Hearts & Minds @ Uncanned Music Over/Out Series, Bar DeVille: 11/19/2013

Apparently the band name Hearts & Minds is not necessarily a reference to the Oscar winning Vietnam War documentary. And I forgot to ask the group members (bass clarinetist Jason Stein, keyboardist Paul Giallorenzo, and drummer Frank Rosaly) what their name might be referencing. A safe, if somewhat reductionist, guess might be that it refers loosely to the combination of freely improvised periods (“heart?”) vs. the written/composed sections (“mind?”) that make up the group’s repertoire. Considering their general intensity and occasional ferocity, the group could almost as appropriately be named Blood & Guts. Almost…

Giallorenzo and Stein wrote all the tunes played last Tuesday (11/19). As challenging and inaccessible as the band’s improvisations can get, the written material tends toward the groovy. Quirky (catchy even) melodies that approach time and space in a playful way are written into relatively compact forms. The more challenging, ornate stuff comes through the band’s improvisations. Although it often might seem like the groove is thrown out with the bathwater, it’s often still there amidst the chaos; obliquely implied, deeply camouflaged – an undetected gravitational pull keeping the planet just within orbit. As a comparison, my best shot would be Medeski, Martin, & Wood meets The Clusone Trio meets John Zorn's Masada. And just like the three aforementioned groups, Hearts & Minds never comes close to strictly derivative.

Bass clarinet, relatively unusual to see at gigs, is one of my favorite sounds. So I was near ecstatic to hear Stein play it all night. That deep and rich reedy buzz is one of the most distinctive in all instrumentdom. Yeah, that’s right: instrumentdom. But from what I heard on this night, Stein is a very textural, searching player concerned more with non-traditional techniques and energy than the expected traditional sounds from the clarinet. Benny Goodman he is not - and thankfully so. Stein’s long split tones can evoke Tuvan throat singers guttural trance states. There were also occasional clarinet versions of what approached Coltrane’s “sheets of sound” where flurries of notes, honks and overtones mixed together flying off the instrument into the cool backroom air. In a trio who’s instrumentation might lead one to assume that the clarinetist would be ever the melodist, Stein broke with convention. He just said no. He is the Nancy Reagan of clarinetists. What?

While the “weight,” or roll, of all three musicians was equal to the music, keyboardist Giallorenzo seemed to play a somewhat more supportive character on Tuesday; but in the way a bassist’s role is felt as supportive in most traditional jazz contexts, when it is often, in fact, more important than it is perceived to be by the listener/audience. Also adding to this “supportive” nature was the subtle tonal palette of his instruments. Warm, deep toned left hand bass lines from Giallorenzo’s Moog formed the initial drive and pulse for much of the music. And his other keyboard (Wurlitzer/Rhodes type sounds from…?) produced mainly smooth, warm tones as well; never anything too bright and often functioning more as a colorist. Nevertheless, his function in the collective improvisations was deceptively strong and his more subtle tone in this context played an effective balance to the other two more brightly attacked contributions.

Hearts and Minds’s drummer is the wild card – the “unstable molecule” (yes, Chicago music scene pun/reference intended): Yet a paradoxically controlled, selective and intended instability; that swinging, driving clatter coming from all directions, often with no discernable starting point; this undefined, non-localized, deconstructionist/reconstructionist force moving ever forward searching for more, more. What is this force called? Yeah, it’s Rosaly. At times, there’s so much happening in his drumming that you sense an oncoming system overload; yet it never arrives. Some fitting, idiosyncratic musical balance is always achieved. It just works itself out. Like in some of Cecil Taylor’s solo piano work when it’s hard to believe all that music is coming from one person. But it is. 

Rosaly is occasionally like a dancer following after the cues from his body. His drums happen to be there and function as extensions of his limbs and movements. Part of what creates this dance is his searching through his trove of instruments, in media res, for the right sound at the right moment. Occasionally he used two sticks in one hand; a technique I had never seen used on a drum kit before - only on vibes or marimba. It reminded me of when I was a line cook and a chef taught me to use two knives in one hand for prep. I could chop twice as much. It was a very smart, simple solution: Two knives, more food. Two sticks, more sound. Rosaly is simply smart. He just gets more done that way. But it’s a unique technique that undoubtedly took a good deal of practice before being able to incorporate into performance. Cool stuff… 

As creative, reactive, and free as Rosaly’s playing can get, he can also lay down a groove that lifts the room and simply makes the space feel good. But more than half of the evening’s music was quite “outside.” His approach in these more unpredictable contexts often seems to create an abstracted shadow of a concrete object. Or he can seem to be using a sort of Completion Principal or “Beat” style “cut-up” poetry technique: like writing sentences/paragraphs, then taking out randm words or ltters. Lke   ths mayb  o     lie his. Bt ith     msic   and with ore  textcon than this   ampleex is gving.

It’s not unusual for groups who play free to move back and forth between pulse/groove and rubato/free. The trick is making those moves feel organic or somehow “right.” Hearts and Mind’s transitions from one to the other is crazy seamless and borders on telepathic. Some of their more extended, free-ish sections were like intentional studies in awkward. When these collectively awkward sections gradually worked their way back to a groove, it was like watching, in slow motion reverse, a car speeding down the highway getting into an accident where it flips and rolls and rolls and flips for a long stretch. Like a slow motion falling up. Together, when they’re really getting to it, Hearts and Minds are conjurers. It’s semi-scripted magic.

Excerpts: