Brian Slattery photo
Brightening the dark at Never Ending Books.
Stan Nishimura announced his entrance with a fanfare from his trombone. Paul McGuire, on saxophone, answered with a wail. For a moment they made a game of matching notes and unmatching them. Then they moved into playing off one another, supporting one another, but breathing together, starting and ending their phrases together, turning the movement of air in and out of their lungs into their own rhythm section.
McGuire and Nishimura were up first in a three-group bill on Thursday evening, a showcase for the New Haven Improvisers Collective — now entering its third decade as a home for experimental music in the Elm City, hosting monthly workshops and a concert series as well as putting out a string of albums by collective members. For many of its events, NHIC has operated out of Never Ending Books at 810 State St., and this showcase, closing out the season of concerts until the fall, was no exception. It may have gotten darker and darker in the room as the night went on, but the music always kept the lights on.
McGuire and Nishimura engaged in some musical pointilism, then shifted toward a more lyrical mode, led by McGuire. They switched roles and with Nishimura in the lead the music became more angular. They together got the idea of switching to sliding glissandos, adding a touch of levity to their music, and landed together at a phrase’s end.
“Seemed a good place to stop,” McGuire said.
In their second excursion both musicians explored the tones and timbres their instruments could make. Nishimura began with sputtering stops, and McGuire with breathy, rasping sounds. As they developed the performance, gaining a sense of melody, it didn’t stop their forays into texture, whether it was playing with overtones or overdriving the instrument. They created a musical space where they could ask each other questions, without necessarily looking for answers.
“Are we done?” McGuire asked.
“You tell me,” host Bob Gorry said.
“We could do another short one,” McGuire said, and brandished a recorder, upon which he improvised a melody that partook deeply of old folk songs. As McGuire continued, Nishimura interjected chromaticism, swelling notes. Having unhinged the song, they kept it open. McGuire ended sweetly; Nishimura ended with a sense of gasping for air, but smiled when everyone clapped.
The room was twilit when Diane Buettner and Conor Perreault took the stage, Buettner on clarinets and Perreault on electronics. Perreault began by feeding vocalizations into a mic to loop and manipulate while Buettner started in on a slinky, smoky melody. Perreault slowly built a soundscape as Buettner explored her own musical ideas. Buettner switched to bass clarinet, and Perreault created a morass of wavering drones for her to wade through. One sound fed the other. As Perreault’s sounds became more synthetic, Buettner’s got more earthy. The pairing was eerie and wistful.
Perreault made his sounds warble and bubble, and Buettner switched to flute. Now the sounds came together, acoustic and electronic merging and blending. They were heading in the same direction. Buettner dropped out and for a moment, performers and audience alike floated in a calm sea of sound.
In their second outing, Perreault first accompanied Buettner’s excursions by reaching over to the piano he happened to be near and playing notes and chords. Returning to his electronic setup, he fed guttural sounds into the equipment, turning the sound to static. Buettner responded in kind, making her notes slurred and raspy. They followed each other into noisy terrain; then, as Perrault’s electronics were at their most distorted, Buettner played a hymnlike melody, slowly and sadly, a definitive end. In that moment, simple tonality and aggressive noise seemed all of a piece, neither more radical than the other.
The room was now almost completely dark, light coming in from the streetlamp outside the window and the narrow doorways from the adjacent room. Bob Gorry and Jeff Cedrone on guitars and Michael Kiefer on drums got ready to play.
“We’ll see where it goes, I don’t know,” Gorry said. “I feel some need for catharsis. There are earplugs for free.” He gestured to the counter in the adjacent room.
Kiefer started on mallets, Cedrone on single lines of melody, and Gorry on skronk responses. Things escalated quickly into a waltz drenched in psychedelia. Kiefer dropped out for a few seconds and Cedrone and Gorry settled into an even heavier mode, which Kiefer amplified when he came back in. Even as the volume rose, Cedrone’s crisp, tight tone stayed distinct from Gorry’s low, crunchy sound. Cedrone took the chance to quiet things down for a minute by switching to both piano and toy piano sitting on top of the piano.
It was a dynamic reset. When Cedrone returned to guitar, his tone was now echoing and distorted. Together Kiefer and Cedrone created a deep rock groove for Gorry to wail over. They shifted from tempo to tempo, texture to texture, with a sense of putting the history of rock guitar in a blender, from its early days to the present, with even a stop in angular New Wave. Part of their improvisation partook of that era’s nervous paranoia while also being slyly tongue in cheek about it. Each musician built on the ideas of the other. They ended on a unified skronk, but one that allowed for Cedrone to make a small gesture by himself, a tasty squall of distortion. It felt like goodbye. It was dark.