In press materials for the album Otis Was a Polar Bear, percussionist, composer, and bandleader Allison Miller mentions pushing her sextet Boom Tic Boom toward a more playful, childlike state, in part inspired by the birth of her child. The group’s performance on Friday night at Firehouse 12, in support of this album, demonstrated this playfulness in many forms, as each member of the band showed a different interpretation of this principle in music that was unafraid of emotion, but anchored by grooves throughout.
Part of the success of the sextet lay in an underlying principle: that texture and groove, melody and dissonance, are different points on the same line, rather than two disparate worlds needing to be juxtaposed. In the midst of some wonderfully expressive playing late in the first set, the bandleader pushed members of her sextet into an ecstatic place. Miller had explained in her introduction that “The Listener (for Josh Cantor)” was a reaction to the sudden death of a friend, and that the last of the three parts was a place to work out some frustration and sadness at the friend’s absence. (A separate essay could be written about Ben Goldberg’s unaccompanied intro on contra-alto clarinet, a fascinating study of texture and tone over a short span.) Emerging from a gorgeous set of chord changes fully inhabited by pianist Myra Melford, the band slipped into a brief melody section almost immediately lost to Miller’s thunderous interjections in and around the drum and bass groove she was helping to maintain. Catharsis aside, it was a fascinating moment in the sextet’s performance. As the deliberate beauty was overwhelmed by raw, melodically phrased lines from the drums, one got a sense that Miller had given herself over to a sense of groove rather than consciously abandoning it; it was an exploration of the outer reaches of a continuum of rhythm, rather than a conscious shift away from rhythm altogether.
Members of the band were clearly on the same page as Miller, even if they explored their ideas differently. Miller anchored the band, eschewing the idea of the solo as virtuosic display, and pushing the melodic soloists as necessary. When it came time for her to solo, as in “The Listener,” or in a pivoting, driving set of explorations in the set’s opener “High T,” Miller juggled timbral and textural considerations with an allegiance to propulsive grooves. Sometimes those grooves shifted in meter or accent, and sometimes they stepped away from a pulse altogether, but they were never gone completely. These moments were especially exhilarating for the almost invisible communication between the band, but especially Miller and bassist Todd Sickafoose. The band’s eight-year history — and the focus often seen in a band at the tail end of a tour — was in full display.
The compositions embodied playfulness as a rejection of stoicism, whether in the joyful counterpoint of “High T,” where Miller pushed against twin lines played by the divided ensemble, or in the almost-sensuality of “Slow Jam.” This tune, emerging out of a bass exploration into a slinky, spacious groove, paired Ben Goldberg’s pure clarinet tone with Kirk Knuffke’s breathier cornet, while Myra Melford offered an aching response to the winds with rising dissonant piano arpeggios. A stop written into the melody allowed for a perfect point of entry for cornet and violin solos, the latter played by Jenny Scheinman on octave violin, which due to its patience and low register amplified the yearning of the titular genre.
But none of this range of expression contradicted the overarching principle, the persistent momentum of the groove. Not even when Melford’s piano built up a Latin-influenced solo into a swirl of dissonance, extending chords to their outer extremities. All players flirted with the expectations of their instruments, and transcended those expectations with ease, interjecting their own personal language as improvisers into the texture of the compositions. All the members of Boom Tic Boom have dozens of credits as leaders, as side players, and in collaborative bands, and all had experience in making the music their own while never challenging the overarching identity of the music. The music on the album is definitely made by a percussionist — not to brazenly show off technical ability, but to demonstrate the different ways rhythm can be employed and embraced to express an emotional range. To hear the band at Firehouse 12, especially in the places where the band pushed against the boundaries of the recorded versions, was hear that principle at work, and to feel it.
