This is the first in hopefully many reviews I will write in the near future covering local, live musical performances. I hope that sharing my experience at these shows will give people some idea of what music in our own town sounds like and feels like. I am a lifelong musician in addition to being a lifelong music lover. To me, it will always be the language I understand best.
When people play music while people listen to that music, when the audience and performers share their breath, something deeply human and crucial happens. And the PS1 Close House is an intimate venue, the stage set up in the dining room of the historic brick mansion.
As the Sam Ross Quartet played there on Friday, May 9, the sun was setting and traffic flowed by on Gilbert Street. The group consists of Oisin Leopold, a University of Northern Iowa grad from Iowa City, on keyboard; Miles Kean, a Cedar Rapids native and University of Iowa grad on bass; and Milo Savage, a current University of Iowa student from North Liberty, on drums.
The quartet is the product of jazz performance programs at UNI and UI, and before that, high school band musicians. They’ve been playing in groups for thousands of hours over many years, and yet they’re still in their 20s.
Their ensemble playing is fluid, casual yet serious, and squarely in the center of the tradition of jazz performance. Interestingly, they don’t hark back to the ’50s and ’60s jazz that dominated jazz teaching even 20 years ago. Sam Ross and his band more often reference the late 1960s and 1970s, when there was a flowering of new ideas in jazz put forward by the alumni of Miles Davis’ various ensembles.
They opened with a funk performance of the Miles Davis song “Nardis,” giving it a funk backbeat. Next was Herbie Hancock’s “Sunflower,” establishing a trend of songs from that crucial time when jazz went electric.
But this group wasn’t born when the songs they played were written, and their musical influences include hip hop. A lot of young musicians come to jazz by combing WhoSampled.com to find where their favorite hip-hop producers got their grooves.
The Sam Ross quartet didn’t play any of their own original compositions, instead putting their a novel stamp on a musical era that shook up the jazz world. The quality of their playing and the interplay, particularly between the keyboard and drums, made it an engrossing listen.
Michael Sarian’s band similarly takes inspiration from Miles Davis and the electric period that started with “In A Silent Way.” The famous Miles recordings like “Bitches Brew” were put together with tape edits.
Sarian and his band (Santiago Leibson on keyboards, Marty Kenney on electric bass and Nathan Ellman Bell on drums) have their own musical mysteries to work out, even as they echo Miles’ musical vocabulary. They have adopted synths and effects for keyboards and Sarian’s trumpet.
Their songs are based around themes and fragments that you can hear on their album Esquina, but every performance is different, full of improvisatory twists and turns. They’re not imitating anyone; Miles Davis might be a touchstone (as he is for the Sam Ross Quartet), but the music is about being in the moment. They know where they’re going, but they’re creative about how they get there.
Jazz is freedom, with something new created every time one plays a song, even if it’s been played a thousand times before. The freedom of improvisation is balanced against the intention of the original creator. Playing is an act of recreation, adding a link to a chain in jazz’s storied history.
