Adventurous Improvisation at Bird & Beckett

Last night’s “visiting artist,” Adriana Camacho Torres (courtesy of Bird & Beckett)

Last night’s live stream from Bird & Beckett Books and Records presented two sets of adventurously free improvisation by Trio Paz. This was an “international” combo in which bassist Adriana Camacho Torres came from Mexico City to jam with two local “bleeding edge” improvisers, saxophonist Phillip Greenlief and drummer Scott Amendola. The music emerged through high-energy jamming with so much intensity that, when the players took a break after their one-hour first set, I found that I had pretty much exhausted my capacity for attentive listening!

There seem to be two sides to Greenlief’s approaches to improvisation. One of them is grounded primarily in the music of Thelonious Monk, although the last time I listened to his Monk performances live-streamed from Bird & Beckett he added a bit of Ornette Coleman to the mix. The second side gives more attention to Coleman, drawing upon his approaches to “free jazz” to explore even more adventurous improvisation techniques.

Camacho’s energetic bass work fit right in along with Greenlief’s extremely diverse improvised phrases, many of which had more to do with sonorities than with thematic lines. For the most part Amendola took a relatively low-key approach to his contributions, but still most of them marked significant departures from any conventional beats. He also seemed to be controlling some electronic gear with his left hand from time to time; but the camera angle (which was fixed) did not provide an adequate view of what he was doing and how those actions fit in the wave of sound that was emerging.

The quotation marks in the Coleman citation were not intended to be “scare quotes.” Rather, they reflect the title of the Coleman album that was released by Atlantic in September of 1961, whose full title is Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation by the Ornette Coleman Double Quartet. This was a hard pill to swallow when it was released, and I am almost certain that I have never encountered that album on any radio broadcast or streaming source. Over half a century has elapsed since then, and it still feels that only a handful of jazz performers have given any attention to picking up Coleman’s torch. Listening to a few of that handful last night not only prompted fond memories but also involved encountering a fresh contemporary take on that half-century legacy.