Search - Adam Lane :: Drunk Butterfly

The tradition of the cutting-edge

greg taylor | Portland, Oregon United States | 09/19/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Modern improvised music has a history. Back in the late forties be-bop was the cutting edge and it drove the elders crazy. They called it all sorts of dismissive names. As I have said before, all revolutions become bureaucracies. Be-boppers had no tolerance for Trane and Dolphy playing together. Braxton and Mitchell took the cutting-edge in new (unappreciated) directions as did those that followed. Don't get me wrong. Many of the elders were open-eared. Listen to Duke playing with Trane, Bean playing with Newk. Listen to Braxton, Mitchell and McPhee playing these days with every young musician they can find.

It remains possible to go back and to listen to the moment of discovery, the moment when it seemed that all musical boundaries were falling. Listen to early Bird, to Braxton's For Alto, to Hemphill's Hard Blues. You can hear the music changing.

Mark Whitecage, Lou Grassi and Adam Lane have done that listening, they have absorbed the ethic of the unending search, and better yet, they have mastered their own musical paths. Listen to Whitecage on the opening tune on this CD, The Last of The Beboppers. He is playing bebop and he is still being Whitecage and the result is swinging and jaunty and exploratory as can be. Then Lane comes is with a completely out of left field arco solo on bass. And suddenly we are in the sixties and seventies listening to people like Silva, Wadud and Jenkins bringing the family of string instruments back to center stage in improvised music.

And that is just the first of eleven well-conceived compositions.

This is a democratic collective of composers/improvisers. Grassi contributes two tunes, Lane (a rising star in that tradition of composer/bassists that include the likes of Mingus and Holland) contributes four tunes and Whitecage contributes three.

I want to close with some final thoughts on Whitecage. He strikes me as a paragon of what is right/wrong with the music industry these days. This is a complete player. He is a master of many reeds. He plays with great passion and intelligence. He has absorbed the tradition of the last 100 years (jazz is starting to show a few gray hairs) and he is a unrelenting explorer. A great great musician that few people know about.

Change that. Check out this CD. And check out the other CDs being put out by the great Portugese label, Clean Feed. Go to their site to peruse their catalogue and to find someone who will sell it to you for a reasonable price."