FTW, 8.28.2023

Hot on the heels of Friday's Joe McPhee extravaganza at The Wild Detectives comes a world-beater of a triple-header right up the street from mi casa at the Grackle Art Gallery. Leading off were Sawtooth Dolls, the electric guitar duo of Oak Cliff denizens Paul Quigg (ex-Vibrolux, Nervebreakers, Superman's Girlfriend) and Gregg Prickett (Monks of Saturnalia, Unconscious Collective, Decoding Society). 

The agreeable collision of their styles -- Quigg's fingerstyle country/blues plus atonality and electronic shapeshifting, juxtaposed with Prickett's combination of classical chops with metallic proclivities -- created a head-spinning aural action painting that transfixed the early-evening audience. Prickett will be back at the Grackle on September 15 with Denton bass stalwart Drew Phelps. Can't wait. [ADDENDUM: September 15 show is a non-starter. Have to wait longer.]

Next up was the duo of Houston-based trombonist Dave Dove and French cellist Nour, performing a meditative set that reminded me of focusing on one's own breath; stillness and attention are required for such deep listening, and the house helpfully turned off the air conditioner and opened the door to facilitate such. (It helped that the temperature had dropped a few degrees from the previous couple of months' swelter.) 

Dave's the director of Nameless Sound, Houston's locus of creative music performance and education, and he previously visited our city (with bassist Sonia Flores and saxophonist Jason Jackson) back in 2009 for the opening of the late, lamented Firehouse Gallery. I still carry the memory of Dave pointing the bell of his horn at the Firehouse's pier-and-beam floor and making the whole house a resonating chamber. At the Grackle, the dynamic level was more subtle, highlighted by his use of various mutes and vocalization.

Last but not least was a trio that brought together L.A.-based cornetist-violinist Dan Clucas with Oak Cliff siblings Aaron Gonzalez (bass) and Stefan Gonzalez (drums). Clucas is in the middle of a whirlwind tour, encompassing nine shows, three recording sessions, and a radio appearance (tonight from 8-10pm on KUZU 92.9FM's Tiger D show). Stefan just spent the weekend performing with Joe McPhee in Dallas and Austin, while this evening's performance marked Aaron's return to performing after a two-month hiatus to undergo surgery to repair a ruptured disc.

The Gonzalezes have been playing together for so long, in different contexts (the thrash metal duo Akkolyte, free jazz trio Yells At Eels with their late father Dennis -- whose image on a sticker adorns Stefan's rack tom -- and metallic jazz trio Unconscious Collective with Prickett), that they communicate onstage like two hemispheres of a single brain. Clucas -- who's worked with heavyweights like Joe Baiza's Universal Congress Of, Vinny Golia, and Jeb Bishop -- is an agile improviser on both of his axes, a masterful manipulator of mutes, and a versatile voyager who can blend his sound with anyone. He'll be at The Wild Detectives in Oak Cliff Wednesday night, mixing it up with electro-acoustic improvisers Monte Espina and Sarah Ruth Alexander. Grackle music director Kavin Allenson opens in his solo-guitar-with-loops incarnation as Breaking Light.

Oak Cliff, 8.25.2023

Joe McPhee had his first recording session -- for Clifford Thornton's album Freedom and Unity --  July 1967, the day after John Coltrane's funeral (which he attended with Ornette Coleman, and where he heard Coleman and Albert Ayler play). The bass player on the date was Jimmy Garrison from Coltrane's classic quartet. No pressure. McPhee was playing trumpet back then. A couple of years later, he'd teach himself saxophone. Now he plays a whole array of reed and brass instruments. 

McPhee started coming to Texas -- Houston and Austin, at least -- back in 1998, and he's been here with a number of collaborators: his own Trio X (with Jay Rosen and ex-Cecil Taylor bassist Dominic Duvall), the Scandinavian power trio The Thing, Peter Brotzmann's Chicago Tentet, and a duo with Brotzmann. But he'd never been to Dallas until last night, when he played a soul-cleansing set at The Wild Detectives in Oak Cliff with a trio including Norwegian bassist extraordinaire Ingebrigt Haker-Flaten and Oak Cliff's own Stefan Gonzalez on drums. 

