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Josh Roseman comes home
BY JON GARELICK
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Since he left Boston for New York, in 1990, Josh Roseman has been ubiquitous on the jazz-and-funk scene. He was a prime player in the early "acid jazz" movement, as part of both the Groove Collective and Brooklyn Funk Essentials. But his list of credits and associations spans the gamut of jazz: Lester Bowie’s Brass Fantasy, Uri Caine, Steve Coleman, Dave Douglas, the Dave Holland Big Band, Charlie Hunter, and Roswell Rudd, as well as pop sessions with Cibo Matto, Sheryl Crow, Sean Lennon, and Ron Sexsmith. His first album as a leader, Cherry (Knitting Factory, 2001), showed him firmly in the postmodern mode of outfits like Sex Mob, leading a fierce blowing session over covers of rock chestnuts like "If I Fell," "Kashmir," and "Smells like Teen Spirit." It was good fun but gave little indication of where he would end up on his new Treats for the Nightwalker (Enja/Justin Time), on which he applies a rich orchestral palette to those funk essentials. With Cherry, says Roseman, who brings a four-piece version of his Josh Roseman Unit to Zeitgeist Gallery on November 19, over the phone from Brooklyn, "we were playing tunes of the day, trying to create some energy in the studio with people who were like-minded, whereas Nightwalker is really a Josh record. It’s all about my writing and trying to create something really specific. I’m trying to provide a service for the musicians in a way, a landscape they can trek through." Some pieces on Nightwalker include as many as a dozen players. There’s a full array of horns and keyboards as well as, on one track, a string section. There are fine soloists like Myron Walden, who takes a stuttering, Wayne Shorter–like alto-sax excursion on "Sedate Remix," tenor-saxophonist Chris Potter, who lends his typical fire to "Prospect," and Jay Rodriguez, whose baritone takes off when it isn’t holding down the bottom on the reggae-and-ska-based "Long Day, Short Night." And of course there’s Roseman’s trombone, which is capable of broad-toned, arcing statements or talking plunger-mute syllabication. But what really holds Nightwalker together are those shifting landscapes. The pieces are relatively long, a couple clocking in at more than 11 minutes, but they never tire. Tempos downshift, new harmonic vistas open up. "Long Day, Short Night" alternates a ska-like melody with a very jazzy theme. Funk grooves anchor just about every cut, but they’re never predictable (it helps that the remarkable Billy Killson, of Dave Holland’s bands, handles drums on several tracks). Roseman knows how to vary the accents on a basic 4/4 so that each piece has a loose-limbed, polyrhythmic feel. He likes to kick off pieces like "Meera" and "Regression" with angular, boppish heads that create what he calls "groove cells" — short rhythmic-melodic statements that can serve as the basis for multi-line collective improv. Sometimes the groove will express itself in odd meters, or in a phrase that extends across an odd number of measures. "We’re taking specific beats and exploding that across the entire band and just using it as fully as we possibly can instead of just treating the rhythm as a generic aspect of the composition," he says, adding, "um, James Brown." Roseman — who grew up in Newton, went to the New England Conservatory and played with the Either/Orchestra, among other bands, before he left town — has lately found himself drawn more into the orbit of jam bands. When we talk, he’d just played a weekend gig with Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir’s band Ratdog at New York’s Beacon Theatre. "It’s amazing as a jazz musician to see that you can play two shows and it just generates reams and reams of discussion and analysis of the show, people are trading copies of it. It’s really encouraging." I comment that it’s a scene that seems more and more open to different approaches. "Sometimes they’re a little too open," he says with a laugh. "There are people who are there for the scene and not really for the music at all. On the flip side, in the jazz scene people can be almost too discerning, to the point where you’ve got the entire Miles Davis catalogue, why even bother going out again? The answer is that it’s not always just about the music, or the music that you appreciate. The music is really supposed to be about the community, and it’s supposed to be about what’s happening right now, and it’s supposed to be something that can make a difference somehow. Picking up a trombone and moving that much air, that’s an activity of consequence. Like what Roswell Rudd said, ‘You blow in one end and a sound comes out the other end that disrupts the cosmos.’ " The Josh Roseman Unit, with keyboardist Peter Apfelbaum, guitarist Liberty Ellman, and drummer Luciana Padmore, performs Wednesday November 19 at Zeitgeist Gallery, 1353 Cambridge Street in Inman Square; call (617) 876-6060.
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