Bill Frisell paused briefly as he sought the right words for his feelings about the electric guitar duos he’d been playing with Julian Lage at UCLA’s Royce Hall on Thursday. He gave up quickly.
“Whatever this is,” he concluded with a sheepish shrug.
Frankly, he couldn’t have said it better.
Watching these two masters play together, it was as impossible to fully comprehend what they were doing, as much as it was impossible to comprehend that what they were doing was on just 12 strings, played by just four hands, the harmonic complexities of the combination often defying musical physics. At times it seemed even they were as mystified not just by what it was, but how it even could be. You could see it in their faces, especially on the face of Frisell, 68, whose sweetness and kindness matches his huge talents, marveling at what Lage, a veteran at just 31, was wringing from the neck of his Telecaster. Sometimes Frisell sat out and just watched his young partner, beaming with a broad grin.
For us in the audience it was a grin-fest as well. The adventurous virtuosity (a word that seems inadequate for this meshing of their artistry) was spiked at all times by both parties’ playfulness. Lage in particular would head off into dazzling displays that brought both squeals of astonishment and peals of delighted laughter, Frisell parrying with his own spritely, if more genteel, sparkle.
This was there no matter what they were playing, be it some 12-bar blues or idiosyncratic Monk (is there any other kind?). Threading it all together were various standards, including “All the Things You Are,” in homage to Jim Hall, whose spirit both of them hold, and an idyllic stroll through “Shenandoah,” something of a Frisell signature, here given a fresh skip from Lage’s shining sense of wonder.
Strolling, for that matter, makes a good descriptive for their approach to it all. They went on strolls together.
“We’re going to find our way to another song,” Lage said, introducing “Shenandoah.” (And now you’ve read nearly everything that they spoke in the course of the show).
Usually one of them would begin solo, sometimes after a chuckle-bringing Alphonse and Gaston moment(“You start.” “No, you start.” “No, please, YOU start.”). Improvising, they would move from dissonant (though never discordant) to melodic (though never mawkish) without a seeming care, as if those are just different aspects of the same thing. And in their loving care they are.
There was one frustration, though visual, not musical, as it was impossible (there’s that word again) to watch both players at once. Any time you’d look at one of their hands, the other was certain to do something incredible. So then you’d switch to him, and the other would do something unbelievable. For the whole show. Oh well, such is the price.
And you gotta love a duo that with the encore, after a transfixing 90 minutes of probing, prodding and teasing into new musical spaces of expression, sends the audience out humming the Snow White classic “Someday My Prince Will Come.”
A joy to whatever this is, indeed.
For a sense of what this is, here’s a video of a complete 2018 show by the pair:
In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Benny Maupin and John McLaughlin were essential parts of Miles Davis’ “Bitches Brew” band that would reinvent jazz, or really invent a new kind of music. On Friday and Saturday, respectively, each played a concert in L.A. dedicated to their own landmark works from shortly after they left Davis’ employ — a mere coincidence of scheduling, but a wonders-filled chance to compare and contrast two divergent, but related paths of visionary artists, and each show a marvel in its own right.
(Photo by Rachel Murray/Getty Images for UCLA’s Center for the Art of Performance)
By Steve Hochman
Friday night, Bennie Maupin addressed the audience at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater underneath Walt Disney Concert Hall, just after completing the first-ever full concert performance of his landmark 1974 album, “The Jewel in the Lotus.”
“It’s like a dream that continues,” the woodwinds maestro said, overflowing with gratitude. “But it continues with you…. You were worth waiting for.”
The next night, at UCLA’s Royce Hall, a beaming John McLaughlin echoed that as he concluded what he says is his last-ever U.S. tour with a set largely spotlighting the music of his revolutionary ‘70s jazz-rock-and-beyond Mahavishnu Orchestra groups.
“Good vibes!” the guitarist exclaimed at the start of his set, and later at the end he thanked the fans for getting to be there “with you.”