Together, the three musicians radiated energy like the sun that's been putting the hurt on us in Texas the last couple of months. (McPhee had flown in from his home in Poughkeepsie, New York, where he said the morning temperature was 66 degrees!) Haker-Flaten and Gonzalez play together in The Young Mothers, and the bassist had previously played with McPhee both as a member of The Thing and in a duet context. From the first moments, they sounded like a unit that had been playing together for years.

On this occasion, McPhee chose to concentrate on his tenor sax (without a mic), and his big sound on the horn, replete with wide vibrato, recalls Ayler's love cry. At times he'd stop and listen to the rhythm section as they developed ideas. Both the bassist and drummer are commandingly assertive players, and McPhee responded to them with blasts of power and multiphonics, sometimes vocalizing through his horn, before drawing the energy down with a lyricism reminiscent of Coltrane's on Crescent. 

It is quite striking to be in the presence of a musician who heard Coltrane, Ornette, and Ayler when their energy was still in the world, and he alluded to Trane's passing in a recitative, referring to "that giant step we all must take," from which "he ain't coming back!" McPhee closed with a statement of purpose, declaring, "Our music doesn't come from tape machines...When all the recording studios are empty, we'll still be playing!" At 83, he appears as vital as folks half his age. May it always be so. The trio is in Austin tonight for a performance at Cloud Tree Studios and Gallery. McPhee will return to the area in December for Molten Plains Fest, December 8-9 at Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios. 

Opening the evening was a trio of Austin-based guitarist Jonathan F. Horne -- another Young Mother and a last-minute sub for saxophonist Joshua Miller, who has Covid -- along with Denton bassist Matthew Frerck and Dallas free jazz pioneer Gerard Bendiks on drums. The three met for the first time the afternoon before the performance, and their set ebbed and flowed organically, with spacious intervals where the musicians felt each other out before building to crescendos that gave way to new explorations as they subsided. 

By now, Horne has had something like ten surgeries to repair a severed tendon in his left arm. He plays with an intense physicality that lets you see his thought process as he shifts between hammering on the fretboard with a flatpick, applying a violin bow to the strings, playing rapid flurries of notes, and shaping his sound with an array of pedals. A rarity among electric guitarists, he keeps his stage volume low, and at times it was hard to distinguish between his electronically altered tones and the harmonics from Frerck's arco bass. 

Frerck used his bow to produce rhythmic and percussive sounds as well as tones, and his constant stream of invention was the music's fulcrum. (He's also in a trio with Miller and Gonzalez that is working on some compositions as well as free improv.) Bendiks manipulates pure sound as well as rhythm, using small instruments and a variety of attacks on his kit. Musicians who listen so intently to each other invite the audience to do the same, and the sizable crowd (the sold out event was moved indoors because of the heat) responded in kind. It was the best kind of musical evening. Kudos to Javier Garcia del Moral, Ernesto Montiel, and Sarah Ruth Alexander for making it happen.

Sara Serpa and Andre Matos's "Night Birds"

Having lost the facility of remembering song lyrics around 1973, it's no impediment to my enjoyment to hear music sung in a language I can't understand, and practitioners of voice-as-instrument (Petra Haden, Jen Shyu, Texans Sarah Ruth Alexander and Lily Taylor) are among my favorite vocalizers. Add Portuguese vocalist-composer-improviser Sara Serpa to that list.

I first encountered Serpa in 2012 on Aurora, one of a triptych of albums she recorded with her New England Conservatory teacher/mentor, Third Stream pianist Ran Blake. Earlier this year, she turned up on bassist-composer Linda May Han Oh's The Glass Hours. Trained as a social worker, Serpa's musical projects include interdisciplinary works exploring the history of Portuguese colonialism in Africa (2020's Recognition) and the African travels of Nigerian writer Emmanuel Iduma (2021's Intimate Strangers). 

Her collaboration with guitarist Andre Matos dates back to 2005, and they recorded two albums (2014's Primavera and All the Dreams two years later) around the birth of their child Laurenco -- who contributes to their latest recording, Night Birds, along with a handful of other collaborators who serve as added colors in the duo's compositional palette. The album is scheduled for a September 29 release, on CD and download, via Portuguese indie Robalo Music.

Themes of familial connection and concern for our planet's uncertain future, which parents feel with special poignancy, permeate this material. The track "Family," with its dizzying modulations, includes Laurenco's voice amid its layers of sound. The songs "Counting" and "Watching You Grow" both carry a mother and child's sense of gentle play.

