Yoko Ono: Soul Talking

Musically, the half-dozen or so long pieces were cut from the same cloth as various John Zorn projects, like Painkiller, his trio with superbassist Bill Laswell and noise-metal drummer Mick Harris -- with one significant departure: Ono and IMA were consistently listenable. At times, with Sean Lennon taking a fiddle bow to a saw and drummer Timo Ellis teasing sustained bell-like tones by rubbing and striking a brass bowl, their music sounded like Umma Gumma-era Pink Floyd colliding with John Coltrane in his acid phase. With Yoko as Coltrane, of course, producing the same sort of gnarled tones, short blats, and stutters that a skilled saxist can tear out of his or her reeds in the name of expression.

Understanding what Ono does with her voice is just a matter of context. If you come expecting to hear a rock vocalist, you're screwed. She sings like an instrumentalist -- a gnarly sax player, to be specific -- and words just don't matter when her vocabulary of sounds feels so much damn richer. Think of the avant-garde vocal heroine Diamanda Galás, who has at the very least taken some inspiration from Ono, upping the ante with an operatic range and a wider vocabulary.

In her opening piece at the Paradise, which trailed a greeting monologue that spun in circles as abstract as the music, Ono seemed to be wrenching an enormous amount of sour bile and pain and anger and sadness from her guts -- sharing something so deep that words couldn't approximate its emotional intensity. What the angst and anguish summoned to the piece actually reflected was anyone's guess. But that was irrelevant. What mattered was the power of the moment -- just like a good live Ramones song.

Ono, of course, is miles from the Ramones. She's shamelessly arty, and so are IMA. Sean's even copped a lot of Mom's vocal licks, though he has a higher voice, one that at times echoed his father John Lennon's breathy upper range. And the bass/drums interplay was elastic, bounding between floating meter and a rock bottom, veering off into careering squawks and low-end rumbles.

Through her marriage with Lennon and her performances with their Plastic Ono Band more than a quarter-century ago, Ono became our first arena-rock avant-gardist. Hence, the broad physical gestures that accompanied her vocalizing. One, repeated, was a poignant sideways arch of her arms and body that seemed more customary to a Beth Soll performance. At one point, Ono slipped into the horrifyingly classic "mime behind a panel of glass" move, yet I seemed to be the only person around who laughed out loud. (She was joking, right?)

But in the end, it was the tranced-out music that carried the messages to the comfortably full, twentysomething-to-sixtysomething crowd. It told us that Yoko is still unpredictable, willing to follow her new rock album, Rising (Capitol), with such an abstract performance; that rock music needn't have boundaries; that a 40-year-gap between a singer and her backing band can be swallowed up in a few synchronous heartbeats; and that the language of the soul is something anyone can hear and understand.

-- Ted Drozdowski