The Julian Argüelles Quartet
played a warm, uplifting set at Ironworks last night, the second of three North
American jazz festival dates. This new group, which has yet to record, features
a rhythm section of emergent next-generation British improvisers: pianist Kit Downes, bassist Sam
Lasserson and drummer James Maddren.
(Maddren is also a member of Kit Downes’s current trio, and plays on Downes’s recent
quintet record, Light from Old Stars,
just out on Babel.) The quartet instantly demonstrated their responsiveness to
each other from the get-go; the first tune, “Mr Mc,” had a calypso-like feel
loosely reminiscent of Sonny Rollins, and, although Argüelles’s approach to
tenor seems to me a little more angular and restrained than the colossus, his
improvisations clearly drew on the thematic tactics that (according to Gunther
Schuller’s reading) Rollins pioneered in the 1950s. Argüelles dedicated the
piece to South African expat Chris McGregor, which
might also explain what sounded like its (again, loosely) Afro-Caribbean
leanings, but it also showcased Argüelles inclination toward odd meters (11/8?)
and off-kilter phrasings. The quartet negotiated complex, prime-number pulses
with alacrity, and teased out vamps and grooves that drew their audience in and
held them, heads nodding, feet tapping. The music was thoughtful and
sophisticated, but also contagiously dynamic, and I don’t think the drummer
stopped smiling through the entire eighty-minute set. The second number, which
Argüelles said was a “twelve-tone piece” called “A Simple Question,” started
with Downes playing solo reminiscent of Paul
Bley (whom he name-checks on his own CD’s second cut, “Bleydays”);
Argüelles also offered lyrical and measured solo playing, but as the quartet
entered the music took on a Phrygian feel and things morphed into what he
described after as something “half Spanish” – his composition “Unopened
Letter.”
But it was the fourth tune –
called “Redman,” he said, and dedicated to “what could only be one of two
saxophone players,” who turned out to be Dewey not Don – which clarified the
influences on Argüelles’s conception of this group. I was hearing what I
thought were echoes of Kenny
Wheeler’s melodicism and – especially in the piano – of John Taylor’s
latter-day harmonies, but “Redman,” both in the composition and in the
improvisations that followed, hearkened directly and unabashedly to Keith
Jarrett’s American
Quartet, with Dewey
Redman, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. The resonances were almost uncanny. I’m
not charging Argüelles with derivativeness, but rather suggesting that Jarrett's quartet music presents
a lineage, and a potential, in quartet music that rarely if ever gets taken up by recent players.
The groundwork laid by Jarrett’s group in the early 1970s brilliantly drew
together groove and edginess, form and freedom; Argüelles seems to me, at least
in part, to be taking up the provocations offered by the American Quartet in
ways that are musically compelling and still, even this many years later, forward
reaching. (Both “Mr Mc” and “Redman” were recorded in 2009 with an NYC trio –
Michael Formanek and Tom Rainey – but those earlier versions seem to echo less the
Jarrett group than Redman’s work with Ornette Coleman. The addition of Downes’s
piano makes a huge difference in the overall texture of the music: Downes is
among a youngish set of British pianists, including Liam Noble, Gwilym Simcock and Nikki Iles, who seem to me variously to
have appropriated and repurposed some of Jarrett’s more open – and more polydirectional
– musical trajectories, an inside-outside conception parallel to and even filtered
though the work of longer-established players such as Paul Bley, John Taylor
and perhaps even Stan Tracey.)
Of the remaining numbers in
the set, “Phaedrus” seemed to draw on the idiom of Steve Kuhn’s ECM quartets
with Steve Slagle, while the waltz-like ballad “A Life Long Moment” was
affectingly lyrical. The alternately falling and lifting cadences of the
oddly-monikered “Lardy-Dardy” produced a sinewy, organic swell and flux. “Triality”
was built around a Dave Holland-like freebop line, while the quartet’s encore –
called “Pick It Up,” I think – offered a floaty, looping shuffle. The concert
felt like witnessing the emergence of a historically savvy, formally propulsive
and musically progressive ensemble. It was a warm, involving and affirmative performance.
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