Reptet: Movin’ Ahead in the Tradition

[Johnny E]

Reptet: Movin' Ahead in the Tradition

BY PETER MONAGHAN

Reptet is a traditional jazz band.Not so much because you hear, coursing through their forward-reaching music, the strains of Dixieland and many other later developments from it.The trad, swing, and bop elements are there, but Reptet is traditional in a simpler sense.When the sextet's four horns and solid rhythm section hoot and blast, weaving and walloping like a sideshow pugilist, they convey a sense that Reptet has engaged both the history of jazz styles and the art form's constant quest for innovation.

The vitality of the present and the promise of the future pervade their work as essentially as does a reverence for the past.And the results are impressive. At times, in their live performances, they appear a juggernaut jazz band, arresting, compelling, and just plain cranked-up.

And they show, on their just-released album, Do This!(Monktail Records) that they have many musical ideas at their command. It's an assured, dynamic effort that, like Reptet's live shows, relies on originals penned by four of the sextet's members.

Do This! is one of the most convincing albums of the last several years from Seattle jazz players. It manages to capture the thrill of the band's live performances, even as it operates within the very different dimensions of the studio. Their audience-friendly live shows are at times ragged affairs that, at their finest moments, sharpen from an unruly onrush to a concerted campaign, firing on several fronts, with the soloists in sympathy and the rhythm section as taut as rebar. Their recording displays similar spirit, but appeals less to the rawness and power of clubgoing than the pleasures of careful listening.

The cuts range. There's Tobi Stone's jauntily good-humored 'Bad Reed Blues' complete with squawks from said reed. There is Samantha Boshnack's set of hommages to the brothers Marx, of which 'Harpo', introduced with guest Bronn Journey's harp, salutes the most tenderly odd of the mob. And there's the soulful sorrow of Izaak Mills's 'H.R.'

Stone and Mills play a range of saxes, bass clarinets, flutes, and assorted other instruments. (In live shows Mills also wears odd hats, jumps about quite a bit, and ensures that getting out of the house is fun.) Boshnack plays trumpets - slided and slideless. Ben O'Shea is a captivating trombonist. Holding it all together (with the aid of the horn players' evident practiced cohesion and attention to each other), are versatile drummer John Ewing and commanding, thrumming bassist Benjamin Verdier.

For its individual contributions and group cohesion, Reptet is a band that deserves attention. It also appears ready for the encouragement, and provocation, of billing alongside much better-known, "national" acts.

The members of Reptet are all associated with the Monktail Creative Music Concern, a loose aggregation of jazz players who have a toe or two inside the mainstream and the rest of their selves in the many meandering tributaries of progressive jazz.

The consortium's members have formed mix-and-match lineups for their various purposes, most of which relate to that curious impulse of jazz to move the tradition ahead because, after all, doing so is the tradition.

The Reptet lineup of today results from a process of pruning and figgering that goes back several years to woodshedding that John Ewing organized in the late 90s. Members came and went, and in some cases, such as bassist Ben Verdier's, returned. One alumnus is trumpeter Chris Littlefield, now with Carl Denson's Tiny Universe. A crucial turn, for Reptet, was the moment when its members decided to replace a departing pianist with a trombonist, with the result that Reptet ventured on with no chordal instrument.

At first, says Samantha Boshnack, one of the band's four composers, "I was a bit nervous about composing for that lineup, but the instrumentation has opened up a lot of new ways of writing."

Three trombonists later, Ben O'Shea became a fixture of Reptet - a particularly sinuous and searching one.

At last year's Earshot Jazz Festival, the band performed with great spirit, and then another crucial lineup change took place: Saxophonist Tobi Stone, who had been playing with the Tiptons all-women saxophone combo, as she still is, returned.

That provided Reptet with real clout up front, and enough skilled horns that none predominates, and a sense of a shared undertaking emerges. "More than anything, with the passage of time and the introduction of new players, it went from a group that was seeking an identity to something that had some kind of identity," says Ewing.

Now, with the lineup set and the players settled and in synch, the group's composers have a distinctive lineup around which to frame their work.

Adopting an all-originals format has long been a way to raise the eyebrows of jazz's more hidebound listeners, but it has also been the natural way to go for players who - not to harp on the point - wish to show that tradition

is a progressive, not static or reified process.

For Mills, playing originals has a simple rationale: "Standards are music by people I don't know." And: "As a player it's just not as rewarding to play old music that other people played better." The opportunity to play originals is "probably why I stick around," he says. Ewing agrees: "When you play music by people you don't know, it's more an interpretation, versus a collaboration. When you can get it straight from the person who wrote it, it's happening at the moment."

In its ethos, Boshnack suggests, "Reptet is like a rock band. Everybody brings in stuff and then we work things out as a group. I never come in with what I want - I have an idea and everybody molds it."

The molding has been going on for some time, and it shows to great effect both in concerts and on disc. Part of the approach is to embrace some of the spirit of free jazz, but to retain charts. Says Mills: "Pre-planned, organized music is fun, but in a jazz context you too often end up with people who are reluctant to play organized things because they're too cool for school."

In fact, he says, sticking with written charts that nonetheless provide room for improvisation and interplay provides a solid basis for other kinds of innovation. For example, the band can then toy with the sonic opportunities that new technologies increasingly permit on stage and on disc. He says: "We're open to other recording capabilities, besides just playing in a room with two mics - overdubbing, different recording sounds, electronic sounds..."

"Another strength of the group, I think," chimes in Ben Verdier, "is that we play some things that are very accessible, and some that push the boundary more. It's a great thing to bring people along who might not listen to the more out sorts of things."

Interestingly, the group's writing sustains the feel of accessible "tunes" even as it often is intricate and conveys a fascinating sense of jazz history. A comparison, in that sense, might be the sinewy, braided, old-and-new sounds that Henry Threadgill conjures from his distinctive bands.

Reptet's version of this - Mills's funny hats, etc. - is in similar spirit to Threadgill's summoning of the circus, the sideshow, and the barroom.

"We're definitely not a sad group," says Ewing. "And we're not a sip-your-martini and pontificate-about-whatever type of group."

Says Verdier: "We do well in situations where we can feel the focus of the audience on us. I enjoy getting to play jazz without what Izaak likes to call "jazz pressure." There's more expectation of formality that comes with saying your group plays jazz."

Edited June 6, 2006 by Johnny E