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eye WEEKLY July 13 1995
Toronto's arts newspaper .....free every Thursday
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MUSIC MUSIC
HITS AND MISSES FROM 10 DAYS OF JAZZBO OVERLOAD
by
TIM POWIS
If there was a patch of common ground trod by the stylistically
disparate acts at this year's du Maurier Downtown Jazz festival, it
was the music of Thelonious Monk. That may come as a less than
galactic revelation; Monk, after all, is someone on whom virtually
everyone in jazz (except Leonard Feather and Oscar Peterson) can
agree. Still, I don't recall -- and I'm not alone in this -- another
jazz festival at which so many artists performed music either composed
or inspired by Monk.
Not only that, Monk never failed to yield a golden moment whenever he
cropped up. On opening night at Molson Place, New York's Medeski,
Martin & Wood brightened up an already spunky set with "Bemsha Swing"
-- detouring mid-song, as they do on the recorded version, into Bob
Marley's "Lively Up Yourself." On the festival's first Sunday, local
tenor player Glen Hall and his band Left Hand/Right Hand wound up
their first set at Nathan Phillips Square with an elaborately skewed
version of "Friday The 13th"; later that day, the English-born bassist
Dave Holland led his three young American accomplices through a
galvanizing finale of "Played Twice." At the Glenn Gould Studio, after
an occasionally starchy program of high-brow music composed
(separately) by Canadian saxophonist David Mott and American pianist
Anthony Davis, it was refreshing to hear the two let down their hair
and join forces for an encore of "Blue Monk." I missed Geri Allen, but
a medley of two Monk songs, "Introspection" and "Thelonious," was
reportedly a highlight of her solo piano set at the du Maurier Theatre
Centre. And before Dutchman Guus Janssen's trio hit a lengthy dry
stretch at the Rivoli (Janssen spent too much time being willfully
minimal and fiddling about under the hood of his piano), they opened
their set with a warm-blooded tribute to Monk.
Evan Lurie had to call off his solo piano performance at the Rivoli,
but when I interviewed him on the phone prior to the cancellation, he
extolled Monk's "Crepuscule With Nellie," played bits of it on his
piano by way of illustration, and recalled that when he played the
song at a Japanese concert the promoter asked him not to do so again
because it was too damned weird.
Although Monk provided plenty of sweet spots, my favorite overall
shows of the festival -- Han Bennink and Steve Beresford's Tuesday-
night duet at the Rivoli and the Franklin Kiermyer Quartet's lunch-
hour Thursday thunderstorm at Nathan Phillips Square -- were both
Monk-free. Bennink, who's from Holland, is nominally a drummer, though
he put everything from a cardboard box to the Rivoli's backstage door
to percussive use. Beresford, a Brit, is nominally a pianist and
trumpeter who also sings and plays an arcane-looking (not to mention
archaic-sounding) contraption laden with knobs and switches -- an
antique synthesizer, I think. He was also armed with a little keyboard
doohickey that was loaded with what sounded like a sample of an Eddie
Van Halen guitar lick. What Bennink and Beresford did together can
only be described as musical slapstick of the highest order. My sole
previous encounter with Steve Beresford was on the album I Will Cure
You by the British comedian/singer Vic Reeves. (It shows up in used
bins all the time; try it, you'll like it). Henceforth, I plan to snap
up everything I come across that bears Beresford's name.
Setting aside that both shows probably resembled somebody's notion of
what constitutes the "avant garde" in jazz, the Kiermyer Quartet's
single-minded, Coltrane-inspired intensity was the antithesis of
Bennink/Beresford's scattershot tomfoolery. If there was a problem
with the quartet's performance, it was that the leader's drumming
stole the show -- quite a feat considering the prowess of the
remainder of the band, which included Toronto saxophonist Michael
Stuart at the top of his form.
The James Carter Quartet's highly anticipated last-evening-of-the-
festival performance at the King-and-John tent was disappointing.
Carter is undeniably a very talented saxophonist, but he laid on the
honking and squealing and circular-breathing and other special effects
so fast and thick and indiscriminately that they soon became
wearisome. The crowd loved it.
The local saxophonist sitting next to me, however, provided a running,
by-and-large unfavorable, critique of Carter's playing ("That sounds
hard, but it's really easy," he pointed out when Carter spewed out a
rapid blather of slurred notes). Well before set's end my neighbor
declared "This is a fucking circus," grabbed his horn off the table
and walked out. Call me impressionable, but I could see his point. If
this had been day one of Downtown Jazz rather than day 10 I might have
enjoyed it more, but even people who write columns with names like
Jazzola have Jazz Saturation Levels and maybe Carter's grandstanding
pushed me into the Over-Saturation Zone. It's worth noting that Carter
has recorded three Thelonious Monk songs, none of which he'd played
before I left, head crammed with a multitude of fonder memories from
the previous nine days.
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