That coursed through both performances. Maupin, switching between flute, soprano sax and his signature instrument, bass clarinet, led a 10-piece band with palpable joy and appreciation for the fans there to see it. McLaughlin was just as buoyed as he strapped on his custom-built Paul Reed Smith double-neck electric12-and-6-string guitar as his 4th Dimension quartet was joined by opener Jimmy Herring’s Invisible Whip quintet and started the shimmering arpeggiated chords opening his “Meeting of the Spirits.”
It was mutual. It seemed many in both audiences had waited, well, decades to hear this music performed like this. REDCAT bristled with anticipation before that concert, the album’s nuanced power and crackling sense of invention and exploration having gained stature in jazz legend over the years, at least among a diverse array of fans and artists, including L.A. percussionist-composer Alex Cline and writer-director Cameron Crowe, both in attendance this night.
And at Royce, many exchanged memories of seeing the original Mahavishnu Orchestra back when, some in 1974 in this very same room, as life-changing events. This writer saw that group in spring ’73, nearly 45 years ago, at the Granada Theater in Santa Barbara, taken by a high school friend without ever having heard a note of the band before. It still stands as a profound moment, ears opened, head turned around by the power and mystery of the music, unlike anything I’d ever heard before. But this weekend it wasn’t just old folks reliving their youth. In both settings, younger people in attendance were eager to be part of something they’d heard about as history but for which they were born to late to experience themselves.
They were not disappointed.
Both Maupin and McLaughlin approached their classic music with all the verve, vibrancy and imagination that brought it about in the first place. These were not mere recreations of cherished recordings, but re-creation, the acts of creative artists still inspired by great music of the past but also still adventurously seeking new routes, new combinations, new expressions. A title of one of the pieces from the Maupin album serves as a nice motto for the approach of both evenings: “Past + Present = Future.”
Now, astute fans of the particular pasts represented here will get the significance of this two-night sequence — not that each alone merits anything less than adulation. Maupin and McLaughlin were each part of one of the most significant, and perhaps controversial, turns in modern jazz: the band that helped Miles Davis realize new approaches to his music, to music in general, with a series of recordings that included the, uh, milestone “Bitches Brew” album.
So here, through an accident of fortuitous scheduling, it was possible to see these two key figures present their own most profound statements, to compare and contrast. Maupin’s “Lotus,” coming on the heels of his work in Herbie Hancock’s electric Headhunters and Mwandishi outfits, was a largely acoustic exploration, airy yet grounded and restlessly meditative, which is not really such a contradiction in terms. Mahavishnu Orchestra was a largely electric hybrid, loud and raw, yet also centered in a spirituality at once calm and searching.
Both brought expanded lineups, and expanded concepts, to the new performances. Both brought levels of vitality and energy that belied the passage of years. Maupin for Friday’s concert assembled a little 10-member chamber group, including several faculty and alums of CalArts, where he teaches, adding viola (Eyvind Kang), cello (Shana Tucker) and vibes/marimba (David Johnson) to the septet format of the album. The very nature of the music involves the players having space and encouragement to experiment, to stretch, but always in concert with the others. All told, the performance doubled the length of the original album version, not a note seeming wasted or less than essential.
(Photo by Steve Gunther)
It was jazz, sure, but also more. This was explicit in the title piece, which started with young pianist Lindsey Hundley, seemingly undaunted to step into a spot originally held by Hancock, beautifully evoking Debussy impressionism. From their flowed elements ranging from Indian classical music (percussionist Eric McKain creating tabla sounds with an electronic pad) to cool jazz (Johnson’s vibes and the guitar of Jeff Parker, formerly of the band Tortoise, putting personal stamps on traditional sounds). And the strings brought in experimental/classical music, at times percussive, at times elastic, at times transcending or confounding attempts to fix time signatures and tonal centers, and wondrously so. The leader, generous to a fault, switched between flute, soprano sax and, his signature instrument, bass clarinet, at times joyously parrying with alto saxist Steve Lehman.
The sounds throughout called forth images meteorological — flurries, breezes, roiling storms — as much as musical, though the pioneering global perspectives of Yusef Lateef and Eric Dolphy are clear touchstones, with perhaps the most profound presence being Alice Coltrane’s unclassifiable musical universe, where borders between musics and cultures simply don’t exist. And all this with just one full rehearsal the day before.
