Start the revolution!

Medeski Martin and Wood go for new sounds, new ears

by Jon Garelick

This is a jazz concert?

It's a sellout crowd at the Somerville Theatre and you can see a few of those yellow-green-and-red knit rasta caps (worn by white boys, of course) bobbing among the kids dancing in the aisles. Girls in long, straight (ironed?) hair and halter tops are dancing too, and everyone, it seems, is between the ages of 18 and 22. Occasional whiffs of marijuana smoke drift over the crowd.

No, this isn't the Wynton Marsalis/Lincoln Center Jazz "Blood on the Fields" tour. It's the keyboard/bass/drums outfit Medeski Martin and Wood (whose new Shack-man is due in stores this Tuesday, October 15), and, yes, they're playing real jazz: improvised music that burns and pops and refers to a tradition that includes jazz but goes beyond it, fusing the organ-trio jazz of Jimmy Smith, Larry Young, and "Big John" Patton; the vintage jazz-rock fusion of Miles Davis and Weather Report; the avant-garde clang and drone of Sun Ra; the chitlin funk of Booker T. and the MG's, the New Orleans second-line rhythms of the Meters, and the funky reggae of Bob Marley.

For a few years now, jazz has been making stronger commercial inroads. Wynton Marsalis, some 15 years ago, kicked off a so-called jazz "renaissance" of neo-traditionalists, and he and players more or less working the same vein (Joshua Redman, James Carter) have taken on the trappings of stardom. On another path, the loosely defined "acid jazz" movement has laced hip-hop and dance music with jazz elements (improvised horns as well as sampled classic jazz tracks). Wynton and friends have gotten young blacks (men and women) back into the jazz audience, and the acid-jazz movement has even drawn the college-rock crowd down to Boston's club strip on Lansdowne Street, where on off-nights (Mondays and Tuesdays) the crowd can experiment with adventurous live jazz between DJ sets at Karma Club.

All of these events have come with their fair share of hype and real worth. But in another sense, these popular jazz movements are as hermetic as the woolliest loft rants of the '80s avant-garde or the most lo-fi hiss and skronk of '90s indie rock.

For the most part, acid jazz doesn't work for jazzheads because it's not really made by jazz musicians. It's made by DJs and hip-hoppers, and it lacks the thrill of sustained improvisational flight. (A conventional dance DJ knows more about improvisation than the hybrid boogie boys of Us3.) And the Wynton crowd, for all the pleasures they offer, are making jazz that's only about jazz, whereas the real stuff has always been about everything a listening musician has been able to soak up. Jelly Roll Morton heard blues and early American popular song and the whole Caribbean funneled through New Orleans. Dizzy Gillespie jumped on Afro-Cuban music, and he and other beboppers routinely reconfigured the pop tunes of Broadway and Tin Pan Alley. Ellington and Mingus were musical omnivores. Miles went with electrified rock.

But the aridity of a lot of contemporary jazz isn't merely in the music. There are plenty of jazz musicians out there with big ears: Don Byron, Bill Frisell, and, yes, John Zorn, and many others, all taking in the surrounding landscape, indiscriminately devouring all things musical -- whether it's klezmer and traditional Hebrew music or Aaron Copland and Madonna -- and applying a jazz sensibility to it. But so far, this is all still minority music. A jazz revolution galvanizes not only genres but audiences.

That promise of a new audience is what Medeski Martin and Wood offer at the same time that they're tinkering with basic assumptions about what jazz is. It's not simply a matter of greater commercial potential; even with their respectable indie-level sales on the locally based Gramavision/Rykodisc imprint, they still haven't come close to Joshua Redman's major-label numbers. MM&W are making genre-defying jazz for genre-defying audiences. Their music's social vitality has become integral to its musical vitality. It's the kind of phenomenon we've seen only rarely -- in the swing era, when great jazz was America's pop music, or in the nascent stages of the eventually moribund jazz-rock fusion era, when Bill Graham asked Miles Davis to open for the Steve Miller Band. It's about an audience that's as diverse as it is large, as well as about tapping your foot, shaking your butt, or drifting off in a reverie.

