James Finn - Live at the Via Della Pace

Gingko Leaf 3

Concert-wise, there’s a certain cachet that comes from being shut down by the cops. It’s roots lie in the counter-establishment spirit of challenging music that balks conventional expectation whether via volume or content or both. A storied history exists when it comes to figuratively blowing the fuses and sending unreceptive onlookers clamoring for the exits.

Such was the scene when saxophonist James Finn and drummers Warren Smith and Newman Taylor Baker gigged at the Via Della Pace in Brooklyn this past May. I’ve never visited the venue, but Finn’s recollections on his website describe it as a small basement space beneath an Italian restaurant known for romantic dining and intimate atmosphere. The owner was presumably expecting one thing and the trio delivered something else entirely- an incantatory evening of free jazz that incited neighbors to complaining and the small audience in attendance to adulating. Someone called the fuzz and the lights came up, but not before an entire precious set made it to digital tape. The edited results reside on this slim-line CDR and they’re quite a ride.

Smith and Taylor-Baker make for a stunning team with a surplus of stamina shared between them. Separated into stereo channels (T-B on the right and Smith stationed left) each man respects the other’s space, but isn’t averse to regular overlap when it comes to shaping roiling currents around Finn’s ruddering horn. On the opening “Aubrush Variations,” an episodic improv that takes its inspiration from a sacred Moslem rug-weaving practice, the pair’s synergy is often downright scary. Reacting and adapting in the absence of Finn during the track’s middle section each drummer shapes solo statements that also cannily interlock in an undulating telegraphing conversation. Taylor-Baker starts on stuttering snare, Smith on rolling toms. A switch signaled by a resounding cymbal wash and it’s time for a call-and-response exchange between the two that makes resourceful use of sticks, brushes, palm edges and fingers. Finn navigates the first third of the piece on tenor, starting purposefully tentative, but swiftly building momentum as rhythms parse and implode around him. Soprano unsheathes for the final third, his straight horn retaining a striking limpidity of tone and syntax even in proximity to the most strenuously martial patterns from his partners.

“Adagio Reflections” generates an even greater density and velocity as Finn’s wailing tenor sluices down the stereo center between frothing drum cascades. Translated from its earlier tenor dialect on Plaza de Toros to flute-speak, “Toro Bravo” feels more ventilated in cast and countenance. Smith’s steady shuffling brushwork joins Taylor-Baker’s atmospheric cymbal and tom swells in further lending an airy agrestic ease to the interpretation. The concert concludes with another ceiling-scoring blowout inscribed with an appropriately epic title “Intercessions and Towards the Final Rose.” Finn’s soprano and tenor scales heights once again and the drummers operate in close league to further pulley and power his skyward spiritualized ascents. As if on cue the track concludes with the restaurant owner audibly and resignedly advising the band to cease and desist per constabulary order. Finn obliges and another chapter in his already colorful history is recorded into lore.

~ Derek Taylor