On Saturday, the audience had already been treated to full sets by jam ’n’ jazz veteran guitarist Herring and band and McLaughlin’s band before the two units joined forces for the bracing 90-minute finale of this collaborative “Meeting of the Spirits” tour. What preceded was wonderful, Herring’s combo combining the worlds of jazz-rock a la ‘70s Jeff Beck and the flow of the Allman Brothers (including a fine version of their “Les Brers in A Minor”), and McLaughlin drawing from his very wide-ranging scope (Indian, Iberian, jazz classic and modern) and incomparable talents and touch in electric and electrifying joy. But this last portion was why everyone was here, and expectations were more than met.
While doubling up nearly everything — two basses, two drum sets, two keyboard and, of course, two guitarists, with Jason Crosby’s violin the lone loner — would seem a recipe for a mess, the result was anything but. The drummers (McLaughlin’s India-born marvel Ranjit Barot, who also engaged in some Indian konnakol vocalised percussion, and Herring’s Jeff Sipe) and bassists (Etienne M’Bappé and Kevin Scott, respectively) have developed remarkably intuitive rapport in the course of the tour. One or the other of each pair sat out at various points, and when they all played together they complemented without over-complicating each others’ playing and then, at times, locked together in mixes of power and grace.
It was not as raw and rough as the original Mahavishnu Orchestra could be, but it drew on that and added new aspects and insights, past + present. “Birds of Fire,” the soaring title track of Mahavishnu’s 1973 second album, sported an exhilarating duel of McLaughlin and Crosby trading sparkling improvisations in a quick exchange. (See video below.) There was true beauty in the power as well, with “Lotus on Irish Streams” and “Dance of the Maya” allowing all the musicians space to add their own stamps. And with the “Eternity’s Breath” suite, originally done by a second Mahavishnu lineup after McLaughlin disbanded the first, this 2017 grouping stripped off some of the slicker sheen of the recording to reveal depths.
Judging from a scan of set lists from previous shows on the trek, this was an expanded set, as if McLaughlin and crew didn’t really want it to end. Neither did many of us. But a closing encore two-fer proved a perfect summation, a perfect end to a remarkable two days of concerts: “You Know You Know” and “Be Happy.” We do. We are.
Lucinda Williams wasn’t mincing any (of Bob Dylan’s) words when she sang “Masters of War” Friday night at UCLA’s Royce Hall. Charles Lloyd took it way beyond words. And the words may not exist to adequately describe the wonders of the band, the aptly named Marvels — Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Leisz on steel, Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums — that sax-and-flute man Lloyd has brought together in recent years and showcased this electrifying night, with Williams as special guest.
Questions, mysteries — the Big Questions and the Great Glorious Mysteries — are to be expected at a time that has seen a rare convergence of Passover and Holy Week. But a week with both MOAB and Easter is the opposite, a time of disconnects, of distressing questions. Of confusion and despair.
But if you are looking for a way to connect it all, if not provide answers or make sense, you would be hard-pressed to do better than with the three-song sequence that concluded this, yes, glorious concert. “Masters of War,” with its simmering, bitter anger, provided a climactic peak to the show, Williams joining Lloyd and band for the latter portion of the set. And then, the encore brought the persistence of determination-driven faith and hard-won renewal with Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come” and, returning to Dylan, “I Shall Be Released.” There we had it, the Seder tale and Easter story encapsulated in a, pardon the expression, trinity of song.
What came prior to this righteous culmination Friday night was no less, well, masterful and marvelous. In the hour or so before Williams joined in, Lloyd and the Marvels expounded and expanded on the genre-less explorations captured on their 2016 album, “I Long to See You.” It, too, is all about connections, even more clearly and profoundly in this concert as they all have gone deeper into their considerable, collective talents. This is a group that was able to go from the skittery joy of Ornette Coleman’s “Ramblin’” and Lloyd’s loping mid-‘60s classic “Sombrero Sam” to the somber solitude of Thelonious Monk’s “Monk’s Mood” and, profoundly, Brian Wilson’s “In My Room” with nary a blink.
