Verbs of Will was recorded just after Mark Helias (bass), Tony Malaby (tenor sax) and Tom Rainey (drums), the three members of Helias' Open Loose, returned from a 17-day tour of the West Coast. Malaby told me about the long drives involved, when the three would listen to Weather Report in the car. Helias' liner notes also allude to “the weather report ... constantly changing.”
What Malaby said he was most impressed by was the fluidity of the Weather Report recordings, that Wayne Shorter could come out of nowhere with a brilliant line on the saxophone and then disappear just as quickly, leaving Joe Zawinul's keyboard playing noticeably changed by the statement. There was no simple head/solos/head structure, a structure that Rainey has said bores him.
When they returned to New York and recorded this CD, that whole western trip, Weather Report included, was documented. But don't go listening for Shorter licks or for Helias to be playing a fretless electric bass. That's not how these three musicians work. When they learn, they are not learning a sound, or a product; when they learn, they learn the process of learning. In Weather Report, while packed into a car with all of their equipment, they heard a way of communicating with instruments, not the communication itself.
Helias' compositions are made for this kind of music; they allow for growth spurts that drive the music. (Years from now, the same compositions will allow for him and his compatriots to have made even more growth.) About the only thing his compositions have in common with one another is a lack of singular emotion. The same tune will not sound the same the next time they play it. The same phrase will not even sound the same. The same couple of notes might be joyous, forceful, mournful or funny next time.
Recently, the three played for a packed house at Barbes in Brooklyn, three years now since the cd was recorded, and many of the tunes had grown. On the cd, “How 'bout it” is a vamp of the sort whose energy is reaffirmed each time it repeats, its bass line jumping down and then climbing back up. As Helias repeats it, he phrases it every way imaginable, like an actor trying different deliveries of a new line. Even when he begins to play other lines, the vamp is still there, its swinging steps rooted somewhere between Malaby's throaty inversions and Rainey's evolving grooves. At Barbes, Malaby played the soprano sax to introduce the tune, along with Helias at the upper register of his bass. After a few minutes, the sway of their music began to approximate “How ‘bout it.” As they broke into the vamp, Malaby switched back to the tenor sax and the three powered through the tune like a ridiculously interesting rock group.
Most of Helias' compositions are not vamps, of course. While Verbs of Will has found him writing structures that are a little looser than on previous albums, like 1998's Come Ahead Back, the new songs are still generally elaborate. Some, like “King Judas,” have acrobatic changes of direction. Its head is a tricky set of question-and-answer, with Rainey doing a little of each and a lot of tight cymbal-work. Then, the others drop out and Malaby starts a conversational melody that quickly grows in intensity. Soon, he is rejoined and it almost feels like a solo, but Helias and Rainey are doing so much. Then all three begin to clearly play another theme (which it sounds like they've reached through intuition as much as lead sheet), where Malaby plays each phrase twice (more or less), Helias plays quickly rising groups of repeating notes and Rainey gets even more exacting with the cymbals. All of the ideas begin to unfold into new ones from there before they slip into an ending as acrobatic as the beginning. But who knows how they'll play it next time.
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