By Brian Earley
My daughter and I walked up Seventh Avenue on a balmy, post-thunderstorm
July night to one of the most well-known, and most sacred, of all jazz
venues on the planet, the storied Village Vanguard, to catch the opening
night of a week-long residence by the trio Paradoxical Frog.
Readers of the Free Jazz Blog might care to know this was a historical
occasion and one that involved the reuniting of three musicians often
discussed here at the FJC: pianist Kris Davis, saxophonist Ingrid
Laubrock, and drummer Tyshawn Sorey.
Behind the famous red doors that evening would perform an avant-garde
trio that had not played together in over a decade. And the band’s
unconventional leanings are perhaps less alien to the Vanguard than one
might first guess. Davis and Sorey have performed at the Vanguard
countless times, and Laubrock’s appearance is as rare and welcome as the
recent celebrated stint of the James Brandon Lewis Quartet in the West
Village club. This is to say nothing of the audience in the house that
night: I spotted Sylvie Courvoisier a few seats behind me, and
encountered William Parker outside the doors after the first set had
concluded. Davis actually opened the show fact-checking the record. “I
was corrected on social media,” she said. “It has not been fifteen
years since the three of us played together; it has been eleven.” In
any case, for listeners to either of the group’s two Cleanfeed
recordings, 2010’s Paradoxical Frog, and 2012’s Union,
it had been a long wait to hear these three masters perform in this
distinct context.
The opening night’s set consisted of four long compositions, all of
which have appeared on record at some point. The first performance, a
combination of Laubrock’s “Masterisk” and Davis’s “Union” spanned over
twenty-nine minutes. Seeing the work live allowed me to confirm just
how through-composed these Paradoxical Frog pieces are. Note the
extensive paper scores in Davis’s and Sorey’s hands and the extensions
on Laubrock’s music stand: a necessary tool to display the lengthy
writings of each work without requiring the saxophonist to flip pages
of these surprising compositions that challenge functional harmony and
defy circular rhythm.
The third work was “Whistlings” from 2020’s Blood Moon, the
Intakt Records duo of Davis and Laubrock. The live performance, over
twice the length of the original recording, featured Laubrock on soprano
saxophone and Tyshawn Sorey on a sonic array of material, at times the
room so quiet that Sorey’s percussion would consist of simply waving his
brushes in the air, an effect that hauntingly filled the room with
audible whisperings.
The set concluded with Sorey’s “Slow Burn,” clocking in at over sixteen
minutes and featuring the mysterious repetition of single notes on
Davis’s piano keys. It was moving to see these three unite again, and I
am certain I do not speak alone in voicing my hopes for more work in
the future, maybe even a Live at the Village Vanguard recording
to place among some of the mythical voices who have passed through that
hallowed underground room.
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