Jazz Search – Recommended
John Gruntfest, Megan Bierman, and John Niekrasz, Carlo Costa's Minerva
Sat., May 18, 9 p.m.Jazz
New York-based Italian drummer Carlo Costa—who recently came to town with the quartet led by bassist Shayna Dulberger—has a trio of his own called Minerva, where he balances composition and improvisation in exquisite tension while maintaining a beautiful restraint. Lots of jazz-related groups make a point of blurring the same line, perhaps hoping it will speak to the level of intuition and rapport within the group, but for Minerva it feels like a secondary concern—the group seems most interested in creating pieces that flow logically and with a discernible shape, no matter the method. On the 2011 album Saturnismo (Between the Lines) Costa, bassist Pascal Niggenkemper, and pianist JP Schlemgelmilch write material that assigns improvisation a support role in navigating composed material: in Costa’s “Noctural Patterns,” for instance, planned silences and stretches of improvisation separate terse composed gestures. “Dream Machine,” on the other hand, is fully improvised, but even then the band focuses on structure: single-note piano flurries (some damped inside the keyboard) and hypnotic arco bass lines seem to coalesce with inexorable logic around Costa’s delicate snare-drum patter. Minerva has the instrumentation of a classic jazz piano trio, but it often feels like a modern chamber ensemble, with Costa using his kit to produce tone colors and abstract melodic lines—though Niggenkemper’s brisk “Let’s Go, I Don’t Know” bears traces of Thelonious Monk and Herbie Nichols, and Schlemgelmilch’s churning “Battle Cry” has the melodic splendor of the Bad Plus. —Peter Margasak A trio of John Gruntfest, Megan Bierman, and John Niekrasz opens.
donation suggested
773-342-4597Rafi Malkiel Quintet
Sun., May 19, 7 p.m.Jazz
On his terrific 2010 album Water (Tzadik), Israeli trombonist Rafi Malkiel demonstrates the cosmopolitan spirit of his adopted home of New York without ditching his roots. From track to track his compositions— alternately elegant and boisterous, but always infectious—draw from Jamaican reggae (“Eden Rain”), Duke Ellington’s jungle-band sound (“A Drink of Spring”), and more than anything Afro-Caribbean styles, but the Middle Eastern modes of his homeland ripple throughout, especially in the eruptions of klezmer that turn pretty melodies and graceful rhythms into wild throwdowns. The recording features a top-notch large band that includes fellow Israeli expats (clarinetist Anat Cohen, trumpeter Avishai Cohen, flutist Ital Kriss) and key figures from New York’s Latin-jazz scene (pianist Pablo Mayor, percussionists Nestor Gomez and Mauricio Herrera), and the multipartite nature of Malkiel’s arrangements gives their contrapuntal lines and dense polyrhythms an extra vitality. Malkiel performs as part of the inaugural Israeli Jazz Festival, leading a quintet with Kriss, pianist Jack Glottman, electric bassist Panagiotis Andreou, and drummer Franco Pinna. —Peter Margasak
$10 suggested donation
Gilad Hekselman
Mon., May 20, 9 p.m.Jazz
Guitarist Gilad Hekselman, making his Chicago debut as part of this week’s Israeli Jazz Festival, represents the leading edge of mainstream jazz, with dazzling chops, inexhaustible melodic imagination, total mastery of harmony, and deep knowledge of jazz history. Since moving to New York from Israel in 2004, he’s worked with the likes of Ari Hoenig and Anat Cohen, but it’s with his own group—bassist Joe Martin, drummer Marcus Gilmore, and often tenor saxophonist Mark Turner—that he shines brightest, extending a lineage established by Pat Metheny and Kurt Rosenwinkel. On the recent This Just In (Jazz Village) he interrupts his elegant original compositions (and a cover of the Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky” that I could do without) with jagged little improvisations, each titled “Newsflash” in a somewhat flimsy analogy to breaking TV news, but he never loses the narrative flow of the album as a whole. His solos are consistently and gorgeously lyrical, and no matter how hard he digs into his harmonic explorations, they feel like feather strokes. Tonight’s performance is a trio set; John Davis will sub for Gilmore. —Peter Margasak
$10
Stirrup
Sun., May 26, 10 p.m.Jazz
This scrappy instrumental trio was born in 2009 as the rhythm section of the Horse’s Ha, the elegant folk-rock group fronted by Janet Bean and Jim Elkington. As Stirrup, though, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, bassist Nick Macri, and drummer Charles Rumback have a sound of their own. On their debut album, Sewn (482 Music), hypnotic, unfussily pretty melodies unfold, roil, and mutate over churning ostinatos and shuffling, shape-shifting beats; everyone contributes at least one tune, though Lonberg-Holm wrote the majority. He plays tenor guitar as well as effects-smeared cello, and unsurprisingly he’s the focal point; his extended, lyrical solos hit with the power of psych-rock guitar and tickle the ear with microtonal glissandos a la Arabic or Indian music. Macri generally holds down the songs’ structures, taking only the occasional motific solo, and Rumback toys with the rhythms, teasing out swing patterns, explosive rolls, and skittery flourishes. Stirrup’s easygoing melodic development and loose interactivity obviously matter more to these guys than questions of technique or genre—though there’s a lot to swallow in this music, it all goes down like honey. —Peter Margasak
$7 suggested donation
Gerald Clayton Trio
Thu., May 23, 8 & 10 p.m., Fri., May 24, 8 & 10 p.m., Sat., May 25, 8 & 10 p.m. and Sun., May 26, 4, 8 & 10 p.m.Jazz
Pianist Gerald Clayton has recorded every one of his three albums since moving from his native Los Angeles to New York seven years ago, and in that brief time his music has undergone a dramatic transformation from brisk and lively post-Oscar Peterson postbop to burnished, thoroughly contemporary jazz that borrows rhythmic ideas from hip-hop and dices them up with staggering technique. He pushes even further on his latest album, Life Forum (Concord Jazz), beefing up his core trio of bassist Joe Sanders and drummer Justin Brown with three horn players (trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and saxophonists Logan Richardson and Dayna Stephenson) and two vocalists, Gretchen Parlato and Sachal Vasandani, who add refined wordless singing. Clayton’s dense, translucent arrangements frequently function as set pieces for his improvisations, even when the horns and voices stick to composed material, and he incorporates a pop-soul influence similar to what you’ll hear on records by Parlato and Robert Glasper. Clayton composed all the music, and he often revels in its lush, complex harmonies while the horns and singers move in elegant counterpoint against the core trio’s fleet movements—on the hard-driving “Some Always,” for instance, he and Akinmusire play an extended passage in precise unison over a churning, frenetic groove. When it’s just the core trio, as on the skittering “Sir Third,” the borderline telepathic rapport Clayton has developed with the band comes to the fore, especially when he and Brown navigate rapid-fire tangles of rhythmic displacements or trade phrases so quickly your ears barely have time to process the exchanges. I’d love to hear the full ensemble play this music, but the trio is so sharp that these new pieces will survive the transition just fine. —Peter Margasak
$20-$45
