Alliance for Improvised Music

New Show


  Companion Trio: Interdimensional Meddlers?

The Companion Trio - Evan Rapport (reeds), Jerry Lim (guitar), Bob Wagner (drums) - will drop in on Sat, Feb 6, 8 pm at Two Way Pull Records in Chapel Hill. A $5 donation is requested at the door. Guitarist Mark Sullivan opens. Sponsored by AIM.

Companion TrioThe Companion Trio are Jerry Lim (guitar), Bob Wagner (drums), and Evan Rapport (reeds)--a group who let the air out of freely improvised, post-jazz music. In fact they may take the metaphor out of metaphors, because their music walks off the page, leaving the listener with the impression that they have heard highly sophisticated, intensely performed music which extends the vocabulary of structure--and without leaving any evidence.

Though aspects of their music can be traced to the "jazz" and "free jazz" idioms, what is most striking about it is the distance of abstraction which these elements travel without losing their cool. Aspects of melodic and rhythmic syntax, largely implied, are played out in unexpectedly strange and dissociated ways; the connections between elements that give them meaning are stretched to the limit. In the final analysis, the music renovates the tradition of jazz as a sort of virtuosity of spirit, where ever-more-flexible worlds are sought in the spirit of focus. Their music has an unaccountable amount of space... wide distances, echoes; sometimes I think someone left a window open. For those who understand it, Companion Trio's music verges on the meaningless or ludicrous, but it is the kind of void where things begin, not end.

Evan Rapport, the group's leader, is a fierce multi-reed player who has assimilated an extremely diverse range of musical traditions and has virtuoso "avant-garde" technique. His sound is assertive-even masculine-and has a pointedness and economy that is counter-balanced by roving tentacles of deep, fluid tone. His playing often  invokes historic players in deep sense, not the cheap sense of pastiche, but his sense of development and large-scale structure are largely unique. Rapport is very learned, especially for his age, and has the sort of confidence which makes it possible for a leader to create an atmosphere conducive to deep group sound exploration and idiom building. In the case of  Companion, the idiom is nurtured in Rapport's very open-ended "compositions" which are loose gambits, often involving repetition of material, extreme abstraction, and incongruous roles among the players. It is typical of Rapport's "compositions" that they require extended listening before they reveal their 'intensionality' or structured-ness. In this sense, his compositions are NOT MACROCOSMIC, whatever that means.

That the sartorial Jerry Lim's guitar playing is perhaps the most recognizably "jazz" voice in the group is misleading. Though Lim walks bass, comps chords and swings medlodic lines in the same breath with the best of them, his musical concept is also painfully oblique, even perverse. At one Companion show in Philadelphia, Lim's solo consisted of sawing on a single string for fifteen minutes with the edge of meat-cleaver he had cleverly hidden in the sleeve of his voluminous robe. The resulting sound (frantic, textural, scrapping) was somehow cut from the same cloth as his jazzier playing from a moment before. Given the intensity of Lim's all-too-wide smile in that sweltering room, one speculates if he himself knew the difference, or if he had gone on to some next level of consciousness where it was possible to mistake people for small dogs, or romantic love for a squirrel hiding nuts in your head. In any case, there is no accounting for Lim's existence, which is absolutely puzzling, as he was never born, and is in fact just a figment of Rapport's overheated imagination.

Perhaps the greatest anomaly in the group is Bob "CousCous" Wagner, called by some natives 'the Han Bennik of Hampden.' Wagner is my all time favorite drummer, and a former band mate of mine from previous units, for whom I have unlimited respect. Wagner's background is in heavy metal music, macrobiotic cooking, and the folkways "Corn Goddess" boxed set, but somehow he makes it all swing, or at least unravel unevenly. While Wagner's chops as a jazz and rock drummer are superficially somewhat ill-developed, he is an absolutely  incredible "non-idomatic" original with a sense of time all his own which is simultaneously oddly funny and highly expressive. He seems to play without cycles, adding beats in ever-forward lurching series, perhaps comparably to Indian Tala, if they were encoded in a wind-up dancing monkey with cymbals. His use of found sounds and extended techiques is not demonstration-fetish virtuosity, but it is highly integrated into his playing in a special way, and irresistable. Who else would play an acoustically dead plastic puppy-head with such verve? "Kinetic Poking," "Arhythmic Rumbeling Tumbeling," "Lime Fizz," "Aquatic Pottery-barn," "Hide and Seek," "Poison Chocolate Sampler," I get exhausted trying to give names to all of Bob's great stylistic contributions. With typical modesty, Wagner probably said it best when he said "I come to this country on a bus. Now I play music for mister Rapport."

So Companion Trio change the world, but not without a certain price, a loosening and yanking of the rugs. It hard to say if their three cultures--Jewish, Korean and Vegetarian--are deeply in evidence in the music, or if they have simply ceased to care about propriety altogether and are just a bunch of highly talented weirdos unified around some very abstract music. Their sound requires considerable intensity of involvement from the audience, which must--humorously--supply much of the continuity to the discourse, as I have tried to do in this article. But if there is a semantic void in their music it is certainly a pause that refreshes. Simultaneously conservative and radical, in a way which confused both camps, let's just say Companion Trio are the three little ear candles of improvised music, and leave it at that. Check them out and be changed.

--John Berndt, 1999

John Berndt is an improviser, composer, philosopher, organizer, writer, lover, cook, business person, neoist, saxophonist, etc. etc. who has been deeply involved in Baltimore experimental music for fifteen years. He was surprised when Evan Rapport crawled out of the woodwork in 1996 at the beginning of a renaissance in Baltimore music, [Rapport completed a triad of avant-garde saxophonists leading a triad of trios in Baltimore, including Berndt and John Dierker.] Berndt Group's include THAT NOTHING IS KNOWN with Jack Wright, Michael Zerang and Bob Marsh; Music in The Key of Zero with Catherine Pancake and Tom Boram; and THUS with Neil Feather. He runs the CD label RECORDED and FIELD RECORDINGS. He is currently feeding his two cats, fluffy.

Also check out: Walt Davis' article on the Trio


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