Three songs into their first set at Ninth Square’s cozy Firehouse 12, the Dave Allen Quartet reached for the inspiration of Wallace Stevens and Keith Jarrett — and brought the audience to a higher plane in the Jazzosphere.
The New York-based guitarist/composer brought a saxophonist, drummer and bassist with him to the Crown Street club, a renovated fire station with a recording studio that doubles as an intimate, 55-or-so-seat performance space. The combo played two sets of free-ranging original compositions.
Allen began the first set with two bop numbers in which alto player Loren Stillman and Allen raced across scales like jets zooming across Western plains.
Solos like this one. (Click on the play arrow.)
Then Allen introduced a new number called “Musing.” The pace screeched to a meditative stillness. It felt like one of the moments in Keith Jarrett’s 1972 recording Expectations, when frantic bursts lead into gentle exploration; one mode needs the other to work. Allen offered a repetitive theme that lent a contemplative openness to the room, filled in by his cohorts’ deliberate improvisations. The slower, softer pace belied a complex rhythmic pattern driving the piece.
Click on the play arrow to hear how bassist Drew Gress weaved in and out of Allen’s theme.
Between sets, Allen said Jarrett indeed is a “huge” influence on his work, perhaps the biggest influence. Poetry inspires him, too; the title of the piece came from Wallace Stevens’ “Musing the Obscure.”
“It’s an emotional piece,” Allen said. “I started hearing the pedal point, the shifting colors of the chords. It ended up being very odd. Bit if it’s played right, it flows.”
Fused by “Musing,” band and audience remained connected throughout the evening, a challenge for experimental music like Allen’s, in which the theme and the meter don’t always stand out front through the bulk of a number. Allen’s guitar played the role of Jarrett’s keyboards in this piano-less quartet — reaching for melodic lines while also setting the theme and often the rhythm off which the other played. The gentler moments stood out, especially in the first set, and offered a showcase for drummer Mark Ferber (pictured). He demonstrated that a drum solo can wind down a song, and end it, without the need for a return to brass or string. Moments like those at Saturday night’s show helped the “musing” break past the “obscure.”
(To read an earlier Independent feature and review of Firehouse 12, click here.)