Cool Jews

Masada tell their story at the ICA

by Jon Garelick

Eclecticism may be the currency of the modern musical world, but no one does it quite like John Zorn. The downtown NY new-music maven has a talent for confusing and frustrating audiences with his cut-and-paste musical collages, or blasting them out of the room with sheer volume. He has alternated fluent, Ornette Coleman-like jazz phrases on his alto saxophone with duck calls. He's applied Cagean "chance operation" gamesmanship to noir film music and hardcore rock in ensembles like Naked City, Cobra, and Painkiller, making sharp MTV-cut stylistic juxtapositions. He's even written some pretty tunes.

In that context, Masada -- who may be his friendliest band -- are something of a shocker: minor-keyed melodies (apparently of the Jewish folk-tune variety) applied to a lyrical Coleman-style quartet of trumpet (Dave Douglas), bass (Greg Cohen), drums (Joey Baron), and alto (Zorn). The melodies are concise and striking, the band swing, and there's little of the squalled overblowing and free-jazz assault you might associate with the avant-garde. It's a lot calmer than Zorn's 1989 skronk fest of Ornette covers, Spy Vs. Spy, on Elektra/Nonesuch. It's also probably the most widely acclaimed of Zorn's various projects. Masada's two performances at the Institute of Contemporary Art on November 13 (as part of the ICA's "New Histories" exhibit) were eagerly awaited and sold out. I caught the second set, and the band did not disappoint.

Masada's first tune at the ICA brought the Coleman comparison to the fore to an almost embarrassing degree. It started with a rough trumpet/alto unison fanfare that alternated with incisive drum breaks -- the kind of poised left-field chamber-jazz arrangement that was an early Coleman hallmark (think "Focus on Sanity"). In his solo, Zorn even exchanged a two-note figure with Baron that recalled a Coleman/Ed Blackwell dialogue from "Blues Connotation." Cohen walks Haden-like, throbbing strongly on the beat or out of tempo and, like the horns, concentrating on melody rather than chord changes. Baron, whether with brushes, sticks, or his bare hands, gets a light, dry pattering sound (he often leaves his snares off) and Blackwell-like cross-rhythmic swing. When Zorn launched into his first solo, the impression continued to be dreaming-in-Ornette-land: the melodic ideas tumbled out of his horn, unrestrained by chords or symmetry -- spontaneous musical speech with a bebop lilt and occasional celebratory goat-cry high notes.

But after the initial shock at the ICA came a second one: the past receded and Masada's own personality came to the fore. Masada have been called a combination of klezmer and jazz, but these are not the helter-skelter odd meters of Eastern European dance music. There's plenty of 4/4 and other reasonable steps. And Masada's music has a quiet dignity even at its most joyous and prancing. The melodies more than the meter connect it to klezmer, and the melodies and improvisatory skills of the players stamp its identity.

The arrangements themselves are unpredictable. Douglas and Zorn like to join each other's solos, spinning yard after yard of bright-silk intertwining counter-melodies that finally resolve in a unison line. The pitch-sensitive Baron is a constant relay switch, feeding Zorn's agitated lines back to him, punctuating Douglas's more-symmetrical statements with a sharp ping of a brush handle against cymbal, or shifting the texture and flow of the music from light, kinetic repeating patterns to a resonating ride-cymbal straight time with kick-drum bombs.

In one tune (none was announced to the audience), Zorn and Douglas harmonized on a theme only as a kind of choral comment on Baron's continuous soloing or in counterpoint to drums and bass. In another, the two horn players faced each other from across the stage, declaiming through their horns until they found a common theme that led to one note that they held until bass and drums dropped out and the note was all that remained. And then it too was gone. Zorn's lines tend to scurry and slide and search; Douglas's forays follow more legible rhythmic patterns up and down the scale or into ruminative asides. Both create a lot of heat, and both were in top form. At one point, the culmination of an extended workout with Baron and Cohen, Zorn ascended to an overblown siren wail of a note and held it. It was an earned climax, and Douglas gestured appreciatively toward his bandmate for applause.

In the tiny ICA theater, Masada played unamplified except for Cohen's modest bass amp. Every note sounded, and the balance was perfect. It's absurd that independent-minded, accessible, passionately conceived and executed American jazz should be available on record only as expensive Japanese import CDs. But there you have it.

Masada's five CDs, all on DIW, are available from Sphere Marketing, Cargo Building 80, Room 2A, JFK Airport, Jamaica, New York 11430. Call (718) 656-6220.