STREAMING: Lots of people talk about “collective improvisation,” but Lovano does it. |
Husband and wife Joe Lovano and Judi Silvano came from different musical backgrounds, but they found home — and each other — in the musical ferment of New York’s late-’70s jazz-loft scene. Silvano was a Temple University dance and classical-voice student in town on a scholarship to study choreography. The Cleveland-born Lovano had migrated from Boston, where he’d attended Berklee. Both were soon in the thick of it. In the tumult of cross-discipline experimentation, Silvano found herself improvising non-verbal vocals. Lovano, having built a reputation as a virtuoso saxophonist, was quickly traveling as a sideman in bands led by the likes of Carla Bley, Charlie Haden, and Paul Motian. The two were introduced at a jam session at Lovano’s 23rd Street loft, and before long they were playing and recording together. It’s been a while since they performed together in Boston, but next week, Tuesday, September 19, Lovano will play as a special guest in his wife’s band at Ryles along with tenorman George Garzone of local avant-jazz heroes the Fringe.What gets called “collective improvisation” in jazz is rarely more than solos with backgrounds, but Lovano, often with Silvano as a collaborator, has taken the idea to heart. You can hear it in the way he juggled multiple written themes and free passages in his early septet Wind Ensemble (with Silvano billed as “soprano voice”), up through his various performances with his nonet, and on his new Streams of Expression (Blue Note), where he collaborates with composer/arranger/musical polymath Gunther Schuller for the first times since their 1994 Rush Hour (Blue Note).
On the first number of the new album, “Streams,” Lovano enters on tenor, playing a short free-tempo melody in three different key, joined first by the patter of drummer Lewis Nash’s brushes on cymbals, then by Dennis Irwin’s bass counterpoint, then by the nonet in rough unison as the melodies are repeated. Lovano solos with bass and drums, pianist John Hicks begins to offer quizzical note-cluster comments, the ensemble returns for the theme again, Lovano cues a syncopated four-note motive and before long everyone’s jamming on that that theme, playing variations in and around his longer lines. The piece breaks for a series of solos over fast-walking swing, each more volatile than the last. Pianist John Hicks, in one of his last sessions before his death this past May, is particularly stunning, climaxing with a series of declamatory block chords.
“I don’t count anything off, I just start playing,” Lovano says about the piece when I reach him at his Hudson River Valley home. “There are these little cues in everybody’s part. When I play a cue that they see, they know something’s coming and they have to answer it. They know it’s going to come at some point, but they don’t know when.” So tempos and keys change at unexpected moments, and how the piece turns out depends on how the individual band members respond to what Lovano calls the musical “suggestions” from his horn. He cites Mingus as an inspiration: “Cats that play together to create music as they play. I wanted to write music that had that. Not that you go in there and count it off and say, ‘Okay, that was take one, can we try that again?’ I wanted it to be this really organic development of some music with a large group.” “Streams,” part of the larger “Streams of Expression” suite, was cut in one take.
