Tom Chant is the Real Deal

I – unsuspecting, roughly oblivious – made the 1.5 hour jaunt into town last night to act upon the rare opportunity to hear Eddie Prévost in concert. The journey from my house to Seattle is an event in itself. Highway or ferry? Brew coffee or make do with bottled water? Take the kids or soak up the solitude? Music or passive reflection? On this last petty quandary – although a slew of AMM and related offshoot recordings were knowingly in tow – I opted for Neil Young’s Harvest, always comforting and ever dependable.

Halfway through “Out On the Weekend,” there are random revelations:

• I am singing an octave lower than Mr. Young
• the Earth’s axis is the direct cause of these longer, daylight evenings
• the modest rattle from beneath the steering column has gone
• to have no preconceptions about an occasion is to be at total peace with its range of possible outcomes

Arriving at the venue I am easily able to contain what is now only a fraction of the excitement I had felt earlier that afternoon. Absent is the euphoric, shrunken attention span so often coped with in flashes of anticipation. The Polestar Music Gallery is fuller than I have ever seen it and the voices are neither restrained nor fragmentary. It is a human wash of soothing, miscellaneous sound. I am fully detached.

Prévost introduces himself and the remainder of his trio, Tom Chant and John Edwards. I wonder if a prerequisite to playing with Prévost is a regimented diet and copious exercise. Chant is painfully young, while Edwards could get lost in a crowd of thirty-somethings, never to be heard from again. I remind myself that I am utterly inept at estimating character on first encounters. The trio is welcomed with a warm, lengthy applause, as Pacific Northwesterners are wont to provide. I have heard from a few European musicians that Seattle gigs are the most rewarding spots in US tours.

Any detachment I had previously felt vanished once the music started; the opening notes had me completely, helplessly engaged. It was the sound of Prévost’s drums: unblemished in their most agitated resonances, and then only a product of their master’s deceptively calculated patterning. For this 45 minute improvisation, Prévost used only mallets and brushes, possibly concerned for the relationship between the listener and the room’s natural acoustics. Nonetheless, his playing was forcibly loud in the most powerful segments. He showed most acumen with the brushes, which were made to be an exact counterpart to the kit: bristles and skins were used interchangeably in the drummer’s weaving of a dynamic sonorous tapestry. Even as a saxophone and bass were actively contributing to the environment, I couldn’t help but focus on Prévost’s playing, perhaps because legend was unveiling itself before me; those wonderful sounds heard on so many recordings were now a tangible reality. More likely he was simply in the zone. All else was shut out.

It was perhaps ten minutes into the set when, in my mind, Chant made some otherworldly transition from passive accomplice to determined catalyst. His playing initiated a rotation of the atmosphere – a transformation of activity that went beyond musicianly dynamics. The energy leapt from the small stage. From his soprano came a series of harmonics unlike any my ears had ever witnessed. These were undocumented techniques and physical manipulations completely unique and wholly belonging to Chant. The soprano saxophone is a finely engineered conduit through which lightly compressed air becomes sound by way of physical, sometimes whimsical, modifications of the instrument’s very structure. Inasmuch that the saxophone is built to accepted specifications, it so follows that the sounds (properly anticipated) leaving the horn will reside in an accordant sound spectrum. But like many other contemporary improvisers, Chant plays his horn in ways that fall fully outside of that spectrum, producing attenuated and sustained (and repeated) tones akin to a photo negative. Chant’s appeal lies in his assembly of these various sounds and a dramatic means of achieving them. He stood for 10 minutes like a stork, leg-muting the soprano in what could be considered his aria's aria. Sputters and tongue-slaps shot out like so many rounds from an automatic weapon, then subsiding into gentle chirping and hollow, low-frequency whistles. I wondered fleetingly what kind of embouchure and movements of the tongue could produce such sounds with continuous precision. Surely he is practiced at this system of effects and tactics. His playing, as original as it was, was anything but accidental.

I should point out that Edwards was not blameless in the music’s ongoing transformation. I ruminated that if Alfred Hitchcock was a bassist, he might play something like Edwards. He had the custom of plucking both above and below his fretted fingers, furthered by the fact that each note was sounded with incredible precision. His extended solo was a combination of the slightest nuances and aggressive applications of bow, hands and fists. At the quietest moments you could hear nothing at all. Nobody breathed. He slammed a fist into the body of the bass and went into a bastardized walk on the low strings like Leroy Vinnegar on the most potent amphetamines, but only for a moment. His work with the bow was similarly eclectic, sawing at the strings both above and below the bridge, but without emitting a single wasted tone; every note and vibration was an integral component to a conscious strain of controlled improvisation.

Their music was deceptive, like a brush fire that, upon first glance, could be stomped out with one or two swings of the boot, but then spreads exponentially with each running step toward the blaze. Prévost kept things running with surges of activity and, during the most intensive group playing, showed tremendous restraint that furthered this gorgeous music. In the countless variants of improvised music since AMM’s introduction to the music world almost 40 years ago, Prévost’s new trio marks a return of sorts to more conventional methods of music making. Yet this group’s music is utterly progressive. The musicians are imaginative, with myriad influences to draw upon, most importantly their own in-performance revelations: moments to temporarily encapsulate, build upon, and then discard for fear of subconscious impulse or repetition.

I was torn between catching the second set and catching the early ferry home. All of yesterday’s conscious decisions yielded satisfactory results. With Zen indifference I opted to head back to the house, not the least worried that I’d miss a set of music superior to what I had just heard. Better to leave on a good note than none at all. When I reached the car, my first thought was to remove Neil Young from the cd player.

~buy oodles of Prévost recordings at Anomalous