Adam Matlock photo
“We’re going to make it what we we want it to be,” said guitarist Trevor Babb of the Aprés-Garde Ensemble. He was introducing “Book,” a composition by Will Redman that offered musicians dozens of performance possibilities by allowing them to play any of the work’s 98 pages in any sequence or layering.
But at last Saturday’s installment of the ongoing Uncertainty Music Series — held at Never Ending Books, its long-time primary residence — Babb could have been describing a lot about the performances by the Aprés-Garde Ensemble and Carte Noire, both of which let the musicians’ desires shape the possibilities of a performance of chamber music.
Chamber music is, at its core, functional. It’s music for staying in, rather than music for going out. As its function has been largely overridden in the age of recording, it’s possible to overlook it. But at its best, it still holds the power to temporarily reshape the room it’s played in.
Carte Noire — a trio composed of Minta White on flute, Chris Cretella on guitar, and Tim Peck on keyboards — wielded such influence at key moments during their performance, acting at times as a conduit between the room and another imaginary space the audience couldn’t see.
In their opening piece, the trio fell into and out of various pulses, going for a subtle interplay that sometimes worked imitatively, other times more intuitively. In the music’s sparest moments, Peck’s electric piano served as a bridge between White’s and Cretella’s distant explorations. The texture grew more dense as the piece continued. Peck added in layers of loops and turned to a bank of effected keyboard sounds, and the worlds of each player became more closely aligned.
Throughout their set, Carte Noire skillfully navigated the axes of density and sparseness, of tonality and texture; for a moment or two, they would try on the roles of a traditional chamber music ensemble, with the flute taking a melodic line and guitar and keyboard splitting the duties of chordal and contrapuntal accompaniment. These were all the more otherworldly in contrast to passages that maintained their sonic organization, but went for the extremes of the instrumental palette, reminding the audience of the alchemy that sometimes can happen in a small space.
The Aprés-Garde Ensemble, appearing last Saturday in a three-person line-up of guitarist Babb, keyboardist Nate Trier, and brass player Ben Zucker, demonstrated some overlap between their work and the sounds of Carte Noire. While Aprés-Garde focused on compositions rather than the free improvisation of the previous group, there were similarities between the languages each group used to communicate.
As with “Book,” many of Aprés-Garde’s compositions required a higher-than-usual amount of performer input, ensuring that no two performances would be alike. One wonders what future performances of “Book” would sound like, even if each player used the exact same materials they did for Saturday’s performance. Due to the use of graphic notation — in which performers interpret elements of conventional notation and abstract imagery, with sometimes minimal guidance from the composer — pieces like “Book” and Trier’s “To Philemon” (which debuted at the 10th anniversary concert of the New Haven Improvisers Collective) have a wide range of possibilities.
Aprés-Garde played with space in a beguiling way. Sometimes, as in Daniel Goode’s “Wind Symphony,” they filled the room with sound, maintaining a semi-regular pulse throughout that drove the music even as the rhythmic accents underneath shifted and blurred. In both Chris Reba’s “Grid” and Trier’s “Individuation,” the ensemble exploited the timbral qualities of effects and electronic reverb. Babb used feedback and distortion at low volumes to evoke the sense of his guitar screaming loudly from a distance, while the gentle reverb on Trier’s keyboard gave it a clarity apart from the immediate sound of Zucker’s trombone. At times, the three distinct spacial qualities of the instruments isolated them, allowing their different ideas to exist simultaneously without drowning the other out. But there were moments, particularly in “Individuation,” where the three players began using similar ideas, unifying the imaginary spaces from which each instrument was being broadcast, and making the small room bigger as a result.
As if he wanted to guarantee that Aprés-Garde’s next performance would be distinct from Saturday’s, Babb announced that this performance was Ben Zucker’s last with the group. Aprés-Garde will continue activity with new players. But it was clear that as long as both Aprés-Garde and Carte Noire maintained their intentions, both experimental composition and free improvisation would continue to have the power to change the room.