Alliance for Improvised Music

Ellery Eskelin at Duke

JAZZ SPOT
by Stan Dick
(A second draft of an article that originally appeared in the Specator Magazine


Tenor saxophonist ELLERY ESKELIN's trio appeared at the Nelson Music Room on Duke's East Campus last Thursday night and presented a unique take on jazz and improvisation. 

The band's book plays with expectations of composition and improvisation. The selections are carefully crafted, but constructed more than composed. The selections jump cut between multiple segments without obvious transitions. Segments vary from a few seconds in length to extended improvisations, with sudden shifts in tone, texture, rhythm and groove. Genres are suggested, explored, subverted, and abandoned in a headlong rush. The trio sometimes merged lines, but frequently at least two of the players established patterns that pulled against one another. Just when things appeared to be wandering away from any coherent center, the tension was resolved by a sudden, choreographed transition into another episode.

While the construction of the selections at first appears wildly arbitrary, an overall architecture emerges. The organizing principal isn't symmetry, but balance. The selections are aural counterparts to Caudal's mobiles, with disparate pieces skillfully assembled and arrayed to create an overall balance. The form is simultaneously fixed and stable, yet free and mobile.

While the emphasis was on collective construction, Eskelin's powerful musical presence focused the performance. He is a remarkable player, with an assured sense of swing, melody, and traditional harmonic improvisation, as on the main theme of "Harmonia" and the haunting Eastern European line of "100 Days". But for Eskelin, the traditional boundaries of the tenor vocabulary are his starting point rather than a destination. His restless imagination explores extreme chromaticism, timbre extremes, quirky rhythmic accents and inversions and eccentric phrasing. At times, Eskelin's keening tone and melodic sense recalled Ornette's classic dirges. But Eskelin is his own man, working out an extraordinary and original approach to the tenor saxophone tradition.

Drummer Jim Black contributed strongly to the wildly shifting textures and fascinating colorations of the performance. Black is amazing - a melodic percussionist with a unique sense of embellishment and punctuation, and an inexhaustible rhythmic imagination. He effortlessly shifted between grooves and tones, weaving bold patterns against subtle sonic filigrees. His sound is distinctive and unusually dark. He avoids relying on any static statement of the beat, constantly shifting patterns. He employs tiny bells, chains, a bow, and his fingers to produce an extraordinarily wide range of sonic textures and dynamics. The evening could have been well spent concentrating on the endless rhythmic and melodic possibilities that Black continually uncovered, developed and explored.

Andrea Parkins' accordion, sampler, and electric keyboard completed the trio. She rarely played solos, frequently limiting herself to large, bold strokes of chordal coloration that provided pivot points for the compositions. During the performance she summonsed ghostly organ wails, walking bass lines, reeling ethnic figures and drones, shadowed Eskelin's spiralling lines, shifting tempos and textures with controlled abandon.

This is wildly adventurous music, challenging traditional conceptions of composition, structure, genre distinctions and definitions, all executed with brilliant precision. If you missed the show, pick up the new disc, One Great Day (hatOLOGY), and prepare for something unexpected, unprecedented, and exhilarating.


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