Evangelista’s Improv Series: Third Installment

Last night avant-garde guitarist Karl Evangelista presented the live-stream of Unsolitary III, the latest installment in what seems to be a semiannual series of improvised music. The preceding offerings, Unsolitary and Unsolitary II, were both three-set compilations of pre-recorded videos, each set presenting different performers. Last night’s program could better be described as a suite in eight movements.

The program was performed by a quintet of musicians. Evangelista was joined by percussionists Kevin Corcoran and Suki O’Kane, Phillip Greenlief on saxophone and clarinet, and Zachary James Watkins on both electronics and guitar. All five of the players contributed to the opening movement and the two concluding movements. Among the remaining movements there was one solo (Watkins enhancing his guitar work with his electronic gear), three duos, each with a different pairing, and a trio in which Greenlief’s clarinet work was accompanied by both percussionists.

The prevailing rhetoric across these eight movements was one of quietude. Perhaps this reflected a general sense of resignation or acceptance in the change of life-style that had already established itself when the Unsolitary series was first launched in November of last year. One might almost say that the performance itself emerged as a sequence of fragmented gestures, some expressed through isolation and others through exchanges across the different performers.

The one weakness in this offering involved the video and audio work of Myles Boisen. He appeared to be working with fixed cameras, none of which provided a satisfactory view of the musicians when they were playing as a quintet. Similarly, the audio quality tended to be uneven, bearing in mind that what the ear actually hears tends to be informed by what the eye sees. The chief “beneficiary” of the technical configuration seems to have been Watkins, who could enjoy a camera angle that captured the full extent of his electronic gear while he was playing his guitar:

What mattered most, however, was the prevailing sense of quietude to draw our attention away from the media bombardment of “news of fresh disasters” (as the Beyond the Fringe revue put it).