Although drummer Lou Grassi has worked with some of the most prominent avant-garde musicians of our time, you could just as easily find him on a park bandstand playing Dixieland. He’s one of those musicians who flows seamlessly through the many faces of jazz, and as his website says, “He has literally played from Ragtime to No-Time.” To date Grassi has appeared on over sixty recordings, and this new release represents another shining facet of his multidimensional career.
Recorded in 2000 at New York City’s legendary Knitting Factory, Grassi is joined by his long-running Po Band. The personnel of the Po Band shifts on occasion, but it always includes the crème de la crème of avant-garde jazz: this time it’s trumpeter Paul Smoker, trombonist Steve Swell, clarinetist Perry Robinson, and the late great bassist Wilber Morris. The band is joined on this occasion by saxophonist and flautist Marshall Allen, who sprinkles some Arkestra stardust atop an already powerful group.
The CD consists of three songs, two clocking in at 23 minutes, and another at 13 minutes. This is avant-garde jazz at its improvisational best, with plenty of time for the songs to bloom and the individual musicians to unfold. Each song starts gently, with the musicians exploring the silence, offering up blurts and tweets and bits of melody. This slow simmering eventually starts to cook, building to a roiling boiling feast of sound. If you like your jazz wild and raucous and free, this is the CD for you — and if your neighbors aren’t home, turn this one up LOUD.
It’s a delight to experience the energy that exists between the musicians on this session, to witness the way they inspire and cajole one another. Together they create lines of thought and sound, explore them, expand them, and then smash them to bits — or perhaps just drop them into silence. And although one of the songs features a melody line by Paul Smoker, for the most part this music is something they all created from thin air, just like that.
The painter Mark Rothko once said, “I do not believe that there was ever a question about being abstract or being representational. It is really a matter of ending this silence and solitude, of breathing and stretching one’s arms again.” This is exactly what music can do: hold out a hand and invite the listener into a community of sound. So sit back and enjoy this CD, which holds out a hand from the dark, quirkily cornered Knitting Factory, deep in the heart of pre-9/11 downtown Manhattan, on a late September evening not so long ago.
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