Medeski, Martin & Cline Play Completely Improvised Show In NYC – Review & Videos
By Aaron Stein Oct 24, 2016 • 9:20 am PDT
Words by: Aaron “Neddy” Stein
Medeski, Martin & Cline :: 10.20.16 :: (Le) Poisson Rouge :: New York City
When life hands you lemons, make lemonade, that’s what they say. Well, unless if you’re John Medeski and Billy Martin, in which case you might serve up a thirst-quenching lemonade, but throw in the musical equivalent of a three-course meal, with a lemon chicken entree and a lemon meringue pie for dessert. When their scheduled Medeski, Martin & Wood 25th anniversary shows had to be postponed when Chris Wood underwent emergency surgery (he seems to be doing fine, thank goodness!), M&M made the most of an unfortunate situation, recruiting guitarist Nels Cline to round out the trio and then throwing in bassist Chris Lightcap, guitarist Julian Lage and trumpeter extraordinaire Steven Bernstein for a lemony-sweet-and-tart, gut-busting feast of improvisation at (Le) Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village Thursday night.
The group started as just a quartet, Medeski, Martin, Lightcap & Cline, sounding very much like MMW, finding ultra funky organ-and-keyboard pockets in long stretches of freeform improvisation. This was high level without-a-net playing, no songs or themes beyond what formed organically between the musicians. For the first stretch, Cline seemed happy to lay back and see what the others had to say and even after Lage and Bernstein joined early on, the directions of the first third of the show seemed dominated by Lightcap who was a revelation on both the electric and double basses. At some point Billy Martin took a nice melodic drum solo which somehow lit a fire under the band which was already operating at an impossibly high level.
From there the full house was treated to an awe-inspiring display of improv, not to mention peak Nels unleashed. The music seemed to go in and out of focus, going to the far reaches of the avant garde and then coalescing on a rock riff or a groove and just exploding in jammy goodness. With six musicians on stage performing together in a one-off, you might have expected some incoherence or sloppiness, but it seemed to be just the opposite, each musician contributing and interacting with each other, small pairings or groupings working together and then fitting together as a whole. The result was long stretches of music where things were both fuzzy and sharp, groovy as all heck and mind-mesmerising at the same time. It was like the picture of the hag and the beautiful lady: listen to the music in one way and you may have heard a controlled anarchy of freeform jazz, shift your perspective and suddenly your body is locked into a funky boogie. At one point maybe Julian Lage’s guitar felt out of place with the rest of them, then, rotating point of view, he was suddenly playing the most clean and beautiful guitar you could imagine, perfectly countering the mayhem of the other musicians, yet somehow in complete harmony with Medeski’s organ. Then things would shift, the wonderful lighting palate would change and you could almost feel other parts of your brain firing up with electricity.
From the start of the show, the band did not stop for over 70 minutes for the first “piece,” an epic of jamming and some of the best pure improvisation I’ve ever seen, fleeting and overlapping elements of electric Miles and Ornette and Zorn and the Dead and the Allmans. There were multiple movements each with its own hero or heroes. Perhaps my favorite occurred when Cline and Lage joined forces, their two guitars seeming to become one free-flowing entity, building from a small hook, slowly climbing measure by measure until they had the whole band in a blissful torrent, a gorgeous, smile-inducing major-key thing that was clearly headed to an ecstatic climax. Martin even set them up with a chugging drum peak, but instead of hitting the climax, both guitars unexpectedly went dissonant, almost as if Nels Cline’s guitar was saying “this ain’t no Wilco show!”
When they finally took a short breather, the crowd erupted in applause. You could feel the release in the room, like the headiest magical spell had finally been lifted and everyone could finally try to look at each other and ask, usually just by the looks on our faces, “did we just all witness what I think we did?” Medeski jokingly referred to the opening jam-of-jams as a track entitled “Chris Wood’s Small Intestine.” They implied they had a little more music left in them, but it was no surprise when the second piece went at least another half hour. The quality was equal to the first section, at times even better, perhaps the musicians breathing a little easier at that point. There were many highlights, too many to recount or remember one at a time, they all piled one on top of each other. It was challenging and weird at times, but the payoff came again and again and was always worth it. Thankfully the tapers have us covered, a show well worth revisiting via recording and trying to decipher, Zapruder-style.
While it was a bummer that the MMW shows didn’t happen — I know many of us have been looking forward to them for a while — I can’t imagine a better replacement show. An added, unintentional bonus was a lot in attendance likely getting exposure to some serious talent like Lightcap and Lage that might otherwise be under their radar… not to mention the better-than-excellent contributions from Nels and Bernstein. The trumpet player seemed to dominate the latter portions of the show, eventually leading up to a closing New Orleans-style jam that felt like it was either going to bring the band into the crowd for a second line or mutate back into something more out there. Instead, it did neither, rather closing up the show in surprisingly tidy fashion, finally breaking the spell once and for all, the audience shaking their heads in stunned disbelief, wondering when, if ever, they’ll get to taste that delicious lemonade again.