“Ramblin’” had Frisell and Leisz, who have become a remarkably intuitive team via recent collaborations, pushing each other in intricately interweaving lines over the rumbling thunder propelled by Rogers and Harland — this is where the Allman Brothers meet Ornette, and it’s a pretty lively place. “In My Room” started and finished with Frisell’s deceptively casual impressionism, framing the group’s collective explorations of tune and textures, led by Lloyd’s signature love of the melody and insatiable curiosity for where he can take it. Or where it can take him. (As it has been through his storied, varied career, in which he has always ignored imposed lines between musical styles — a rare mix of high-minded musicality with a naturally populist streak, fully flowering in the current Marvels projects.)
Through it all on Friday, gentility sparkled with delight, power gained strength from peace — and vice versa. Lloyd, 79, has been part of and witness to a lot of great music in his nearly 60-year career. But often this night he stood aside, watching the other players with a look of unbridled joy.
That joy went off the scale when he brought Williams out, flipping the formula of a concert at the same locale last year in which Lloyd joined Williams and her band (which, that night, also included Frisell and Leisz) for the latter part of her concert. Williams told the crowd that they had bonded over their southern roots (he raised in Memphis, she in Louisiana, Mississippi and Arkansas), but the bond is deeper than that in the music, bringing out much in each other. The gospel “Ain’t Nobody’s Fault But Mine” launched the pairing this night on a fine, fiery note.
But if the concluding three songs of the night gave us the power of anger and redemption, the song right before them made that possible — with the power of love. With a gorgeously wrenching version of “A Place in My Heart,” Williams’ nakedly, unashamedly sentimental waltz, she, Lloyd and the band fully revealed their hearts, and fully reached the hearts of the moved fans. There were tears.
And there’s your answer. There’s your connection. There’s your holy.
Nels Cline stepped onto the stage of UCLA’s Royce Hall on Saturday, sporting a sheepish grin, following the 18 musicians who would accompany him this night. The lanky musician took a seat, strapped on and plugged in a Gibson hollow-body, the red of its hull more or less matching the color of the shirt he wore under a natty black suit. Conductor Michael Leonhart, center-stage and back to the audience, raised his arms as if suspending time for a second and then….
Elegant was a word heard several times a couple of hours later as the crowd filed out to the lobby post-concert.
Dazzled would be the word to describe the look on most of the filing-out faces.
And it was an evening of both elegance and dazzle, Cline and crew showcasing most of the music from “Lovers,” the sprawling and ambitious album of his released by jazz legacy label Blue Note last year, a mix of standards, originals, film music, modernisms and choice obscurities alike for, as he put it in one of his few times chatting to the audience, “a Saturday night concert almost entirely made of ballads” from, as he put it later, “a record about romance, sex, intimacy… the pulsation of life.” That, on the record, covers a pretty sweeping landscape, with interpretations of music from such seemingly disparate artists as Rogers and Hammerstein, Henry Mancini, jazz (and beyond) innovator Annette Peacock and even New York experimental rockers Sonic Youth. It was even more sweeping, yet of a clearly conceived piece, in this concert.
With Leonhart’s arrangements and Cline’s leadership taking on whole new layers of, well, life in this live presentation, it evoked on everything from Debussy to Hendrix, Messiaen to Mancini, Stravinsky to swing, all taking the road through Ellington and Evans (Gil and Bill). Cline’s own wide-ranging virtuosity nodded to Jim Hall, Joe Pass, Tal Farlow, Gabor Szabo, John Abercrombie and countless other jazz guitar masters. One of the several trumpet solos taken by Leonart had a Chet Baker feel to it, very fitting to the romance theme.
For some, the “Lovers” album and this, one of just a handful of live presentations planned at this time, is a wonderful, if curious, side-trip from his role in Wilco, which has made him an international rock-guitar hero. Funny thing, though. For a good number of those at Royce this night, it’s quite possible that the Wilco gig is seen as the side-trip, even after 13 years now in that band. Heck, it could be that some barely know that he’s in that group at all, or at least not are particularly familiar with its music.
