Equal
Interest
First
Congregational Church 1125 SW Park Ave., 772-0772
7:30 pm Wednesday, Oct. 20 $12-$14
Equal Interest is also playing in Seattle's Earshot jazz festival
at On the Boards,
(206) 547-9787. 8 pm Thursday, Oct. 21. $12-$14.
The trio will conduct a workshop earlier that day.
In the late '70s, when Myra Melford was a student at Washington's
Evergreen State College, she checked out a Leroy Jenkins concert
at Olympia's Gnu Deli. The violinist, composer and founding
member of the Chicago-based Association for the Advancement
of Creative Musicians blew her away.
"It was very exciting for me," says Melford in a young-girl
voice that still hiccups with the thrill of discovery. "After
hearing him, I said, that's what I want to do with my life--play
music as impassioned as that."
A short time later, she traveled to Seattle and witnessed
the theatrical mayhem of the Art Ensemble of Chicago, the
AACM quintet featuring multi-reedist and composer Joseph
Jarman. Though it would be a few years before she'd meet
Jarman in person, the show stuck.
Now, 20 years after young Melford's heady introductions
to these two jazz icons, she's living the dream of every
hopeful who's ever venerated a musical idol. Melford, Jenkins
and Jarman now form the three legs of Equal Interest, a
reed-violin-piano combo that unites three of the most unique
creative-music composers of the last part of the century
in a push toward sonic nirvana.
While Melford split for the experimental-jazz mecca of
Brooklyn, N.Y., soon after graduating from Evergreen, she
views Equal Interest's loop through the West Coast wetlands
as something of a homecoming. "The Northwest is kind of
where this all started for me," she says. "It's very special
to be coming back to play here with two of the mentors who
got me started."
Scanning the stats of the Melford-Jarman-Jenkins collective
is like reviewing the last 30 years of jazz history. Jarman
and Jenkins were both founding members of the AACM, the
Chicago-based music collective that developed from a Muhal
Richard Abrams big band in the 1960s and went on to become
one of the creative catalysts for jazz's ever-evolving new
voice. In his nearly 20 years with the Art Ensemble, Jarman
also helped create a sublime soundtrack to the African-American
inner-city experience, pushing the jazz recital into the
realm of performance art.
In his own Revolutionary Ensemble, Jenkins established
the violin as a weapon to be reckoned with in the new music
arsenal. The sounds he pulls from his fiddle and bow are
alternately humorous and disquieting, always rooted in the
mystery of the blues. As a composer, his reach extends from
ragged, transcendent jazz to hip-hop opera.
Melford, the relative baby of the band, has caught up at
warp speed. Her music, rhapsodic and rhythmically monstrous,
snakes along, mixing tight ensemble passages with frenzied
improvisation. In her playing, you hear the history of jazz
piano, from James P. Johnson to Art Tatum to Cecil Taylor
and Muhal Richard Abrams.
Though the three met up shortly after Melford made her
New York move in '84, they didn't actually play together
until the fall of '96. An AACM concert spotlighted compositions
by Jarman and Jenkins, and the pair tabbed Melford to tickle
the keys.
"The first half of the show was designed as a free improvisation,"
she remembers, "where each improviser would have an equal
interest in creating the piece. It went so well, Muhal said
the piece should be called 'Equal Interest.'" Cynthia Herbst,
owner of Ocean Records, happened to be in the audience that
night and convinced the trio to record together. "So we
did a disc called Out of the Mist," says Melford,
"and then we were forced to name the group. Equal Interest
made sense." A gig at New York City's Knitting Factory started
the ball rolling, and dates in Boston, D.C. and Oakland
soon followed.
With three strong leaders and individual voices contributing
to the musical melting pot of the trio's repertoire, the
group tosses egos aside and creates a new and flexible music.
Traditionalists may ask, "Is it jazz?" Melford responds
after some thought, "I'd say jazz-slash-new music, 'cause
I don't want to mislead people into thinking we're playing
standards. It's not your typical jazz: head, solo, solo,
out. It's written music developed through improvisation."
A frenetic, free style is still present in Equal Interest's
work, but it now shares the stage with Buddhist-influenced,
meditative passages, creating a dramatic maturity, a push
and pull of harmonic tension. Melford feels there's a definite
symmetry in the pairing of Buddhism and improvisation. "Improvisation
is about playing in the moment," she says. The studied unity
of the written sections anchors the improvised passages
to create a suspenseful interchange.
"What it comes down to," Melford says emphatically, "is
that we're each really expressing our own voices through
our music. What's always inspired me the most when I listen
to other's music is hearing a genuine 'human' voice coming
through the music. I hope what you'll hear with Equal Interest
is three voices really communicating with each other with
heart."
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Willamette Week | originally
published October 20,
1999
|
