Sunday, August 03, 2008

Of Frictions and Sax-sonic Poetry

Joshua Jefferson/Samuel Burt/Paul Neidhardt @ The Red Room, Baltimore, MD
August 2, 2008

Joshua Jefferson: alto saxophone
solo, and in a trio with -
Samuel Burt: balloons, bass clarinet
Paul Neidhardt: frictions, percussion

Like shards of explosive sonic grains the opening salvo from Joshua Jefferson's solo alto saxophone set unleashed short bursts of loud, timbrally mutilated gestures that threatened to puncture the eardrums and settle deep within the skull.  With these seeds planted within the cranium of the attentive (and rudely awakened) listeners he then followed up with short improvisations exploring the opposite extreme of volume.  The brevity of his compact, self-contained solos was poetic to a fault - leaving one longing for a mix of longer expositions and developed ideas.  The shards of poetry, and creative use of mutes, gave a sense of ideas capable of taking root where these seeds had been planted.

The second half of the first set then transitioned into a study of frictions as Samuel Burt and Paul Neidhardt applied flesh to balloons and drum heads.  The expansive, sustained volumes of bowed sheets of metal and aggressively twisted rubber settling into a long-form meditation punctuated by the abrupt pop that ended the set.

The second set brought these three creative forces into a single fold as each contributed to an attentive and organic sonic form.  Duos formed and coalesced instinctively as each player left spaces within the collective sound and mined the timbral extremes of their instruments.

2 comments:

forbes said...

Devin-
That picture looks like Evan Lipson, it's definitely not Josh Jefferson! Glad you got to check him out though, sounds like a cool concert.

roseburt said...

yep, that's definitely evan ;)