There are a lot of reasons for MM&W's success. For one, they've had the stamina to create an audience for themselves where none existed (in this they bear a resemblance to fellow travelers like the Either/Orchestra and Morphine), returning again and again to the same clubs, branching out from New York's Knitting Factory (the locus of alternative jazz) to work other unconventional, or even non-jazz, venues. That direction culminated in a New Orleans gig opening for jazz-friendly rock improvisers Phish -- and a whole other Web-generated audience.

But backstage at the Somerville Theatre on September 29, bassist Chris Wood was quick to dissuade me from the Phish association. Phish, after all, are a rock band, and MM&W play jazz. "They like us, and they play our records at their shows," he said, but other than that, there was little musical connection. And there has been exposure through a stint on the HORDE tour, not a traditional venue for jazz bands (though it is in the spirit of genre-busting festivals produced by Perry Farrell, who brought former Sun Ra Arkestra trumpeter Michael Ray and his band along on ENIT this summer).

These gigs could have effected musical compromise; instead they've become a testament not only to the band's touring stamina but to their musical fortitude. These are three strong musical personalities. Playing around Boston with other bands before joining MM&W, Medeski often came on like a wrecking crew, his Hancock-like rhythmic precision giving way to Cecil Taylor seismic eruptions, showering the bandstand with molten debris. At a MM&W Middle East gig some time ago, Wood wedged a drumstick into his strings and bowed across the top, sending up grunge-like squalls. Oddly enough, drummer Billy Martin is often the most-self-contained, a master of idiomatic detail as well as funk-jazz grooves.

Because of their individual strengths and affinities, the band have blended their myriad influences into an integral whole. When new-jazzers like Joshua Redman and Christian McBride step outside the straight-ahead tradition, they adapt discrete styles to individual pieces, and it's as though they were trying on another Armani jacket. Here we get a piece of James Brown funk, there some electric Miles. But MM&W are always fluid. No choice can present itself without at once suggesting other options. It's typical of the company they've traveled in individually and collectively: the Either/Orchestra, Lounge Lizards, David Byrne, Marc Ribot, Zorn. So, like the Either/Orchestra, they'll arrange diptych medleys with pieces from different parts of the map, Monk's "Bemsha Swing" joined at the hip with Marley's "Lively Up Yourself." They've shown a taste for loungecore ("Last Chance To Trance Dance-Perhaps," from 1995's Friday Afternoon in the Universe) and now movie-music schlock ("Dracula," from Shack-man). But there's nothing they don't reinvent.

Since their first album for the local Accurate label (Notes from the Underground, 1992), MM&W have gradually developed and refined their approach from a standard acoustic piano trio to electric trio augmented with guest horn players to the electric-keyboard skronk-funk trio. At the Somerville, playing much of the material from the new album, the trio showed that they can groove in any time signature. Wood alternated between electric and acoustic basses (though his overamplified acoustic sometimes came across with a muddy boom). Dynamics and texture were always paramount. Medeski would play guitar-like solo lines on the high treble rattle of his Hohner clavinet, or slap at it percussively, against lush rolling chords from his Hammond B3, or set up his own call-and-response patterns. Out-of-tempo collective improvs, with Medeski coaxing percussive barks out of his keyboards, or skittering broken single-note lines, would suddenly find release in a rush of swelling B3 and a deep groove from Wood and Martin.

If I have any complaint about Medeski Martin and Wood, it's that I miss great tunes. They tend to rely mostly on vamps and riff numbers, short melodic statements. There's no "Boogie Woogie Waltz" (Weather Report) or "Boogie Stop Shuffle" (Mingus) in their repertoire. But complaints fade fast in the face of their inventiveness and virtuosity, the vocal quality of their phrasing, and the sheer variety of sounds. Just when you find yourself complaining about the abbreviated melodic material, you find you've been humming Wood's infectious five-note syncopated bass riff. After all, a jazz classic like "Dickie's Dream" was a riff. And Wynton hasn't exactly written any hit tunes. Medeski Martin and Wood are about the brainy spontaneity and physicality of jazz performance, and about audience participation. In today's jazz world, no one else even comes close.

Medeski Martin and Wood return to the Somerville Theatre on November 3. Call 628-3390.