... and magical jazz
| Conduction at Bezanson: Moondoc leads Jus Grew at UMass this spring. (Ben Barnhart photo) |
Jemeel Moondoc stands onstage like Zeus, his back to the world, emphatically drawing rhythms from the ten-piece Jus Grew Orchestra. Gaunt frame cloaked in a charcoal sports jacket and baggy leather pants, dreadlocks straying from beneath an African-print skullcap, Moondoc flings lightning-bolts of "conduction" - a style of directed improvisation attributed to legendary innovator Butch Morris—at a horn section showering the audience with rainballs of music.
Moondoc's style embodies the free creative nature of jazz that has attracted this audience of several hundred nodding heads and tapping feet to this second performance, on March 30 in Bezanson Recital Hall, of the 2000 Magic Triangle Jazz Series. Since 1990, WMUA radio and the FAC's Residential Arts program have been bringing both jazz veterans and up-and-coming musicians to UMass every spring for the three-performance series.
WMUA advisor and disk jockey Glenn Siegel calls jazz "omnivorous" in its ability to devour many musical styles and influences, and the Magic Triangle crew, headed by Siegel and ResArts director Bob Antil, try to emphasize that breadth when they book musicians for the series each year. A similar range is reflected in tonight's audience: from graying wanna-beats who might have stepped out of the pages of Kerouac's The Subterraneans to teenage undergrads whose only exposure to jazz is the samplings on the latest trip-hop CD.
Siegel and other WMUA jazz DJs hatched the Magic Triangle idea eleven years ago. He says the concept of the series agrees with the station's philosophy of providing music that's not widely available elsewhere.
"We wanted to travel under the radar, so to speak," Siegel explains. "And we couldn't afford the Wynton Marsalises and the Ray Charleses, anyway."
So the series brings in either unknown musicians looking for a break, or older performers who've logged many late nights in clubs and recording studios but haven't hit it big: artists like Jemeel Moondoc, who played the world over with his Muntu Ensemble in the '70s and has been a regular for years at such New York jazz spots as Fez and Neither/Nor. Triangle organizers sometimes collaborate with the Boston Creative Music Alliance to offer artists more area gigs and a bigger paycheck. Moondoc and Jus Grew will head to Boston after tonight's show for a date at the Institute of Contemporary Art.
The pot has been further sweetened by the fact that Northampton-based jazz label Eremite Records, owned by WMUA DJ Michael Ehlers, is recording the two shows and will release the first-ever commercial recording of Moondoc with Jus Grew by year's end. "This is the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for him," says Siegel of Moondoc's recording contract with Eremite.
The fulfillment cuts both
ways. Among the students who make up roughly half of the crowd in Bezanson
tonight are a few who are new to jazz. Tamara Codor '04 and her friend
Nick Dedini, an exchange student from Humboldt State U. in California,
say most students have had some exposure to the music, mostly through
popular bands like Phish and Medeski, Martin & Wood that fuse the
language of jazz with the edgy sounds of funk and rock. But, they add,
the introspective, penetrating nature of jazz is not widely appreciated
among their peers.
"It's a cerebral kind of music," says Dedini. "And,"
chimes in Codor, "there are no words, there's no drinking at these
shows—you have to sit in a seat and concentrate on the music."
Back onstage, Moondoc frantically fingers his alto saxophone, then lashes the band with electrical pulses of conduction once more, as wailing saxes and blaring trombones add voice to the rhythm of guitar and drums. The audience seems mesmerized by the thundering sound, the thin figure blowing with his bandmates, and the unmapped musical journey they're all taking together.
– Ben Barnhart