A lot of folks at this show go much further back with him — some to the days in the ‘70s when he was working at the Rhino Records store just down the road here in Westwood while trying to make inroads in his musical ventures, some back to high school and earlier. (This writer first saw his talents on full display in the spring of 1975 when we were both freshman at Occidental College and he did a performance leading a forcefully dynamic electric jazz-rock trio that had his twin brother Alex on drums.) Sure, he’s lived in New York for a while now, but he’s still a hometown boy to the family and friends at the core of this crowd.
And many of their images of him are in a more jazz context, and that mostly on the explorational front of the form — his part in the semi-acoustic group Quartet Music, or booking “new music” nights at the old Alligator Lounge (highlights including evenings of furious guitar shred duets with Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, strings beaten with kitchen implements and such) and various ongoing projects including his slyly named Nels Cline Singers instrumental ensemble.
Cline was clearly moved and grateful for this homecoming reception. His parents both went to UCLA (he wore one of his father’s ties this night, he noted proudly). His brother now works there. He saw many, many concerts at Royce throughout his life.
“This is daunting and mind-blowing and overwhelming to me,” he said. “After all the wild concerts I’ve seen here, I never thought I’d be doing this. Certainly.”
The gathering on stage included compatriots from various phases and stages of his career: winds player Vinny Golia and Quartet Music violinist Jeff Gauthier among the L.A. contingent, harp adventurer Zeena Parkins, slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein, keyboardist Yuka C. Honda (formerly of the band Cibo Matto, and married to Cline) among the NYC presence, as well as Bay Area violinist Jenny Scheinman, another long-time collaborator. And of course, twin brother Alex was on drums and a variety of percussion instruments, up to and including wrapping paper, which he crinkled charmingly for one number. (On a, uh, related note, Alex’s new album, “Ocean of Vows,” with a few of these same musicians in his Flower Garland Orchestra, is another wondrous release.)
Sometimes the music took on all the colorations of the full ensemble, other times focused on the smaller jazz combo core, with double-bassist Devin Hoff providing propulsive force. The ballads, the Rogers and Hart classic “Glad to Be Unhappy,” the Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II musing “Why Was I Born?” (arguably the most “traditional” jazz performance of the evening) and the David Mann/Bob Hilliard-written Sinatra favorite “In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning” (the latter not on Cline’s album) among them, all sported ebbing and flowing orchestral dynamics and rich tonal colorations that mined and illuminated the deepest emotions of the songs, the muted sorrows and sparkling joys in equal measures. Not that it was all serious business. There was an engaging casualness at times, including a laugh-bringing bit when an audience member had to remind him to plug in his guitar as he was about to start one tune.
Arguably, though, it was the “almost” moments that were most arresting. “You Noticed,” one of several Cline originals, was a powerful tangent, with his soaring, elastic, electronically processed Fender JazzMaster lines calling to mind Norwegian guitarist-composer Terje Rypdal, a long-time Cline hero who has forged compelling intersections of jazz, rock and modern orchestral music. A medley of themes from scores to the movies “The Night Porter” and “Max, Mon Amour” (Cline is a big Charlotte Rampling fan) were modern classical/big-band at its daring best, with Cline engaging in some of the banging and scraping on the strings that have been part of his repertoire for ages, Parkins matching the approach on her harp. But then they all were also able to bring out those same sensibilities and richnesses in an exploration of and expansion on a Mancini passage from the “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” score, “The Search for the Cat,” ostensibly more traditional movie music.
And while the massive, even raucous portions were breathtaking, the most profound passage was also the quietest. In the middle of a pairing of two Peacock compositions, “So Hard it Hurts” and “Touching,” the orchestra built to a massive, dense crescendo and then, suddenly, stopped. The sounds receded, leaving only an almost-subliminal high sustained note of quasi-feedback from Cline’s guitar and a steady, complementary note from a metal bowl rubbed steadily with a cloth-wrapped dowel by his brother standing at the back. Save for Alex’s steady circling of the bowl, utter stillness took the hall. Then, after a minute of this powerful hush, bit by bit the other musicians picked up the harmonics — vibes player Brad Dutz using a bow on one of his instrument’s bars, then some strings, then the winds, then brass…. and the breath that just before had been taken, now returned, renewed.
Make Mine Baconwrapped 