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[MUSIC REVIEW] JAZZ PASSENGERS
11.18.07
MASS MOCA
North Adams, Mass.
ALT CABARET
Saturday, November 17, 2007
JAZZ PASSENGERS
"SUBWAY STORIES"
review by SETH ROGOVOY, editor-in-chief and critic-at-large, BERKSHIRE LIVING
Magazine
(North Adams, Mass., November 18, 2007) -- Attempts to fuse poetry and jazz have a long and spotty history. At their worst, they produce post-beatnik style pomposity, bad poetry recited over aimless bebop.
At their best, however, as in the work of Everton Sylvester and Searching for Banjo, and now, in Roy Nathanson's "Subway Stories," his latest multimedia project with downtown's greatest jazz group, the Jazz Passengers, the fusion makes total sense.
It helps when you have on hand a group of musicians such as the Passengers, whose lineup reads like an all-star team of downtown jazz, including trombonist Curtis Fowlkes, vibraphonist Bill Ware, drummer E.J. Rodriguez, and, of course, saxophonist Roy Nathanson himself.
It also helps that in Nathanson's latest program, he adds video to the mix, and Andrew Gurian's short films, alternating abstract images, collages, and straightforward narrative, help support Nathanson's prose/poems about and inspired by life on the Brooklyn subway.
It also helps that Nathanson's music is tailored to the poetry, so that there is a direct connection. It helps that jazz has had a long, respectable relationship with trains and subways (think Ellington/Strayhorn's "Take the A Train"), and that the Passengers made the most of this in the composed sections and in their improvisations, and in
keyboardist/samplist Hugo Dwyer's interstitial passages, which were like pauses in between trains pulling into the station that was the Club B-10 at MASS MoCA. Each time a train pulled in, Nathanson got us on and took us for a ride with his narratives and music, until we were let off at the next station.
It was a terrific program that fed the soul in multiple ways -- through Nathanson's poetry and music, through the musicians' performance, through Gurian's video, and again, through Nathanson's vibrant, athletic commitment to the whole of his performance.
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