In the summer of its 25th year, Philadelphia presenter Ars Nova Workshop and its still-newish live clubhouse, Solar Myth, have spent the season celebrating both the old masters and the new maestros of the avant-garde.
However, with its two-night residency starring experimental Filipino-American guitarist Karl Evangelista — from the modern jazz-meets-prog-rock ensemble Grex — alongside legendary free drummer Andrew Cyrille (of Cecil Taylor Unit fame) and 91-year-old cornetist (and early Ornette Coleman collaborator) Bobby Bradford, all eras of avant-garde jazz expressionism got the chance to hang out, play loose and push the free/prog equation into the stratosphere.
Along for the bumpy ride with Evangelista, Cyrille and Bradford on July 18 were William Roper (tuba, conch shell), Luke Stewart (bass) and Rei Scampavia (keyboard) — Evangelista’s life partner and Grex bandmate. It was the first collaboration between Cyrille and Bradford in eons — both worked together with John Carter on the reedist’s five-album series Roots and Folklore: Episodes in the Development of American Folk Music (1982-89).
Though much of what Evangelista did at Solar Myth sounded explosively random (he told me that the index cards he kept handing to bandmates during the gig stemmed from having only one rehearsal together), there is history between the guitarist and these giants of the form. While Bradford can be found on Evangelista’s recently released album Solace Angles, Cyrille will be on the guitarist’s next album, Bukas, which translates as “open.”
“Open” is a great way to think about the bracing music that this multi-generational free ensemble made on Friday night. Though much of what this team improv-formed was as cramped as that small stage — knotted with the frenetic “thrak” attack of King Crimson’s mid-’90s oeuvre — there was a lustrous warmth to the proceedings, a vintage West Coast vibe indigenous to many of the sextet members’ Bay Area and Los Angeles origin stories.
“Mama & Papa” started the evening in a slow, sinister fashion that quickly grew loutish and harried. When he wasn’t conducting this assemblage with the headstock of his guitar, Evangelista was busy pushing his six-string into a tangle of chicken-choking noises and buzzing sustains atop Cyrille and Stewart’s quickly rolling rhythms and Bradford’s salty blue, melodic cornet. In fact, Bradford more often than not was the keeper of the keys to blissed-out tunefulness and decorum. With that, the cornetist became this sextet’s somnolent eye in the center of Evangelista’s stormy weather hurricane, a whoosh made more irritable by Scampavia’s creepy organ wheeze.
“The Undesirables” began with Evangelista acting out a series of space-age pings, boings and pops while Bradford and Roper walked through a funereally paced melody to the pacing of Stewart’s insistent streaks on his bass strings. Before long, Evangelista swapped out pings and pops for a metal finger-slide’s sneeze, as Bradford played a kind of baggy-pants wah-wah on the horn. Then someone got hold of the ghost of Lee “Scratch” Perry to push the dub echo FX pedal up to ten.
“Spectre Cell” was the most straightahead, cool Cali moment in the set, one that found Scampavia with a fractured psychedelic organ sound balanced atop the ensemble’s lullaby repetitiveness (she and Karl are new parents!), and the guitarist doing a fine approximation of Jim Hall’s fretboard magic.
What was sweetest about this, and so much of this set, is how Evangelista’s overall melodic thrust was always ascending, no matter its temperature or tone. Roper’s mournful tuba and Cyrille’s slow-brushed snare at the top of “The Sound of Disappearing” lifted itself to the heavens by song’s end, in spite (or because) of Scampavia’s Suspiria-inspired synth strings. A similar ascension occurred as Stewart’s bowed bass line and Bradford’s softly staccato cornet met during the mournful “Louis Moholo,” a lovely, soft-spun song dedicated to the late South African drummer, who died on June 13.
The unhappy turned to highflying happiness, the frown turned upside down, is how Evangelista and co. closed their set, another moment dedicated to the leader’s newborn son as well as that late drummer with “Malcolm Louis.” As Roper turned his attention to a swelling conch shell sound and Scampavia softly hammered her synth, Evangelista, Stewart and Bradford went out on a cloud of undulating bop rhythm and fuzzy, buzzing electricity. JT