Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith
The Jazz Gallery
Flatiron, Manhattan
Feb. 21, 2024
Ears on a swivel and eyes wide, we all hold our breath for the moment pianist Yvonne Rogers’ hands break from grace.
Up to this point in the music, Yvonne’s hands have been locked into the role of accompanist, adding shimmer and concretizing context to the barefoot rollickings of her compatriots on the bandstand. They’ve all been running their wildness through the newly constructed Eden of Ingrid Laubrock’s Lilith compositions, staking their claim in this cacophonic aural paradise, playing the Creator hand for hand.
Now the moment’s come, as Adam in the garden asked by Yahweh to give it all a name, for Yvonne to build for the band her vision of what this is all to mean.
And the break from grace is apocalyptic. We’ve all watched and listened as her hands feint and splay out Messiaen chorale chords and circling rivulets a la George Crumb’s little sacred musics. Now, held in a moment of Rogers’ sole creation, her hands ball in to fists and hammer away, setting to work, render a new sonic world forth, set the foundations before the others join in their roiling play.
Last night’s early set at the Jazz Gallery was full up with moments like these. Laubrock brought together a band of absolute musical arsonists: Whether the Hephaestion hammering of Rogers’, the long-range howitzer blasts from drummer Henry Mermer, the cathedralic microcosmos constructed by Adam Matlock’s organing accordion, or the sludging, lava-thick life-mud of Eva Lawitts’ propulsive double bass, every musician on stage got the opportunity to shake the world back to its fundament for a group effort toward reconstruction.
This is all to the credit of Laubrock’s compositional chops. She opened the set with an introduction of the band and said, “Now we’re going to play through for about an hour.” In my experience this can go one of two ways. We can either get lost in a meandering, clogging soup occasionally broken up moments of brilliance. Or we can get what Laubrock and company delivered: A tightly woven series of compositions and environments for collective improvisation, stitched together as to career a full arc and argument.
Without regard to composition, though, Laubrock’s own playing is well worth the witness alone. It’s a beautiful thing to listen to an improvisor as sensitive as she. In her own cadenza-cum-solo-cum-introduction, Laubrock kept the music barreling forward by feeding clear ideas to her rhythm section, meaty morsels of raw musical notion that Lawitts, Mermer, Matlock, and Rogers chewed to gristle and burbling fat in their untiring churn.
The whole night was come combination of the hyper-cool and hermetic, employing the tonal and harmonic vocabularies of various schools — all fused into a sound that could be nothing but original. Stylish grooves and haunting rubato, chorales of bass and accordion. Laubrock’s saxophone and Dave Adewumi’s trumpet a singular twinning voice. And, the ultimate surprise with music like this, beneath all the surface chaos, all the extended techniques and formal ambivalence, the ultimate reality of it’s organized underpinnings is revealed to be raw tune, raw groove, pure music.
If this is the sort of programming The Jazz Gallery traffics in, my return visits have been joyfully guaranteed.
