Allen Lowe Photo
Sometimes in performance, no reaction is the most telling reaction of all. On Saturday night at Firehouse 12, Schrift — Chris Cretella on guitar, Zach Rowden on bass, and Dave Parmalee on drums, playing Cretella’s compositions — gave a demonstration of just how a working band actually works, as opposed to acts.
The trio was grouped in a small semi-circle, with Cretella’s non-verbal signals essential to the music’s numerous stops and starts, its regular shifts from thematic to non-thematic material, and the occasional internal surprise. Together, Schrift’s members produced an intentional mix of loud monotone and jarring dissonance. The musicians hardly moved. But the wall of sound they created was clearly cooperative.
Though the label of “experimental music” has been with us for a while — and parts of New Haven’s music scene have championed it — it can be a mistake for musicians to call their music “experimental,” as though a public performance is a visit to the lab, with witnesses. Performances by improvising musicians are fluid, of course, but it’s my opinion, as a musician myself, that the real experimentation should take place in group rehearsals beforehand, so by the time it reaches the public, the music we hear is not experimentation, but the result of it. Is it all right to let everyone into the lab right away?
I was thinking all of this as I watched Schrift. Cretella is a true and creative improviser, with all the inherent characteristics of such. He has the courage to take risks, the willingness to make the audience come to him (and his group), and a knack for avoiding the obvious musical, harmonic, and tonal resolutions that our Western (or, really, American) ears tend to demand.
Cretella has been playing with Rowden for the past year and a half and with Parmalee for “most of my adult life,” as Cretella put it in a statement about the group. “I had a hunch that both Dave and Zach would hit it off,” he continued, “for their shared affinities for extreme music.”
Courtesy Chris Cretella
Rowden, Cretella, Parmalee.
Cretella uses the guitar like a drum, to drive the rhythm and lead the band. This is, in its way, oddly traditional; it connects him to a long blues and rock ‘n’ roll tradition. (I’m intentionally avoiding the word “jazz” here, even though, with music like this, it is the elephant in the room: a constant and ready presence, though one we may feel compelled to ignore because it tends to evoke a very specific and domineering cultural response. Schrift’s music is/isn’t jazz, and it does/doesn’t have to be, depending on your own predisposition for hearing/not hearing certain kinds of musical and organizational connections.) Likewise, some of what Cretella improvises is clearly connected to themes — yes, I saw him adjust the music on his music stand — but, at its organic best, the improvised aspect of his music is relatively inseparable from what was written on the page. Truly, not only was I uncertain which was which, but I realized very quickly that it did not matter.
Some of Schrift’s music is noise — or, really, as composer and electronic music pioneer Edgard Varèse might have called it, organized sound. Some of it may be even be random, but no more random than a typical bebop motif, which may be used, in its slightly abstract insolence, to connect to a more linear turn of phrase. More central was the trio’s relationship to the sounds it was making, the uncertain drones, the half-vamps, the odd resonances bordering on feedback which I at first thought were coming from the bass but which then seemed to be emitting from the guitar (by way of the whammy bar on Cretella’s Gretsch, an instrument which, though someone shrouded here by solid state amplification, has pickups that are known for their mellow mid-range, where such feedback resonances tend to occur).
Most satisfying was a punk-like acceleration midway through their set, in which, for the only time in the music that I heard, the drummer essentially played straight time, the kind you might have heard the Ramones do many years ago. It was all resolved by not resolving — but then that’s the point, as this is music beyond or beside harmony, its linearity a matter of free association and musical free choice. The intensity, length, confusions, and occasional randomness transformed the performance into an evening of abstract, yet very satisfying, audience participation.
