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Trio M
Seattle Asian Art Museum (Volunteer Park), 8:30, $18 BUY ONLINE
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| Photo by Patrick Lore |
Back in 1993, Myra Melford related a story to critic Kevin Whitehead, where she remembered living as a child in a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Illinois. She remembered “weird stuff on the ceiling” and tons of light. “I used to walk around with a mirror in my hand and pretend I was walking on the ceiling,” she recalled. And that’s what will leap out first as Melford plays piano. Your world can be reversed, up becomes down. Clustered chords become long-fingered, steady vibrations. Likewise, an elongated harmonic line can almost explode as you hold it close. She can tussle, tumble, and thunder without ever seeming to leave a melody aside. Her avant-garde outness is a lyrical construct, something that opens the eyes when in reality it’s aimed at the ears. That’s Melford’s muse, the making of space in time, the creation of a landscape out of musical motion.
Of all bassists, none has endeavored further down such a likeminded path than Mark Dresser. His nine years as part of Anthony Braxton’s heralded, spacious quartet put Dresser in front of hundreds of brilliant graphs and illustrations, idiosyncratic pictograms that served as Braxton’s compositions. Dresser had to live within a spatial world governed by time, roaming through elongated free improvisational spaces that found sunbursts of fast-flown, hard-hit energy. He careened through the pieces, playing pizzicato lines, and he swung in loose tempi that, with Braxton, made a dust devil, a whirlwind. Dresser’s non-Braxton work hits the same highs, whether he’s playing solo in front of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or in the C/D/E trio with Andrew Cyrille and Marty Ehrlich.
And Matt Wilson, he grew up like Melford, in the Midwest and its open flatlands. He stumbled onto drums, he reports, via television, watching I Love Lucy and seeing Buddy Rich in a cameo appearance. Luckily, Wilson had a couple key things in his favor: parents who cherished creativity and nurtured it and then also a whimsical willingness to unlatch from regularity, to stumble and clamber along. Wilson’s now an expert rhythmist and, simultaneously, a showman, even while he puts technical surefootedness alongside energetic flashes, drawing a crowd’s energy right from them and circling it around a band.
The trio comes together with a leaderless plunge into their respective musical histories. Before Braxton, Dresser was an LA player in the city’s 1970s avant-garde heyday, with Bobby Bradford, Arthur Blythe, and David Murray. And in recent years, Dresser’s settled in at UC San Diego. For his part, Wilson was a backbone in the early-90s Boston scene, making big-ensemble noise with Either/Orchestra and John Medeski before heading to New York to break into more regular, wider-ranging gigging. Then there’s Melford, who started improvising in college and learned key compositional spacing, structure, and drama from the likes of Henry Threadgill and Don Pullen. Together the threads make a wild weave.
Masterclass with Trio M / Tuesday, Oct 20, 2009, noon / PONCHO Hall, Cornish College of the Arts / Free and open to the public.
Presented in association with Cornish College of the Arts.
– Andrew Bartlett
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