After an uncharacteristic six weeks of not experiencing any live music - no shows since the July 22 Swans' show at Terminal West - we've finally come to the end of the drought with a veritable deluge of good shows, starting with last night's performance at downtown's Mammal Gallery by James Harrar's Soloriens Native Unity Quartet, featuring Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra.
Atlanta's The Convergence opened with a set of inspired improvisational jazz reminiscent of Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. The Convergence is Marquinn Mason on alto sax, Rasheeda Ali on flute, Majid Araim on mandolin, Rafael Villanueva on guitar, Maxwell Boecker on bass, Zach Dawson on drums, and Paulino on percussion.
In many ways, The Convergence stole the show. I've never heard or seen them before last night, but damn, they are good.
We saw James Harrar and Marshall Allen perform last year as Cinema Soloriens, and this year they return backed by drums and bass as the Soloriens Native Unity Quartet.
At 92-years-old, Allen was a revelation, as spry and as energetic as during the Sun Ra years. He really did most of the performing, carrying the evening on his back as it were, and unleashed some fiery solos that would have left a man half his age breathless.
A lot of the evening was all just bloop and bleep, although the most stirring moments came when both men picked up their saxophones and squonked instead. Here's a sample of the bloop:
Although Allen did the heavy lifting, Harrar contributed and also provided the projector show. Sun Ra's legacy has nothing to worry about with Harrar's show, but the evening was worth it just to see living jazz legend Marshall Allen one more time, perhaps for the last time.
If you have the time and interest, there's an excellent article over at The National Journal on the artistic revitalization of downtown Atlanta as exemplified by venues such as The Goat Farm and The Mammal Gallery. The article opens (like this post, apparently) focused on Atlanta percussionist/composer Klimchak, above, who played drums and other percussion during last night's performance of James Harrar's Cinema Soloriens at the The Mammal Gallery. The article describes The Mammal Gallery as an art space that brought "a hipster crowd" to an otherwise uninhabited block and says that the gallery founders look forward to the day when the barren street on which the gallery sits will have all the amenities of an art district, where people could do some window shopping, get coffee, and look at used records.
Last night represented a baby step in that direction. Before the performance by Cinema Soloriens, the warm-up act, an ad-hoc collection of Atlanta jazz and fusion musicians (including Eric Fontaine, Chris Alpiar, Marquinn Mason, Majid Araim, Zach Dawson, John Greg, Max Boecker and Rafael Villanueva) performed as Dreaming of the Open Door in a separate storefront space across from The Mammal Gallery.
The audience was encouraged to walk back and forth across the street to look at the exhibit of photographs by and of James Harrar and supporting musician Marshall Allen (of the Sun Ra Arkestra) set up in a make-shift gallery in the storefront space and listen to the opening band, to sit and wait in The Mammal Gallery for the main performance to begin, or to just loiter out on the street. I chose the latter, at least until Dreaming of the Open Door started their set, and watched a large number of balloons and lanterns float over the downtown skyline. It says something about the amount of art space downtown that people on the street couldn't decide whether the balloons and lanterns were coming from Eyedrum, another downtown gallery and performance venue, the Castleberry Hill district, the latest lantern festival, or some combination thereof.
The Dreaming of the Open Door performance was, as befits an ad-hoc collection of musicians, a single extended improvisation, with different members each getting an opportunity to solo. Together and individually, they made a grand and glorious sound, setting an appropriately adventurous mood for the rest of the evening.
The Cinema Soloriens set started around 9:00 pm in the Mammal Gallery space. The band is led by composer, multi-instrumentalist, and film-maker James Harrar, and includes the legendary alto saxophonist Marshall Allen, 91, of the Sun Ra Arkestra. Formerly, the band had also included prog-rock legend Daevid Allen of Gong and Soft Machine until Allen's recent passing. For last night's performance, guitarist Mitch Esparza filled the Daevid Allen spot, and Atlanta's Klimchak was on drums.
The band performed several numbers, each a mix of composed and improvisational passages as is typical in jazz, while Harrar's abstract and impressionistic films were projected behind the band.
I don't think I'm alone in saying that a large part of my reason for attending was to see Marshall Allen. I've been fortunate enough to have seen the Sun Ra Arkesta several times while Sun Ra himself was still alive, including sets in various Manhattan clubs and an epic, five-night stand in Boston's Orpheum Theater in the 1970s, as well as after his passing when the Arkestra was under Allen's creative leadership, and I was looking forward to another chance to hear his dynamic musicianship. But with the lights down low and the stage lit only by the films and a few discrete lights, it was difficult to see anyone on the stage, other than Klimshak who was silhouetted in front of the screen, But Allen was seated in a rear corner of the stage behind Harrar, who also took most of the solos, and if it weren't advertised that Marshall Allen was going to be a part of the show, I don't think I or anyone else would have recognized or even noticed him. He was allowed to let rip one terrific, fiery solo, showing no slow-down due to age, but otherwise, when one has arguably the greatest living alto sax player alive in the band, it seems a shame not to showcase him more.
Here's a 30-Seconds video of last night's performance:
Regardless of Allen's low-profile role, as you can tell, the set was an intriguing amalgam of jazz, Eastern, tribal, outer space, and classical elements, set against the evocative images of Harrar's films. The performance lasted some 90 minutes and although sparsely attended was still a major step forward in the invigoration of downtown Atlanta and the credibility of small venues like The Mammal Gallery to provide world-class artists in an intimate, urban setting.
