Gorge Trio
Thurs July 15
Berbati’s Pan
10 SW 3rd
IT IS A QUIET SUMMER evening in 1982 and the sunset is coloring the ocean a deep red orange. The beach is long and white and deserted. The boardwalk, empty and dark. The shops and lifeguard towers, closed for the night. Not a creature is stirring–except for the saxophonist. He is tall and thin and has long, curly locks blowing in the breeze, his white dress shirt open at the chest. His jeans are a perfect blue. Behind black RayBans, he stands nobly in the sand, arched back, blowing a bluesy sax solo. Next to him is a metal trashcan and it is on fire, flames and smoke billowing into the cool California night as the jazzman plays.
That’s how a lotta people see jazz nowadays–and rightly so. It is a genre co-opted, Caucasianized, and heisted for soundtracks to Val Kilmer movies. But jazz was once surly, important, and revolutionarily innovative–and that’s where Gorge Trio lives.
The Trio’s kind of jazz might not seem like jazz at all, but the genes and roots are there–improvisation, heady musicianship, sprawling choruses riffing on a central theme. Genealogy: Gorge Trio has members of grind-jazz loons the Flying Luttenbachers and Deerhoof, the latter of which does for noise what Ornette Coleman did for free jazz–gave its wild heart an accessible, likeable, romantic personality. They are also three quarters of Colossamite, which broke up but once tore the faces off lions in the terror-rock battlefields of the ’90s.
Seen as a sum of their pedigrees and past records, Gorge Trio promises the freaky–and they deliver, but not like you might think. At their most jarring, they stop dead and turn gorgeous–thick walls of abrasion shifting to soaring, majestic waves of rock–the kind that sounds like our hero riding Pegasus over the rainbow backed by a glorious guitar wwhaaa.
The Trio’s new rec, Open Mouth, O Wisp, is beastliness vis-a-vis beauty–jazz invention for the 21st century.