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ZEITGEIST AT THE ZEITGEIST
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Both bands on the double bill last Saturday night at Zeitgeist Gallery — Daniel Levin’s quartet and the collective trio Stone House — played with equal intensity, but they evinced markedly different styles. Cellist Levin’s set, with pianist Steve Lantner, bassist Joe Morris, and trumpeter Daniel Rosenthal, confirmed what his debut CD, Don’t Go It Alone (Riti Records), had already suggested: this is a major new voice on his instrument and in improvised music. Elements of European improv and classical music are part of his vocabulary, but his æsthetic rests primarily in the jazz tradition developed over the past half-century, with swinging rhythms, structured freedom, and blues-informed extended techniques. His brooding style calls to mind the soulfulness and muscle of a tenor sax more than the pretty decorum of chamber music. In Levin’s solo on the opening "Underground," spidery microtonal gestures thickened into dark, troubled chords. On "Sad Song," his subtly inflected phrases, with moaning low notes and singing high ones, alluded to the blues without his actually playing them. On "Unfortunate Situation," he interjected blunt, percussive notes with explosive force in the midst of linear passages. It’s that sense of a jagged edge threatening the delicate flow of the music that gives his compositions their thrilling drama. And his drummerless line-up was in tune with that aspect of his music: Lantner’s floating, dancing lines and pointed chords meshed especially well with Morris’s bass on "Bronx #2." On "Nervous," Morris, who plays bass more often than guitar these days, did a solo bristling with the fast, jagged lines one hears in his guitar playing, but he also showed a feel for the thrumming power of the instrument’s lowest notes and the propulsive force of funky vamps. Morris stuck to bass with Stone House, a free improvising trio with saxophonist Rob Brown and drummer Luther Gray who also have a debut release on Morris’s Riti label, Likewise. This group increased the evening’s energy level, and their improvisations lasted longer. Brown’s solos were relentlessly logical, with each phrase growing organically out of the previous one. Sudden flurries of notes would end in tiptoeing points of sound that flew off in new directions. He colored his lines with startling inflections and timbres: the sounds themselves suggested new departures for the music. Morris threw all his resources — rhythmic vamps, interval-hopping counter-melodies, and walking lines — into these extended jams; Gray unleashed a cascade of cymbal patterns with flickers of snare, tom, and bass drums that poked and prodded. It was exhilarating stuff, bursting with variety and surprise, vitality, and uplifting energy. When I left at midnight, they were in the middle of a third piece and still searching.
BY ED HAZELL
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