|
|
October 29
Tom Varner Tentet
Andy Clausen & Sjenka
Chapel Performance Space, 7:30, $15 BUY ONLINE
Rarely known for its fleetness, the French horn has a rather short list of jazz masters. Challenge most, and they’ll come up with only Julius Watkins’s name. And one of Watkins’s foremost proponents, Tom Varner (whose participation in the 6th annual Julius Watkins Jazz French Horn Festival on October 3 is eagerly anticipated at press time) presents his new tentet and the fast-approaching new CD, Heaven and Hell. Varner calls the piece “my big meaty work for tentet,” something he’s incubated and worked on since September 11, 2001. He notes that the piece mixes “My … hell … being in New York City on 9/11,” with that most incongruous thing, a sort of heaven, as he and his wife adopted their son in Vietnam a short 8 days later. That contrasting mix of elements and imperatives is a Varner specialty, something he did with magnificent ease on The Window Up Above, a take on the American song-book, in 1998. The free-ranging French horn, hardly something one associates with George Jones, made fabulous, slippery improvisational material out of, well, George Jones and other American staples on Window. The point? Varner’s got no fear of steep material, of flowing free, of going “big and meaty.” Varner’s discography shows him using his horn as if it were always an improviser’s mainstay, something that shone as it seemed to smear across notes, slowed brilliantly even as it sped (it is a French horn, after all). His 2001 look at Don Cherry’s Second Communion is nothing short of a master-work, a tribute, of course, but also something that takes the trumpeter’s clipped execution and makes it pliable and all-encompassing. That’s what Heaven and Hell promises, the orchestration of Varner’s elastic harmonics, his use of the ensemble as an instrument, his Ellingtonian ability to animate against the instruments’ limitations.
Opening for Tom Varner’s Tentet will be high schooler Andy Clausen and Sjenka, who impressed an audience at Earshot’s Second Century series with fully evolved ambient improvisations. The Roosevelt High stand-out plays trombone in the school’s acclaimed jazz band. His big-band composition “Fly” was honored with the 2009 Gerald Wilson Award for Jazz Composition from the Monterey Jazz Festival. Sjenka is Clausen’s ambient electronic trio, which synthesizes diverse musical styles into dynamic layered soundscapes filled with striking juxtapositions.
—Andrew Bartlett
|
|
