New Languages Festival Makes Avant-Garde Inviting, if Not Compromising

[Lazaro Vega]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

May 15, 2006

Jazz Review

New Languages Festival Makes Avant-Garde Inviting, if Not Compromising

By NATE CHINEN

Communication can sometimes seem like a secondary concern in the adamantine ranks of jazz's avant-garde. But proponents of new music do enjoy connecting with audiences, and occasionally manage to do so without compromise or contortion. That was the deceptively simple idea behind the New Languages Festival on Friday and Saturday nights at Rose, a sleek new lounge in Williamsburg.

Friday night's offerings did support the notion of an accessible experimental music, though perhaps not as convincingly as planned. Out of three featured bands, the one that received the strongest response was the one that took the fewest risks. But that group, Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble, had the advantage of going on late in the evening, when the audience had effectively tripled. It also had rhythm staunchly on its side.

By contrast, rhythm was a slippery sort of ally for the alto saxophonist Jackson Moore, who performed earlier with his working quartet. This was by design: Mr. Moore was one of the festival's organizers, and he presented the evening's most challenging music. (His founding partner and fellow saxophonist, Aaron Ali Shaikh, led a group of his own on Saturday.)

There were four pieces in Mr. Moore's set, each with a similar title and slightly warped propulsion. "Identity T" moved fitfully, as the drummer Tommy Crane and the bassist Eivind Opsvik stopped time at irregular intervals. But Mr. Moore was unperturbed; his improvisation, strictly in the low-to-middle register of his horn, conveyed an indifferent cool. It was only during a subsequent turn by the vibraphonist Mike Pinto that the piece's rhythmic tensions were exploited.

Elsewhere in the set, even Mr. Pinto gave in to the music's hypnotic pull. "Identity O" featured a series of meter modulations, while "Identity M" induced its trance with a generally indeterminate pulse. Despite the abstruseness, there was an omnipresent swing: when Mr. Moore and Mr. Pinto dug in together, the results were like an update of the hard bop that Jackie McLean made with Bobby Hutcherson more than 40 years ago.

There were more willfully contemporary allusions in the music of Mr. Opsvik, who played an opening set with his group Overseas. "Doggerbanken," one of his new pieces, featured some rhythmic gamesmanship that seemed inspired by Mr. Moore. Otherwise the songs were sturdy and unassuming vessels, almost poplike, and anything but opaque.

Of course they were abstracted, inflated or deconstructed by the band. The tenor saxophonist Tony Malaby did most of the heavy pillaging; he sounded fiercest on "Tilt of Timber," an offhandedly funky tune. On a more somber piece, "Still the Tiger Town," he initially adhered to a music-box melody but quickly frothed up to screeching range.

Mr. Opsvik locked in tightly with the drummer Kenny Wollesen and the pianist Jacob Sacks. As a trio they nailed one of the set's more cohesive numbers, "Maritime Safety"; Mr. Sacks, playing an out-of-tune upright piano, embellished the melody with rickety chord clusters and fast, upsweeping runs. Mr. Wollesen kept the groove steady and deep.

Akoya Afrobeat Ensemble had its own steady groove: more of a thumping, unrelenting thing. Led by Kaleta, a singer and conga drummer once affiliated with the Nigerian pop hero Fela Kuti, the group comprised a dozen members, all of whom intermittently joined in singing. On the set's most distinctive piece, "U.S.A.," they all responded to a list of sociopolitical cues with an unequivocal indictment: "Not true." (U.S.A., in the parlance of this band, stands for "Unilateral System of Attack.")

With two guitarists, two baritone saxophonists and several percussionists, among other things, Akoya left subtlety at the curb. This tactic was effective: dancers crowded the foot of the stage until the last downbeat, just before 2 a.m. Of course there's nothing new about this body language. But it's still powerful, precisely because it's universal.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company