a good thing, I think -- a sign that they haven't yet succumbed to the Sin of Seriousness. Occasionally, when they broke it down, the boys lost their groove and lapsed into the kind of aimlessness that comes from kicking an idea around for longer than it can sustain, but overall, I was reminded of how enjoyable it can be to watch a local band develop over time. These guys have come a long, long way from the days when Batson and Skates used to play for tips in front of the Coffee Haus in Sundance Square. Seeing the sizable crowd that showed up to hear them (and White assured me that it was "a little slow" that night), I had to smile remembering Skates' initial surprise when Tad Gaither offered them a regular, paying gig. They've got a live CD now. You can buy it at their shows. It's only three bucks -- real value for money -- but it's not as great as the one I know these guys are gonna make someday.
What Confusatron is not: a jazz band, although they might easily be mistaken for one by civilians who think any music that features improvisation and saxophones is automatically jazz. Sure, Batson and Skates are products of the jazz program at Weatherford College (and Skates' guitar-playing brother, whose first name I'm sorry to say eludes me, studied jazz at TCU). But the music they play is more jam-band rock and streetcorner funk than it is jazz. And there's nothing wrong with that. Audiences dig what they dig, and if musicians can find a crowd that happens to pick up on the form of expression that's most organic to them, it's a win-win, as they say in CorporateAmerica. These guys are a natural for the groove-hungry crowd that digs local heavyweights like Pablo and the Hemphill 7, Sub Oslo, Bertha Coolidge, and even the mighty Spoonfed Tribe (and indeed, Spoonfed's front guy Egg Nebula was in the Black Dog crowd that night).
Still, it saddens me that a band like Dave and Daver can only draw a fraction of the crowd Confusatron routinely pulls to the same venue -- on a good night. I'll admit to being a sucker for the kind of jive Daves Karnes and Williams and crew purvey: specifically, the kind of post-bop, tune-based, modal improv for which the archetypes are John Coltrane's classic quartet, the Shorter-Hancock-Williams edition of the Miles Davis quintet, and a slew of classic Blue Note sides that drew from the same pool of musicians, as well as gifted contemporaries like Joe Henderson and Freddie Hubbard. These days, the jazz masterworks of that era seem to be on the verge of attaining the status of classical repertoire, which is usually a precursor to any art form losing whatever vitality it had left. Why, in the last few months, both the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra -- brainchild of pompous didact Wynton Marsalis, the last Great Black Man to be annointed by Columbia Records -- and the less-evil Marsalis brother Branford have essayed Coltrane's A Love Supreme -- for my money, the most fervent prayer ever committed to tape with the possible exception of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On -- on stage or disc.
But A Love Supreme IS classic, dammit, more for the individuality with which the original musicians invested it than for the sanctity of its structure. When I was in Korea back in '82-'83, I had a cassette I used to call my "sanity tape." On one side was A Love Supreme. On the other, Miles' In a Silent Way. Although I'm no longer thousands of miles from my family, being constantly reminded of a hostile adversary waiting just a few minutes' flight time away, I still listen to both of those records when the stress of life is about to put me over the edge. One of the things I pay the closest attention to on both records is the drumming. I love the way Elvin Jones invested everything he played (in Trane's band and elsewhere) with the deepest pulse imaginable, all the while listening and responding to the forms and the soloists. And I dig the tension between the pastoralism of the other instruments on the Miles record and the static cymbal patterns Tony Williams plays against them. (Anywhere else I've ever heard him, on records or the one time I saw him live -- in '77, with his New Lifetime -- Tony played like a force of nature, albeit a very intelligent one.)
Both Elvin and Tony are dead now. Elvin died from congestive heart failure last May at age 76. He stayed on the road until nearly the end, even though reports say he could scarcely hold a stick in his last days. Tony died of a heart attack during routine surgery back in 1997. He was only 51. Both of these men seemed larger than life to me, and I remain in awe of their musical accomplishments. No one has ever played drums in a way that melded subtlety and finesse with power as well as these two did. My point in bringing all of this up is, Dave Karnes knows about this shit. When he was at Berklee, he studied with Alan Dawson, who was also Tony's teacher. And everytime he hits the stand, those guys are present. I used to hear them in Dave's playing even before I knew him, and we've talked about them a lot since then.
Sure, there's limited utility in playing repertoire of any kind, but then again, jazz isn't the music of constant (well, once a decade, at least) innovation it used to be. There's more to Dave and Daver than "just a bunch of guys playing tunes," too. Not only does Dave Williams blow tenor sax with authority and taste, he writes good originals, melodies with the opaque abstraction of someone like Wayne Shorter. Musically, these guys might not be pushing back any boundaries, but they're bringing their own ideas to the table, which is rare in any idiom. They just finished their own CD, which gives you a chance to hear 'em playing a dozen of Dave Williams' tunes. So I'll keep going back and hearing Confusatron, and I'm sure I'll enjoy their continuing evolution. But I'll keep digging Dave and Daver just as much, and hoping that sooner than later, some other folks will catch on, too.
posted by stashdauber at 7:32 PM
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