Saunier, Chávez, Ismaily
Solar Myth
1131 S Broad St.
Philadelphia
Jan. 8th, 2026
It’s a special thing to witness relatively new musical connections develop in real time, especially in the jazz, improvisational and experimental music spaces where collaborations are often inherently fleeting. The most beguiling and inspiring musicians are likely to turn up over and over, again and again, in different contexts and circumstances, following their curiosity. The Solar Myth stage last night summoned three unique players for an excursion into the unknown: the great drummer/producer/polymath Greg Saunier, best known for playing the kit with the long-running noise-pop band Deerhoof; Maria Chávez, an avant-garde turntablist and author of the influential Of Technique: Chance Procedures on Turntable; and Shahzad Ismaily, a multi-instrumentalist, producer and improviser known for wide-ranging collaborations.
Once the crowd was fully seated, the trio took turns taking the stage, reminding me of the act of cooking. Saunier was the base, sauntering lithely to his position behind the kit and proceeding to play alone for about ten minutes, exploring jagged rhythms with only the kick, snare, rim and high-hat, sometimes sounding like a stream of tangentially related, highly converted turntable breaks, toeing the line between free improvisation and rhythmic order. Chavez took the stage next and elicited audible murmurs and “whoa"'s as she initially produced, from her stock of records, pieces of broken vinyl, sharp corners rather than the expected smooth circles. Far from the stuff of traditional scratching and mixing, she was often exploring the more music-concrete aspects of the technology – hiss and static, needle stabs, rubbing and noise and aleatory sounds and textures. She and Saunier worked up a responsive blend.
It was Ismaily’s introduction, later, on the electric bass, that really got everything cooking together substantially; to my surprise and delight, in their quiet, slow and methodically thoughtful way, they became sort of the controlling agent of the group, grounding everything with motivic and intriguing energy, particularly in the early going with a slow, long, harmonically-unsettled line, notes often swelling in, ringing through the room. In many ways the least animated and most mysterious presence on the stage, Ismaily was particularly meditative – in no way a default, as I’ve seen them work up a terrible racket with Ceramic Dog, their band with Marc Ribot and Ches Smith – and they played as if gently wringing developed compositions out of the ether, giving Saunier's and Chavez’s explorations a little extra sizzle. The highlight for me was when Ismaily switched to banjo for a plaintive modal section, a lament deftly obscured, haunting and haunted by sputtering turntable noise and soft flickers of rhythm. (Full disclosure, they borrowed my banjo for the set.)
When they’d concluded and taken their bow, Chávez took to the mic to explain the genesis of their collaboration: “Somehow one day I got an email from [Shahzad] saying, ‘I need to talk to you.’ So we spoke on the phone and he said, ‘I want to collaborate with you,’ and I was like, ‘Whoa, that would be amazing! Yes, of course!’ And then a few weeks later Greg and I met for the first time at Big Ears, when I was playing with my trio with Evicshen and Mariam Rezaei, our turntable trio... and we ended up hanging out the next day walking around Knoxville looking for our food vouchers [laughs] and just really got along, and then when I left in the plane it all just kind of came together, like, ‘I think all three of us should play,’ and now it’s become this band. This is our third time playing together – first show was in New York, we played last night in D.C. at Rhizome and it was so special, and now tonight with you guys... ideally, this is going to evolve into something more, but for right now, we’re incubating and figuring it out, and it’s such an honor. Thank you guys for sitting here and listening to us!” It was a great way to kick off the year at Solar Myth, a testament to the joy of the new, and hopefully a sign of things to come: if only the year ahead could be ultimately remembered in terms of budding, fruitful collaborative energy, building bridges, nullifying perceived divides, revealing hidden possibilities.