Matos and Brooklyn-based pianist Dov Manski blend electric and acoustic instruments seamlessly, creating an organically spacious sound. Drummer Joao Pereira, a regular collaborator of Serpa and Matos's, provides a floating, unobtrusive groove to a number of tracks. South Korean cellist Okkyung Lee contributes swooping glissandos to "Melting Ice" and "Lost Whale." Ethiopian-Swedish vocalist Sofia Jernberg adds her virtuosic tonal approach to the title track and "Underwater," intertwining and contrasting with Serpa's elegant, unadorned style. 

Both Lee and Jernberg are present on the album's heart -- the song "Degrowth," a call to reverse the mindless human drive to consume that is destroying our planet. All in all, Night Birds is a collection of haunting, atmospheric soundscapes, which convey a chilling message even a confirmed non-lyric listener like your humble chronicler o' events can recognize. The closing Bartok bagatelle serves as a fervent prayer for a future in the balance.

akaKatboy's "Arga Warga"

Five vignettes:

1) Late 2002. It's Tuesday night at the Wreck Room, the night we put the Fort Worth Weekly to bed. I'm sitting at the bar with my editor when the members of Goodwin -- a sterling pop-rock outfit I'd previously heard on an EP their singer handed me one night at the Black Dog Tavern, but didn't yet recognize on sight -- started setting up on the stage. They had random numerals affixed to their T-shirts, instruments, and amps. I still recall my precise words to my editor before they started: "Who are these fucking guys with numbers on their shirts?" Forty-five minutes later, they were my favorite band. Matt Hembree was their bass player.

2) Around the same time, I'm interviewing Bill Pohl and Kurt Rongey of The Underground Railroad -- Fort Worth's answer to Gabriel-era Genesis with Holdsworthian guitar, whose musical rigor cured at least one accomplished muso of playing original music for life -- at Four Star Coffee Bar on West 7th. Both of them are very effusive in their praise of Hembree, who played bass on both of their CDs (Through and Through and The Origin of Consciousness), focusing especially on his penchant for melodic invention. I'm inclined to agree. I know a lot of good bass players in Fort Worth, but only Hembree's lines serve as hooks for some of my favorite songs.

3) October 15, 2003 -- the night I met my wife at the Black Dog, watching Goodwin play an acoustic set for KTCU-FM's "The Good Show." Hembree learned all the songs on guitar in the alley right before they hit.

4) Early 2006, when Marcus Lawyer released Top Secret...Shhh, a collection of studio jams by an array of Fort Worth musicians. On the last track, "Ne Exite'," Hembree plays more notes than all the other bass players on the record put together -- and still sounds tasteful. (When Marcus decamps for Austin, Hembree replaces him in Pablo and the Hemphill 7, a band with enough local notoriety to headline the well-attended Fridays on the Green following a lengthy pandemic hiatus.)

5) April 2006. The first time "proto punk repertory band" Stoogeaphilia played a show, I got to see Hembree take off his shirt, get on the floor, bang his head, and lots of other stuff I'd never have expected from his "science officer" persona. (Although once I showed up early for band practice and found him in his truck, reading a sci-fi paperback.) I enjoyed standing onstage next to him for a dozen years (half of them intermittent) of noisy abandon and feedback transcendence before we finally folded the tent.

In 2013, Hembree started his family and began backing away from the band wars, but he never stopped playing music. During the pandemic, he started sending me snippets he'd recorded in his home office late at night, when everyone else was asleep. He'd been a songwriter for Kids Who Care and Bindle (the latter of which I wrote extensively about when I still had the motivation to do so), and now he took the opportunity to document some of his compositions. 

This year, Hembree's best pal, Goodwin mastermind Daniel Gomez, challenged him to record a song a month. They were a mixed bag, ranging from reggae a la Pablo to the beginnings of a full-blown classical piece. Hembree just released his first EP, Arga Warga, to all the streaming services, collecting the rawkin'-est items from his story-so-far. For a happy domestic dad, he's clearly been storing up rage and frustration, and it all comes tumbling out in "Bomb," "Tornado," and "Drowning" -- short, sharp shocks of fiery, feral fury. "Gumshoe" is a catchy power pop change of pace to close things out and send you back to the beginning. Believe me: if I didn't know the guy, I'd still be plopping down my Bandcamp bucks.