To the accompaniment of a chamber part that sounded prefer it was sliding off the Titanic, a cool-blue guitarist with a Barney Kessel lilt, a grooving strolling bassist, a thundering drummer, a squawking trumpeter with a silvery piercing readability, two piquant vocalists and an previous good friend conducting their non-Arkestra whereas sustaining duties on a number of devices, Marshall Allen performed his record-release present at World Cafe Stay. After his banging of a ceremonial gong, after all.
That’s quite a bit to say at one time. Then once more, Allen—a Kentucky-born saxophonist who threw in his lot with Solar Ra in 1958 till the pianist’s dying/interplanetary passage in 1993 and has resided within the Solar Ra Home in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood whereas presiding over and arranging for the Arkestra as its chief—is doing quite a bit.
On high of his Arkestra duties and his floating-membership ensemble, Ghost Horizon (which is able to subject its debut, Stay In Philadelphia, in Could, that includes James Brandon Lewis, William Parker and members of Yo La Tengo, the Conflict On Medicine, Wolf Eyes and others), Allen is simply now getting the possibility to shine as brightly because the sequins on his stage outfits with the discharge of his solo debut, New Daybreak, at age 100.
Multi-instrumentalist Allen has launched work with different avant-jazz associates, Ra and in any other case, and has even steered extra artists’ albums prior to now. However New Daybreak feels and appears like a contemporary starting—one thing to be celebrated by this evening’s 10-piece quirk-estra.
With Arkestra companion Knoel Scott co-conducting this troupe whereas adjusting Allen’s mic stands (and doubling on flute, roaring baritone saxophone and clarinet), Allen improvised his means by means of blaring slices of noise on his sax and the Theremin-meets-slide-whistle chook calls of his EWI (digital wind instrument) through the night’s quietest moments.
Allen took his time with an intense, calming, alto-sax solo by means of introduction to Solar Ra’s hypnotic basic “Springtime Once more,” and he sweetly and sonorously conjured his Chicago roots and friendship with percussionist Babatunde Olatunji, coming into the gates of “New Daybreak” and its occasional Christmas-music-meets-Wes-Montgomery sway. On the angular bebop of “Sonny’s Dance” (the place Allen welcomed his previous good friend), he created squealing-in-space, multi-chord chaos whereas ringing his lengthy, bony fingers alongside his saxophone’s keys as if he have been Pete Townshend smashing one other guitar. With out the ornate robes of the Arkestra beside him, this model of violent sax assault appeared all of the extra vivid and theatrical. That’s, nevertheless, when Allen wasn’t busy messing across the whirrs and wheeze of his slip-sliding EWI.
Beginning the night with the winged-strings-filled “African Sundown,” Allen and his ensemble struck a buoyant, cloudy stability that lasted all through the entire of the present: sublimely spiritualized and eerily tumbledown, typically inside mere breaths of one another or all of sudden. The rumbling “Are You Prepared,” with Bruce Edwards’ fired-up guitars pushed excessive within the combine, propelled Allen to flights and heights of mad, blasting sax squawking—an improvisational search celebration the place two offended males appear to hunt one another out for a duel with a bloody finale. For all of the ire conjured by “Are You Prepared,” there have been (barely) calmer moments such because the highlife sprays of “Boma” and the instances when movement-artist/vocalist Ayana Wildgoose took the stage.
To finish the set, singer Rochelle Thompson joined the mass for the super-elastic-bubble-plastic funk of New Daybreak nearer “Angels And Demons At Play.” It led the gang and the ensemble deep into the recesses of the offshoots of Jupiter, proving, as soon as once more, that house is certainly the place the place Marshall Allen breathes deepest.
—A.D. Amorosi; photographs by Chris Sikich
