Roundhouse Trio at Cafe 9.
A suitcase was onstage at Cafe 9 — and someone was singing out of it.
That was the scene Wednesday night for the latest evening of music presented by the New Haven Improvisers Collective, which began 17 years ago and has resumed staging showcases after a pandemic pause. (Read a previous story about that here.)
Two ensembles — Roundhouse Trio and Mess Hall — performed Wednesday night, which was all about free music and improvisation, about an absence of rules and structure.
The man singing the sticker-lined, electronics-crammed grey suitcase was Roundhouse Trio’s Conor Perreault. As he sang, Bob Gorry, driving force behind the Collective, skipped his fingers up and down the neck of his guitar and Michael Larocca trailed the drum kit’s cymbals.
Perreault uses his voice as an instrument of improv, reeling and experimenting with it in layers that travel overhead and underneath Gorry’s guitar textures. His suitcase electronics added an ethereal tone to the performance, as Larocca nearly whirled the cymbals in bright, bold tempo.
Click on the video below to hear a sample of what that sounded like.
Roundhouse Trio at Cafe 9.
As the Roundhouse Trio weaved in and out of a genre-less label-less melting pot of punk, rock, jazz, and noise, it was clear that group was partaking in a kind of conversation. As each musician’s notes and rhythms blend, I began to lose all track of thought, worry, distraction, and reach near to what in Buddhism is called no mind, a mind not fixed or occupied. The room started to melt with the people in it and the people in it begin to melt with its improvised sounds.
Mess Hall, a group comprised of Joe Morris on guitar, Jerome Deupree on Drums, and Steve Lanther on keys, followed Roundhouse Trio on the stage.
“For some reason I call this Mess Hall,” Joe Morris said before he hit the first note of the group’s set. Within a minute, the combo leapt from genre to genre. The musicians followed Mess one another’s dips, rises, and movements, pivoting from high energy to mellow. The music was a reminder that we’re all improvising and changing all the time.
Mess Hall at Cafe 9.
Joe Morris hit that note outside the club on Crown Street during a conversation about free music.
“You ask most people, do you improvise at all? When you’re cooking do you improvise? When you cross the street and a bus comes at you do you improvise? And they’ll say, ‘Yeah.’ So to me it’s pretty natural. A spontaneous action. But I always think it’s based on knowing a lot of different options.”
Like the music onstage, the conversation itself took unpredictable turns, thanks to the contributions of a barking dog, a drunken party bike, and talking passerby.
The Improvisers Collective’s third mission statement reads: “Develop venues for presenting the music for public scrutiny, celebration, and ridicule.”
“This is challenging music, and some people are not going to get it. And you have to let yourself be open,” Gorry told me in another offstage conversation. “You have to be OK with that. To not stay in your own little box and say, ‘I’ll just play for the two people that get it.’”
For Gorry, it’s important that everyone has the opportunity to hear improvisational music, rather than just the folks who already know it.
“At its best it’s a conversation, but it can be an argument, a discussion, however conversations are,” he said.
With their instruments, he and his fellow improvisers spread that complex conversation through Cafe 9 throughout the evening.
