Posted by On April 17th, 2015 I went to see the Sonoluminescence Trio gigging at a small venue called Gigspace on the fringe of Ottawa’s Little Italy neighbourhood. I attended the show more out of habit than desire, more interested as I was in a night out hearing crazy-wacky musicians playing their crazy-wacky music than I was in these specific crazy-wacky musicians or their particular crazy-wacky music.
(I suppose for expediency’s sake instead of “crazy-wacky” we can just call it “free jazz”, though there was indeed a cover charge to get in.*)
The musicians in this case were a bass player from New York named William Parker, a Toronto-based sax player named David Mott, and the name that drew me out of my house on this Friday evening, percussionist Jesse Stewart.
Jesse started teaching at Carleton University right around the time that I stopped doing the same, and while I’m sure I met him back then I was in fact more familiar with him as a member of one of Kevin Breit’s projects, a long, tall outfit called Stretch Orchestra (Dave Brubeck’s youngest son Matt completes the trio). As anyone who has read these missives well knows, I revel in the vibrations that emanate from Kevin Breit’s very aura and I attend his shows with a near-religious fervour, and while I’ve never been the hugest fan of Jesse’s cerebral drumming style his association with my much-heralded guitar hero was enough to put my butt into one of Gigspace’s thirty folding seats.
One thing I really appreciate about the Sonoluminescence Trio is how well the name describes the band. You want cerebral? According to the dictionary, “sonoluminescence is the emission of short bursts of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound,” and that’s what William Parker, David Mott, and Jesse Stewart sound like when the three of them shake off any preconceived musical notions, close their eyes to the material world and attempt to start and stop playing at the same time. (You could tell a piece was over when they all opened their eyes and looked at each other with shrugs and questioning eyebrows; it’s not like there were any big Elton John-style V-I cadences or anything.)
Of course the tenuous connection to Kevin Breit wasn’t enough to elevate the music to the point that it reached deep into my skandas and tickled my musical soul the way Kevin usually does, but at least I didn’t just sit at home on a Friday night.
*Imagine if a brewmeister came to work one day, threw away all of his recipes and just started fermenting random concoctions. Now imagine that he hung a sign out front that read “Free Beer” but still charged by the pint. Hmmm…come to think of it I would probably frequent such an establishment.
Todd Man Out 