Two keyboardists crank out massive chords and strange, electronic sound effects.
A percussionist churns up great bursts of shimmering sound, while an Apple PowerBook operator creates a space-age array of blips and bleeps.
And at the center of this swirl of instrumental color stands trumpeter Dave Douglas, his clarion horn piercing through the sonic fabric, his phrases built upon the most basic facets of blues vernacular.
It’s an exotic blend, this merger of high-tech noise and low-tech trumpet blues, but it proved remarkably persuasive Thursday night at the Chicago Cultural Center. The occasion was the Chicago debut of Douglas’ “Witness” band, drawn from the brilliant new recording of the same name, and it represented a quantum leap in the maturation of an already accomplished trumpeter-composer.
If Douglas’ previous venture at the Chicago Cultural Center with his Charms of the Night Sky Band offered an entertaining but ultimately flawed blending of jazz improvisation and faux Eastern European folk music, the “Witness” project mostly avoided such self-conscious genre-bending. Instead, the trumpeter this time delved into a free-wheeling sonic vocabulary that he truly understands — blues-tinged horn solos, microtonal pitches, carefully orchestrated noise and ingenious blendings of acoustical and electronic idioms.
This is a music built more on events than on themes, a sound conceived with exotic instrumental colors rather than traditional chord changes and theme-and-variation structures.
How does Douglas make it all cohere? In essence, he asks his players to create perpetually shifting layers of gauzy sound, with pitches, noises and seemingly random rhythmic ideas undulating before the ear. Yet the themes that Douglas plays on trumpet or occasionally passes along to the other musicians remain remarkably simple and direct — a three-note riff here, a mercurial blues line there.
Thus, despite its textural complexity, the music that Douglas has composed for “Witness” becomes remarkably straightforward and accessible. Even when all manner of instruments and technology are interacting, Douglas takes pains to give his listeners something to latch onto: a melodic riff, a kinetic backbeat or a particularly lush wave of sound.
In some ways, Douglas’ experiments resemble the new work that Chicago reedist Ken Vandermark has been formulating during the past year or so with his extraordinary Territory Band. Though Vandermark has been using a broader orchestral palette, he, too, has tapped into remarkable new realms of sound by combining old and new musical technologies. If Vandermark’s venture has been considerably more complex and tautly controlled than Douglas’, both artists are pointing toward new forms of jazz ensemble improvisation and composition.
At its best, Douglas’ “Witness” music appeals to two audiences at once. Listeners unfamiliar with his musical and technological ideas can respond to the rhythmic momentum and sonic incident of this music, while Douglas devotees can appreciate the daring of his experiment and the fearlessness with which he and his band pursue it.
Even so, there were a few slow moments during Douglas’ show, particularly the clarinet solos of the otherwise reliable Chris Speed, whose pseudo-klezmer playing relies on cliches. The fault, however, was not entirely Speed’s, since the “Witness” music does not support long solo statements. To hear anyone step forward for very long is to sabotage the central achievement of this music, which lies in the way six artists marshal such a breadth of color, texture, rhythm, pitch and noise.
When the players kept their solo statements concise, they made their point far more effectively, as the keyboard eruptions of Craig Taborn and the electronic percussion of Ikue Mori affirmed.
Though the “Witness” recording contains text expressing an explicitly political message, the concert version (performed without text) proved so cohesive as to render words unnecessary.
