FTW, 4.29.2023

Fortunate am I when I can walk up the street at the end of a pretty good day (Willie Nelson's 90th birthday -- the only musical artist besides maybe ZZ Top that everybody in Texas can agree on) and hear two sets of improvised wonderment by musicians I admire. 

A touring trio of Austin-based drummer Lisa Cameron (Brave Combo, Roky Erickson, Suspirians, ST 37) and St. Louis-based string players Damon Smith (bass) and Alex Cunningham (violin) played a first-ever quartet with North Texas new music mainstay Sarah Ruth Alexander (voice, small instruments) at my neighborhood spot, the Grackle Art Gallery. They'll play again tonight at Oak Cliff's The Wild Detectives, shuffling the deck in a couple of first-time duos, before heading on to Houston, San Antonio, and beyond. 

Together, they performed two long, riveting improvisations, filling the space with welters of sound that ebbed and flowed as the musicians listened and responded to each other in the moment with tremendous empathy, picking up on melodic and rhythmic themes and mirroring them back or expanding on them. Every instrument was a percussion instrument and the theme of the evening could have been friction. Besides her regular trap set, Cameron used a Tatsuya Nakatani bow on a couple of strings attached to a metal frame, topped with a wooden board and mounted on her floor tom. Smith detuned his bass, placed wooden and metal objects between the strings, and used drumsticks as well as a bow and fingers on his instrument. Cunningham attacked his strings with crumpled pieces of paper and the wood of the bow as well as the hairs. Alexander used a zither, ceramic bowls, a megaphone, and metal objects as well as her amazing voice, at one point gargling water to produce a sound disturbingly like drowning, even pounding on the floor, making the house an instrument. Non-idiomatic improv doesn't have the imperative to be exciting that more conventional musics generally do, but I can think of no other word that applies so well to the impact this collective produced.

Drummer Stefan Gonzalez (Akkolyte, The Young Mothers) opened the show playing solo trap set. He's been preparing the Dennis Gonzalez Legacy Band for their Father's Day performance at the Kessler, recording new music with Orgullo Primitivo and The Young Mothers, and breaking in a new trio with bassist Matthew Frerck and fiery tenorman Joshua Miller. His solo set, which included dedications to Ronald Shannon Jackson and "all the Fort Worth players," was as assertively thunderous as it was exploratory. Was glad to have these folks stop by my neighborhood.