Willie Oteri at Jazz on a Monday Vibe (Club Tropical), 11/24/03


Jazz on a Monday Vibe joined CryptoNight (Thursdays) this fall as the second of two bookends of week-night creative music at Club Tropical.  Though the two series have a certain degree of stylistic overlap, they are separate presentations with separate booking, and Monday Vibe stretches out eclectically in some different directions from Crypto, including world and ethnic music as well as sophisticated progressive jazz that doesn't always reach for the avant garde edge.

This evening was a CD release performance for electric guitarist Willie Oteri's "Spiral Out" (which includes Tony Levin and others with King Crimson backgrounds, and thus the CD naturally invites stylistic comparisons with that eminent progressive-rock group).  However Oteri is involved in improvisational forms rather than fixed compositions.  His bio shows that he often listened to Miles Davis and John Coltrane in his teens, and the extended modal and free jams of those jazz greats resonate strongly with his playing today.  This music lives in a realm where progressive rock, progressive jazz and other progressive musical forms extend out from their traditional cores and begin to significantly overlap.

In many ways this music might sound like a typical rock/funk/grooving jam session in any number of garages around the country and the world, but when you get inspired players doing it, it can rise above the mundane and reach a world of notable artistic expression.  Oteri often likes a nice sharp funky groove to play over, but he doesn't limit himself to a diatonic scale.  He'll run all over the chromatic spectrum and then some, while developing the sound with a collection of processors ranging from some form of phased modulation to harmonizing and onward.  (In fact, at the very start, I was amused to hear the guitar sounding like an organ going through a leslie speaker, and the keyboard sounding more like a traditional power-rock guitar...)  Textural noise is one important component of Oteri's bag of tricks, along with (but not limited to) fast-and-furious free melody not unlike late Coltrane.

The players on the CD were replaced this evening with several talented local performers.  Nate Wood provided a solid and often delicate foundation on drums, with a great deal of funky imagination and nuance alternating with rock-hard groove beats -- even a swingy jazz groove at one point.  Jonathan Dimond added his usual technical facility and melodic/rhythmic invention on the bass, and Giovanna Imbesi contributed a nice pallete of keyboard sounds, plus the occasional harmonically-developed interlude.