Late the other night, too early to sleep but not too early to be sleepy I GOOGLED Wayne Shorter and unwired a web world of jazz. Shorter’s blowy throaty saxophone to be sure, but nothing short of much more. The ‘more’ included two groups new to me; one sprung from Israel, one sprung from Japan.
The first is the Avishai Cohen Trio; the string bass played and percussed by Avishai Cohen, Shai Maestro whose fingers waltzed and jolted across the piano keys , and Noam David beating a feast of rhythms out of his drum set. They helped me rediscover the magical contradiction of jazz; simplicity wedded to complexity, improvisation married to composition, intellect saturated with emotion, an aural cornucopia of melody, rhythm, and instrumental texture. Some tunes lured me almost to the point of blur only to smash through my mental fuzz into elaborate rhythms and sumptuous sounds that grabbed me back from the brink and fired my brain with the musical equivalent of Red Bull. In the video of their 2018 Gently Disturbed concert in Paris, humble melodies were repeated almost incessantly until I began to notice subtle variations in beat and tone, harmony devolving into discord, discord evolving into elaborate melodies. I am not often this alert when listening to music but this trio’s jazz requires me to pay close attention, not because they are boring but because their music flashes between mathematical precision and whimsy, pathos and joy.
Significant to the joy of hearing a jazz trio is the interplay of the instruments, as if the audience were guests of a conversation between fine minds speaking different languages everyone could understand. I am in awe of the syncretic complexity they create as they play compositions which morph into improvisation and back again.They are partners in a dance, but instead of dancing to an outside source of music the music dances out of them.
Youtube has many offerings of this group, from single songs to whole concerts.
Watch Poet’s Notebook for another installment on jazz.