Butch Morris Revels in The Rarely Recalled Spirit of Miles Davis

In New York for CMJ, it felt like a good idea to step completely outside the indie rock realm and venture into a cabaret setting and then some downtown free jazz. Judy Kuhn dazzled with exceptionally honest renditions of Laura Nyro songs; in an eye-opening performance, Butch Morris conducted the Nublu Orchestra in the

Alphabet

City

club Nublu.

Favoring funk flavors that his players clearly relished, Morris went in a rooted, direction Monday not usually found on his recordings. Morris calls his work “conductions”: With baton, he guides the music and the musicians, asking for thunderous bass lines, the occasional rat-a-tat drumming and a steady recurring single note blast from the alto sax. It meshed wonderfully, recalling the funk of Miles Davis’ “On the Corner” period and fed into some Sun Ra-ish electronic keyboard lines and, for a few very captivating minutes, some dub reggae. Morris is making the usually derisive term "fusion" a badge of honor.

Band was comprised of two electric basses (Cavassa Nickens, Jesse Murphey), two trap drummers (Kenny Wollesen, Aaron Johnston), keyboards (Didi Gutman), trumpet (Kirk Knuffke), trombone (Clark Gayton), sax (Jonathon Haffner) and a musician or two (cornetist Graham Haynes) tucked in a corner of the stageless venue. There are no actual songs, just stylistic segues that take the musicians from one journey to another; as experiments often are, there were moments when the sound went flabby, but for the most, the audience was keenly aware they were listening to an ensemble working from the same unprinted page.
Morris began his career as a free jazz cornet player and composed notated music; since he created “conductions” 30 years ago, he has conducted more than 5,000 musicians in 22 different countries. Nublu Orchestra, he reports is a composite band of those nations and players.
Nublu is a club on a non-descript section of Avenue C. It was a bit of a flashback to the late ‘70s, when punk and other underground clubs would crop up out of nowhere in mostly abandoned lower

Manhattan

neighborhoods. Its doorway – filled with graffiti and stickers – is an unlikely entryway to such an inviting club. Inside is appropriately dimly lit and accessorized; CDs from regular performers Forro in the Dark and Wax Poetic are displayed behind the bar and probably available for sale. Not until you visit the website, does it appear the co-mingling of cultures is highly intentional: the bartender was from a suburb of

Paris

, a Barzailian man was with an English woman; the crowd seemed more neighborhood than free-jazz fanatics. For a couple of hours, it restored the faith that

Manhattan

has not made the presentation of all but the most commercial of music economically unfeasible.

Comments

[ols]

nublu orchestra is really one of its kind