Z. Rubin Photo
Di Maria.
The organ on “Black Rock” starts off spacey, an ascending line that drifts off into the air. There’s an effects-driven squiggle of sound. The bass thumps its way in, and the drums follow suit. Soon they’re on their way, driving fast down some neon-lined musical highway. A trumpet comes in with the melody, but you almost wouldn’t know it’s a trumpet. Effects have changed the instrument into something else, something that hearkens back to the synthesizer experiments of the 1970s but feels like now, too.
“Black Rock” is the first track on New Haven-based musician Nick DiMaria’s Bomb Shelter Music. It’s also the first track on Time Circuit, which DiMaria released in 2015. But where Time Circuit was a studio project, Bomb Shelter Music was recorded in front of a live audience at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street in June 2017.
The recent album shows how a couple years of steady performance (and involvement in Jazz Haven), the thrill of recording live without a net, and an engaged audience make a difference. With DiMaria on trumpet and effects, Josh Walker on tenor saxophone, Andrew Kosiba on keyboards and effects, Andrew Zwart on bass, and Eric Hallenbeck on drums, the music feels both more lived in and riskier. The grooves are harder. The bass is fatter. The experimentation is wilder.
And most notably, on Bomb Shelter Music, “Black Rock” moves seamlessly into the next two Di Maria compositions, “Computation” and “Miles of Funk,” so that the three tunes together function as a single 30-minute piece, full of changes in rhythm, texture, and emotion, tension and release, anxiety and exuberance. It’s a thrilling performance to have a document of — a thrill that’s echoed in the shouts from the audience midway through “Computation” and at the end of “Miles of Funk.”
On that night in June, the band also showed its range, with the pastoral ballad “Stars and Streetlamps,” the rolling “Drift,” and the strutting “Wondercat.” It acknowledged its influences on Herbie Hancock’s funky “Hornets” and Duke Ellington’s classic “Caravan” — a piece that itself signed Ellington’s own forays into music outside what was then the boundaries of jazz.
Befitting a live recording, the excellent decision was made to include the applause at the end of the show. Over the cheers from the audience, Di Maria introduces the band and thanks everyone for coming. His voice is hoarse from work and excitement. You can tell that he already knows what the album reveals: that he has an excellent album on his hands, full of the kind of energy that you don’t get any other way. Sometimes you just have to stand in front of people, turn the microphones on, and play.
Click here to sample and purchase Bomb Shelter Music from Nick Di Maria.
