Sunday, March 9, 2008

You Grooving?

So I was asked by the saxophonist Dave Liebman before his concert tonight in Buenos Aires. After learning that I was from New York and living in Buenos Aires, he wanted to make sure that my time here was living up to the jazz ethic. I told him it was.

Courtesy of my friend, the guitarist Ale Demogli, I had full run of the theater where Liebman was playing and was able to chat with him for a bit before the show. Way back in November 2000, I went to a jazz club for the first time and saw Liebman playing with his big band at the Knitting Factory's Old Office. While my friends (fellow travelers of the spaceways and waterways Greg Kress, Dude Friedman, Zach Seward, and Dan Hemel) and I liked hanging in a real live jazz club, we certainly didn't get the music.

Tonight, I introduced myself to Liebman by telling him that he was the first musician I ever saw play in a club, omitting the fact that I didn't really like what he'd played then. Since that fateful night in 2000 (earlier in the day, Dalton football had won its first championship in 20 years in an epic 14-13 win over Horace Mann) I hadn't heard Liebman play live, so my view of him continued to be of an eccentric and inaccessible performer.

What a difference seven and a half years makes.

Tonight's concert was one of the finest I've seen in a long time. I don't recall ever hearing a saxophonist that was more powerful than Dave Liebman was tonight. In his hands, the soprano sax, an instrument with a proclivity for Kenny G sacchrine, was a flame thrower. On tenor, he evoked the spirit of Coltrane more earnestly and powerfully than any other player I've seen. Liebman's originals were stirring, but the concert reached a new level on his ten-plus minute solo on 'My Favorite Things'. The man had the gall to poach directly from the Coltrane cannon, perform a sheet-of-sound attack solo, and come up with something ferocious and new.

The last show I saw that reached this kind of level was a August 2007 concert at Blue Note in New York of Don Byron's Ivey Divey Trio. That night, I left the Blue Note and needed to walk the streets of Greenwich Village for an hour just to process what had gone on. Take this gushing missive as the digital equivalent of that bewildered and awestruck stroll..

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