.gonzalez review.

Dennis Gonzalez

September-7th-2003, 01:05 PM (on www.jazzcornertalk.com)

Well, where to begin? Interesting evening at the new New Music venue in Oak Cliff (Dallas). Challenging music for a crowd of about 30, half of which had never heard anything like it, especially the beautiful almost-classical compositions and arrangements of Carl Smith, who leads the ECFA ensemble -- pared down to a duo: Carl on tenor sax and James Alexander on viola.

The room is the "back room" of the Cafe, a large rectangular place with sofas and bar chairs and disco lights, which we requested they turn off. It has a lot of potential for future shows, but as it was the room's "maiden voyage", it had an air of disorganization...hopefully it'll work itself out. For last night's show, though, it was a positive factor, it lent an air of daring and being on "the edge" of a new thing.

ECFA (E.C.F.A. stands for emanation, creation, formation, and action) started off, Carl quietly introducing the duo and its first composition, which title I couldn't hear because the audience was still conversing. But once they started, the listeners realized that they had to..., well, ...listen! I remarked to Stefan (my youngest son and drummer for Yells At Eels) that ECFA are very brave to play uncompromising music wherever they go. Let me put it this way: If you are familiar with the creative jazz idiom, the alternative and extended techniques, and the call-and-response of jazz, you would have very easily settled into the way of listening to this superb duo. But for half of the audience, it was obvious that this was no simple formulaic performance.

Smith's arrangements of Steve Lacy, Jimmy Giuffre, and his own compositions, are excellent and melodic/harmonic, interspersed with dissonant clustered interplay between tenor and viola. The drummer was absent, and possibly his presence would have underpinned a sense of rhythm for the audience to hang on to. At times, the duo sounded like a chamber string quartet, and at other times they would launch into a Gestalt swing that was as ferocious as it was abstract.

Originally, the duo was set to play a 40-minute set, but ended up going at it for just over an hour. Some of the compositions were pages and pages long, but the ECFA is an obviously well-rehearsed group, because never did it sound as if they were glued to an unfamiliar page of music, always flowing with grace and strength and a very deep beauty that was inspiring. The respect that emerged from this unseemly audience was amazing to see. The funniest part of the ECFA portion of the program is when the television screen, which was on because Carl had to have more light to read his charts, started playing a scene in a Jim Carrey movie where a duck flies into his butt...picture this, if you will: a naked-assed Jim Carrey making these funny gestures and faces because a duck -- or could it have been a Canadian goose -- impales itself in his ass as Carl and James are playing Lacy's "Blinks", and the audience is falling out of their chairs cracking up, howling with delight. Stefan looks over at me and says, "I guess you just have to imagine that they are playing the soundtrack to this movie...!" And a great soundtrack it was.

Yells At Eels was forced to call off a part of our set because Aaron (my oldest son, and bass player for YAE) blew out his plucking finger. We started off with "Hymn for Julius Hemphill" which almost sounded like lite jazz compared to the music of ECFA. It was a good change, and the audience visibly relaxed and listened well, even when the music headed for the stratosphere. The second work was an improvisation, with soloing by all three of us, and a group interplay that made Daddy proud. Rhythmic and free at the same time, we played several false endings before closing out the piece with a unison bang.

The final reading was "Old Time Revival" from the CD of the same name, and we asked ECFA to holster up their axes and join us. It's a good thing too that I opted to ask them up at this time, which was to be the middle of the set, because, as I said before, Aaron's finger turned black and blue after he popped a couple of veins and an ad hoc blister all at the end of the song. Everybody soloed strongly, and the crowd loved it. I noticed that Aaron had his finger in his mouth and was hopping around in pain as the song ended, and when I asked him what had happened, he mumbled though his finger that "I 'hink I 'lew ou' 'y 'inger!"

At which point I thanked ECFA, the Twilight Cafe, and the audience for coming out.