Two Sets from Lockdown Festival VI

In reviewing my writing exercises that have emerged from pandemic conditions, I see that, when I wrote about Karl Evangelista’s Lockdown Festival IV at the beginning of January, I covered all nine sets in the program lasting four and one-half hours. Because these were all video recordings, I was able to divide the project into the opening four sets and the remaining five sets. However, when Lockdown Festival V was announced, my schedule had filled to an extent that I could not squeeze in the time for any of the nine sets.

Yesterday saw the streaming of Lockdown Festival VI. This time I was able to ration my schedule in such a way that I could take in two consecutive sets during the early evening. The first of these presented Grex, Evangelista’s duo with his wife Rei Scampavia; and the other was a solo set by saxophonist Francis Wong. The fact that all three of these performers were involved in the video recording session of Apura was no coincidence; but all of the Lockdown music was very much “something completely different.”

Indeed, while I encountered streams of Grex several times over the course of my “COVID coverage” writing, this was the first time I heard vocal performances by both Evangelista and Scampavia. The style tended more to experimental approaches to rock and blues, rather than the jazz styles I had previously encountered; and, to be fair, I was unable consistently to grasp the words delivered by either of the vocalists. On the other hand, Evangelista’s evocations of shredding styles from past decades definite piqued my attention by prodding old memories.

Francis Wong playing his saxophone’s mouthpiece (from the YouTube video of the performance)

Wong, on the other hand, served up a provocative set of alternative techniques for playing his saxophone. Probably the most radical of these involved his playing the mouthpiece detached from the rest of the instrument. Drawing upon imaginative approaches to controlling his breath, moving the mouthpiece to elicit different reed vibrations, and cupping his free hand to add reverberation to the mix, Wong managed to present one of the richest monophonic lines I have ever encountered. I also suspect that any resemblance to the spine-tingling sounds of the shofar (ram’s horn) on solemn Jewish occasions was purely coincidental.

Working only with the mouthpiece was only one of Wong’s experimental pursuits. Over the course of his set, he explored different approaches to eliciting sounds from the full instrument. Many of these were percussive, as was the use of his own body. There was even a “march” episode with vigorous foot-stamping. Indeed, Wong’s activities occupied such a broad region of space at the Temescal Arts Center that it was necessary to include additional camera work to track all of those activities. (A static camera would have missed too much of what made this set so compelling.)