12/11/2024
We can’t say it often enough, so we’ll say it again: Creative music creates singularity by recreating space-time. By bringing together approximate bodies, in the same place and on the same backdrop, at the same time, and from past to future, from present to future, and back again. From
Chicago: Greg Ward, one of the most agile and zesty saxophonists of his generation, a distant
descendant of Johnny Hodges and a close partner of Mike Reed, a worthy disciple of Von Freeman
or Fred Anderson, i.e., unique in his genre (free funk swing or otherwise), whom nothing frightens, in
a flash or a plume of smoke; Isaiah Spencer has also proven himself on the Chicago stage or
belvedere, since his apprenticeship with Ernest Khabeer Dawkins: his (hypersensitive) drumming is
obviously propulsive, is naturally ardent, he feigns a certain nervousness to adhere to everything
going on around him and more. From France and Brittany: double bassist Hélène Labarrière sails and
capsizes freely over the equator, the tropics, and even the meridians, thanks to the submarine of
the most liberated (unsubdued) jazz, but also on the sailboats of so-called traditional music or the
steamships of so-called contemporary music.
No one can predict the outcome of their story, except that it began as a story and will end
as a story. At least this one, to begin with, to play with: improvising musicians meet—human beings
on Earth—to melt backgrounds. To sift through the “here and now” in search of ephemeral or eternal
nuggets of gold.
