The rhythms at Space Ballroom swung from rock to funk to dub to soul as two modern jazz bands — the Messthetics, comprised partly of former members of the now-legendary punk band Fugazi, and the New Haven-based Skylab — showed just how expansive, and how freeing, jazz today can be.
Skylab — Nick Di Maria on trumpet, Andrew Kosiba on keys, Mike Schmidt on sax, Matt Dwonszyk on bass, and Avery Collins on drums — warmed up the stage for the Messthetics with a set of originals big on grooves and sharp solos. Di Maria has long worked the ground marked out by 1970s fusion greats like Herbie Hancock, and Tuesday’s set showed how over the years he and his collaborators have settled into it, made it their own, and even pushed the borders outward.
The set opened with a delay-drenched flourish from Di Maria’s trumpet, a declaration of intent that found context in Kosiba’s atmospheric keyboard. Dwonszyk and Collins quickly set up a pulsing beat that let Di Maria and Schmidt belt out the tune’s head before turning to solos. In that piece and subsequent tunes, Di Maria and Schmidt turned out to be both good partners in making a small horn section and foils for one another in expanding the sound of the ensemble. Both leaned into certain aspects of their instruments, as Di Maria headed toward the trumpet’s exclamatory power while Schmidt got gritty with tone and unrolled sheets of sound. Meanwhile, Dwonszyk and Collins doled out groove after muscular groove, while Kosiba swung from clouds of sound to acrobatic solo lines.
Di Maria also expressed his excitement to be opening for the Messthetics, calling it an honor. “I’ve been technically listening to this band since I was in high school,” he said, referring to Fugazi. “Not many kids grow up on punk and then become jazz musicians, so this one hits double.”
Messthetics.
True to their collective pedigrees, the Messthetics — Anthony Pirog on guitar, Joe Lally on bass, and Brendan Canty on drums, with James Brandon Lewis on saxophone — came out blazing with a complex, crackling riff from Pirog that Lally and Canty jumped on and ran with, with Lewis screaming across it all. It was a lightning bolt of energy that struck and then held, carrying through the second tune as well. The next song dialed back the volume but not the intensity, as Lally and Canty dipped into dublike rhythms while Pirog unfurled a wide landscape of sound on guitar that Lewis explored, mournfully and purposefully. It all reached a new height at the end of the fourth number, as Pirog, Lally, and Canty cycled through an oceanic song structure, finding greater depth in every pass, while Lewis seemed to reach into the bottom of his instrument to pull out a wrenching, aching tone. For all the grit and energy, it was also startlingly melodic, and deeply moving.
As the Messthetics’ set continued, they kept introducing new rhythms, new textures, new melodic ideas, lush and angular. They made the latest case for a newer kind of fusion, also explored by Marc Ribot and Getatchew Mekuria and the Ex — one that pulled from several styles, from rock to reggae to contemporary and experimental jazz, and delivered all of it with punk’s desperate, emotional immediacy. That kind of energy may have been easy to access, as Fugazi veterans Lally and Canty packed mountainous energy into every beat. But Pirog and Lewis matched it, always aiming for a direct expressiveness, that made its intentions utterly clear and aimed straight for the gut and the heart even as the ideas kept coming. The guitarist and saxophonist excelled at blending their instruments together in gnarly unison when required, could also part ways to create a cyclone of cacophony, and could play off each other in beautiful balance, sometimes all in the space of one song.
The group played through its latest, self-titled album like a hurricane passes over the ocean, with Canty occasionally pausing to remark how much he enjoyed being back at Space Ballroom. “We just love playing together, honestly,” he said. As proof, they kept coming up with song after song even after the album’s material was finished. The crowd, an ample mix of old punks and jazz heads alike, was there to take it all in. It was a case not simply of dissolving musical boundaries, but of finding the common ground among them, the place where jazz musicians and punks stand together with the singular goal to say what’s on their minds, and speak what’s in their hearts.