Nagl, Bernstein, Akchoté, Jones - Big Four Live

hatOLOGY 637

Big Four borrows its name and basic structure for a somewhat counter-intuitive antiquated source. In March of 1940, Sidney Bechet and Mugsy Spanier entered a studio with a guitarist and bassist as conscripts, cutting eight seminal sides still revered as some of the most convention-bucking music of the pre-bop era. Swiss saxophonist Max Nagl wasn’t the first to adapt the group’s instrumentation to his own designs. Buck Clayton dabbled with a like-structured quartet in 1946 and clarinetist Allan Vaché founded another some five decades later, releasing a pair of tradition-conscious discs on the Nagel-Heyer imprint. Both of those bands are well worth hearing, but it’s Nagl’s group that most naturally takes template and atomizes associative expectations. Their live follow-up to a 2002 hatOLOGY debut spent a long time in gestation and arose out of an open slot on the bill of the Willisau Jazz Festival in 2005. Nagl and his colleagues took the stage with songbook of both old and new compositions built atop the “avant-chamber-swing” pillars of their collective muse.

The band’s biggest appeal originates in the mutability and erudition of its members. Steve Bernstein is a living compendium of trumpet terminology, referencing everything from Bubber Miley brass-gnashing to Bill Dixon watercolors while retaining his own distinctive argot. Guitarist Noël Akchoté, an occasional interlocutor here at Bags, corrals a similarly far flung clutch of influences, bouncing from sharp Sharrock-like bursts of granulated distortion, to silver-fretted Charlie Christian chording and even twangy surf reverb. Nagl’s alto encompasses equally expansive tonal spectrum from dry rustle flurries to teeth-clenching cries, good-naturedly sparring and grappling with Bernstein, the two splitting composerly chores to a near even percentage. Vintage drug culture and a trio of disparate musicians receive nods in the tune titles and the numerous tightly sprung contrapuntal passages. Bradley Jones is the least flashy of the four, resisting the temptation toward capriciousness of tone and touch in plucking out rich resonating patterns on a bass borrowed from Joëlle Léandre for the performance. Nagl and Bernstein revel repeatedly in role reversals sketching unison ostinatos over which Jones and Akchoté limn exacting melodic solos.

Big Four’s earlier studio debut contains a plenty of split second give and take, but this concert companion evinces an ensemble at a juncture of even greater maturity and collective facility. Nagl may be mining the past in a sense, but his diggings are not for the usual reasons of repertory revitalization. Whether Bechet and Spanier would’ve approved of the appropriation is moot. What matters instead is the vibrancy and viability of the music made as a result of the rust-resistant toolbox they left behind.

~ Derek Taylor