On Sunday night, Paul Flaherty, on alto saxophone, began with nervous, fluttering arpeggios. Chris Corsano on drums and Zach Rowden on double bass fell in with a slow, purposeful beat. Mette Rasmussen, also on alto saxophone, bided her time, and then entered. Together, she and Flaherty held a melody, building energy that all four musicians then unleashed. Flaherty, Corsano, and Rowden took off, grinding out a fleet, chaotic rhythm. Rasmussen’s sax soared over the top.
Billed as “a first time meeting as a quartet for one set only,” the evening at Firehouse 12 on Crown Street brought together four musicians from across geography and time. Born in 1948, Flaherty started playing professionally in the early 1970s — just before Corsano, now Flaherty’s frequent collaborator, was born. Rasmussen is a Danish musician based in Norway; this evening represented the last show of a seven-week tour. And Rowden, based in New Haven, has established himself as fearless improvisor on bass and violin who seems already to have played with just about everyone.
What brought all of these musicians together was a shared taste for bold playing and an attention to dynamics and texture. Yet characteristics of their individual playing emerged — particularly between Flaherty and Rasmussen, whose quickly found ways for their voices to complement one another. Where Flaherty was at home working with sweeps of frenzied notes that rose and fell in pitch, tone, and energy, Rasmussen tended toward longer, definitive, almost lyrical phrases. As the set went on, It was up to Rowden and Corsano to figure out who to bounce off of, and how. It made for a thrilling evening of music.
Rasmussen turned out to have a gift for getting the other three to shift what they were doing. In their first burst of activity, it was Rasmussen who got Flaherty and Rowden to slow down. But Corsano chose to forge ahead, more quietly, but still with a lot of propulsion. One by one, the musicians got swept up in it again, with Rowden and Corsano building the rhythmic intensity as the saxes climbed to the top of their registers.
But this gave way, in time, to a slow, sparse texture from Corsano that let the saxes engage in a duet, each of them expressing themselves in their own styles, with Flaherty bouncing and skipping off Rasmussen’s phrasing. Corsano followed Flaherty. Rowden followed Rasmussen first, and veered off to join the other two, and as the music flew apart, Rasmussen’s drone emerged as an anchoring voice. They all met where Rasmussen was. In the quiet, Corsano began drawing low moans out of the heads of his drums while Rowden followed suit. Together they submerged the music in slow, murky water, and ended with nods.
The set continued with still more highlights. The other three gave Rasmussen space to step out and go solo a few riveting times, in which she explored the full percussive and tonal range of her instrument. In another moment of eerie, nervous energy, Flaherty separated sax from mouthpiece to deliver a primal, piercing wail. They were all digging in deeper. At the end of the quartet’s second piece, Rowden looked up.
“How are we doing on time?”
They got a nod from the back.
“We can do more,” Rowden said. “Is that cool with everybody?”
“Yeah!” someone said enthusiastically from the healthy-sized audience.
“Just getting started!” someone else said.
That person was right. The second half of the set featured all the musicians finding different sounds on their instruments, whether it was Corsano scrubbing the side of a drum with a small bow, or Rowden playing on the other side of his bridge, or Rasmussen half-playing, half-speaking through her horn, like a voice on a bad and distant telephone line. Near the end it was almost as if Flaherty and Rasmussen had swapped voices, as Flaherty dug into his pitches and Rasmussen took flights of fancy. In the end, they met in the middle, doing a swinging duet so closely knit together that it seemed almost as if they had worked it out beforehand, though everyone knew they hadn’t.
