E-Mail This Article to a Friend Show and tell The free-jazz/funk hybrids of Color and Talea BY ADAM GOLD
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Some people go out to hear live music; others go out to see it. Watching the interaction of the local instrumental trio Color and Talea is certainly part of the excitement. Since they began playing together as high-school kids from Jersey, saxist Anthony Buonpane, bassist Ben Das, and drummer Adam Sturtevant have developed a sound that encompasses jazz improvisation, funk grooves, and rhythmic breakdowns borrowed from the electronic world of drum ’n’ bass. It’s made them one of the more interesting bands to watch as they communicate with one another on stage in a language of unspoken signals.

"The audience seems to react to what we’re doing on an emotional level just by being able to watch us interact with each other," says Sturtevant when we meet at the band’s Allston home. "They can somehow feel the communication that’s going on by watching our expressions, our gestures."

The absence of a guitarist or a keyboardist to fill the middle range of the sonic spectrum has freed Das and Buonpane from the limitations of traditional harmony and even pushed them into exploring the atonality of free jazz. Buonpane admits it’s a hard void to fill: "It’s pretty stressful. I have a lot of responsibility." His response has been to accumulate the mess of effects pedals and cables that line the stage at every performance. Das dials up bass sounds that seem to originate in outer space; Buonpane tweaks and distorts his tone to make his sax sound anything but pure. On occasion, Sturtevant processes the sound of his drums through Buonpane’s effects to create more-electronic rhythmic textures.

It’s approach that’s located Color and Talea somewhere between rock and jazz, earning the trio residencies at Manhattan’s home for the avant-garde, the Knitting Factory, and at Cambridge’s similarly inclined Zeitgeist Gallery, where they’ll be celebrating the release of their new Project Mayhem (Bad Bread) this Saturday. "I think from the start we’ve never been interested in creating a casual setting for people to relax or talk or hang out or even dance, for that matter," says Buonpane. "Our whole approach from the start has been to sonically fuck with the listener. We’re always looking for opportunities for musical trickery and ways to really give it to ’em."

But Color and Talea aren’t a purely a cerebral endeavor either. As Sturtevant counters, "Sometimes when people are unfamiliar with the style, their first reaction is like, ‘What the hell is going on?,’ But once they get used to it, or once they see us, there’s something kind of primal and simple there that they can relate to."

Indeed, amid the band’s off-kilter melodies, screeching solos, and difficult rhythms, listeners still find ways to groove to those odd-metered pulses. "We do know how to make people dance," says Sturtevant, "we just don’t do it in the same way a jam band would, by just setting a groove and keeping it going. We’re kind of the antithesis of that."

The band made their recording debut in 2002 with the self-released Gallery of the Muse, an album that was basically created live in the studio in the one day it took them to track and mix the entire disc. The result was 15 numbers running two or three minutes long. On Project Mayhem, the group improvise much the way they do live, turning out nine tracks that run anywhere from six to nine minutes. On "wOR," a complex, syncopated passage played in unison simulates a DJ scratching; "Infestation of Peanut Butter by Fungus" interweaves two distinct musical themes as it moves forward. But it’s "Decomposition #4," which the trio reveal was composed on the spot in the studio, that plays most to Color and Talea’s ability to anticipate and respond to one another. As Sturtevant explains, "We were trying to create the excitement of our live show in the studio and capture it on disc." That done, Color and Talea have returned to what they do best: showing people how they do it.

Color and Talea perform this Saturday, March 5, at Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street in Inman Square; call (617) 876-6060.