Solstice beyond jazz, unruly mashup to meditative rhythm

Saxophonist Mars Williams and band ecstatically wed holiday songs and Albert Ayler anthems at the Hungry Brain in Chicago past 12 pm December 20  — the deepest, darkest, longest night of the year — then at 6 am December 21 percussionists Hamid Drake and Michael Zerang performed a flowing, meditative duet to get the sun up, for a crowd that felt like a congregation at Constellation.

(Better than Chicago’s 606 hiking/biking trail did, cancelling its first time “Solstice Viewing” from an astronomically aligned endpoint due to “inclement weather” — in Chicago in December, really? Just a little cold rain. . .)

Drake and Zerang, extending their 25-year tradition by offering this program on three mornings and evening concerts with other collaborators, began together with hesitant, delicate, then increasingly detailed fingertip work on frame drums. Their tapping grew faster, more numerous, like raindrops, longer in phrasing and richer of timbre as Zerang took a goblet-shaped drum in hand and Drake synced lyrically, intuitively with him on his well-tuned traps set. Eventually Zerang went to his traps, too. They kept steady pace, volume controlled, dimensions of the beat shifting like kaleidoscopic patterns that didn’t repeat but grew out one into the next.

They didn’t rush to a peak, but kept constant in progress. The concert was in a dance studio with folding chairs and people sitting on the floor around the drummers, who faced windows high in a western wall behind where most of us sat. So maybe Zerang and Drake saw a patch of Chicago’s sky turn from Hopperesque street-lit to rain-streaked grey. The drummers swung looser, more physically, as if having reached a high plateau they were stretching their muscles. And then assured that the sun had indeed returned, they let the energy they’d stirred up subside. The crowd remained silent. Zerang struck his gong, once. The crowd held its hush, as those vibrations rang and died. Someone breathed. We all applauded.

Just hours earlier – at the Brain around the corner and also presented by Constellation stalwart Mike Reed, to whom much credit for the verve of current cutting edge offerings is due — maverick reeds virtuoso Williams had led a no-holds-barred ensemble in a mind-boggling demonstration of the malleability of “The First Noel,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Partridge in a Pear Tree” and the like. The quaint caroling tunes proved perfectly well suited to mesh and meld with “The Truth Goes Marching In,” “Spirits” and other gloriously mad, insistent, utterly open airs from the Ayler songbook, jazz’s equivalents to the visions of William Blake.

Brassman Josh Berman brought the spirit of early jazz collective improv to his phrases, circling around and bouncing off Williams’ squeals and roars; cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm and pianist/Arp synthesist Jim Baker on one side of the stage supplied a wealth of contrasts and drama; bassists Kent Kessler and Brian Sandstrom (they use other instruments, too), standing on either side of inspired drummer Steve Hunt, plucked and bowed a springy underscore to it. Their unholy fun was perhaps ironic, perhaps celebratory, most likely both, definitely orchestral and wild party appropriate.

At the break, Mars mentioned he’d tried this imaginative program a week ago in New Orleans, with New Orleans musicians — “And it was different, but good, too.” His Chicago troupe was a slightly enlarged version of the band Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and he said he’d been trying to book it in Europe, thought he’d had an engagement in Amsterdam, but then the venue said no, though they could do it in June. “This is a Christmas show!” Mars told them. For those of us who hate the season’s kitschy commercial bombast, seasonal favorites in the key of Ayler were the perfect antidote. Happy Hollydaze!

howardmandel.com
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