Peter Ganushkin Photo
Rainey, Halvorson, and Laubrock.
Shortly after taking the stage Friday and introducing bandmates Mary Halvorson on guitar and Ingrid Laubrock on soprano and tenor saxophones, drummer and bandleader Tom Rainey cut right to the chase.
“I hope you enjoy it,” he said. “Well, I hope we enjoy it, too.”
From that, Rainey launched the group into their first set, with distant but thunderous tom work amidst probing lines from tremolo guitars and tenor saxophones that danced around a harmonic center before jumping tracks completely, comfortably demonstrating the vitality and necessity of improvised music — and of good places in which to listen.
It was a promising start to Firehouse 12‘s fall season, which continues through December with Friday night concerts at 8:30 and 10:00 at its Crown Street space, showcasing music in the margins of jazz, improvised and experimental music.
Two impressions of the Tom Rainey Trio continuously emerged throughout the night. The first was of a group with no bass but plenty of low end. The lack of a proper bass frequency left plenty of space for both Laubrock and Halvorson to explore the rich-but-entirely-distinct low ends of their respective instruments without being drowned out. At several moments in the long opening piece, the two melodic instruments needled at each other in this low register, creating quite the auditory illusion in a piece given a surging, measured momentum by the drums. There was a similar moment in the opening piece of the second set, in which the musicians explored their lower registers to a more conversational end, full of breaths, commas, and occasional moments of glorious cacophony as phrases began to overlap with one another in timbre, while still strongly maintaining their own melodic ideas.
The other profound impression was of a small group that sounded huge. Imagine a pit band working frenetically to sound as though their ranks are twice as large. The musicians didn’t appear to be struggling to pull this trick off, however. Due to their attentiveness to timbre and frequency, and their willingness to leave space only when necessary, the listening room at Firehouse 12 felt much more crowded than it already was. This was in part due to the density of Rainey’s drumming — distinct from his volume, which rose and fell in an intuitive dialogue with the rest of the trio. Thanks especially to his dextrous brushwork, including one memorable moment where the only sound was that of Rainey waving his wire brush in the air, there was plenty of propulsion both in and outside the confines of rhythm and pulse.
Laubrock, working on soprano and tenor saxophones, is a truly impressive player. She has a clear love for and knowledge of the history of jazz and creative music on the saxophone, while still creating and refining her own personal language on these instruments. Bits and pieces of that history crept into her playing Friday night, and there were points where she very clearly embraced the tradition. But one of her most distinctive gifts is how effortlessly she can leap to and from each of these reference points, creating a liquid sound that is always reacting to the context. In the final piece in the first set, all the players embraced something like a song form, giving themselves a small set of ideas to work with and switching in tandem. Here, Laubrock moved from a lush ballad-tone on the tenor to a series of pitchless gestures, commanding each with the same control. In a solo moment in the second set, her forceful, brief attacks conjured up a ghostly resonance from the cymbals.
Halvorson served as a bit of a wild card in the trio. Playing the chordal instrument within this group, she was happy to sometimes serve in an accompanist’s role. Late in the first set, she put decisive, impressionistic chords atop a militaristic snare entrance from Rainey. In the second set’s opening piece, she provided a tight rhythmic pocket that explored the furthest harmonic reaches of a single pedal tone, freeing up Rainey for a wonderful feature that explored melodic phrasing of percussive sounds. As a lead player, she sparred ably with Laubrock, either with dry, unfolding lines, or by using various pedals and effects to envelop the sound of the ensemble, at times triggering a dynamic shift in mood without disrupting the momentum of the improvisation.
Firehouse 12 often features artists or ensembles playing composed music, but makes an important statement in sometimes presenting fully improvised music alongside them. For an audience, seeing free improvisation can be hit or miss; seeing it done well, by people with tremendous experience and rapport with one another, is a thrilling thing, not unlike watching a time-lapse video of a compositional process. Sometimes there is full transparency, with each sound in its place, each player in their role. At other times there is an almost psychedelic blend of sound, where even dissimilar instruments reach a collective melting point. A high level of communication is a significant factor, no matter the outcome.
In the first set, the trio struck with a closed fist, only sometimes pulling the punch at the last minute, leaving the audience to feel only the gust of wind created by the effort. In the second, the texture was sparser but more immediate, more delicate choices made more confidently. One would hope that Rainey, Halvorson and Laubrock enjoyed their performance. At the end of the night, there was no exuberant acknowledgment of this fact, but a more restrained satisfaction, as though this level of communication was par for the course.
