Jeff Gauthier/Crossings at CryptoNight, 3/4/04


For musicians of a certain age the early 1970s represent a watershed era of explosive and exploratory transition from the 60s avant garde into the 70s-and-beyond fusion wave.  Going into this period, you had experiments in free playing from the likes of Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane and a younger generation such as Chick Corea/Anthony Braxton/Dave Holland/Barry Altschul in the 'Circle' group.  Coming out of it you get the likes of Chick Corea's 'Return to Forever', Joe Zawinul and Wayne Shorter's 'Weather Report', John McLaughlin's 'Mahavishnu Orchestra' and especially Herbie Hancock's 'Headhunters' band.

All of these leaders cut their teeth with Miles Davis's exploration into the African roots of funk/rock music most widely recognized on the recording "Bitches Brew", and their early efforts as independent groups shared many aspects with that music: long free-form modal jams and collective textures, ventures into free playing, and experimentation with the leading edge of newfangled electronic synthesizers.  This was true of the first couple of albums of Weather Report and Return to Forever, as well as Herbie Hancock's intermediate project, the "Mwandishi" group, which released several albums before Hancock formed Headhunters and got really, really big.

Two albums released by that group, "Mwandishi" and "Crossings", turned the heads of a whole generation of musicians of high school and college age, and one of those musicians was Jeff Gauthier.  Gauthier is of a very certain age these days: he is turning 50 this year, and as a birthday celebration the prominent improvisational violinist decided to get a bunch of his talented friends together to perform the music from these two albums, as part of the CryptoNight series he curates at Club Tropical in Culver City.

This was no mere "concert" on Thursday, March 4th -- as far as we can recreate here in the aughts this was a genuine "happening" in the spirit of the 60s/70s.  The Con Sabor restaurant was packed to the gills with a standing-room audience, including even one of the performers and composers from the original 70s group, Bennie Maupin, the venerable VIP guest of honor of the night.  The performers included top-shelf talent with several familiar names:  Scott Amendola (drums), Nels Cline (guitar), Brad Dutz (percussion), Steuart Liebig (bass), George McMullen (trombone/dijeridoo), Andrew Pask (reeds), and David Witham (keyboards) with Gauthier at the helm.

With detailed transcriptions created with care by Witham, the group launched into the B side of "Crossings" and proceeded through two sets to paint a soundscape worthy of the source.  While each player brought their own personality to their contributions (especially the irrepressible Cline, not to mention that the original group did not include violin...), the overall spirit was clearly true to the original, as many of them had experienced the same turn of head that captured Gauthier over 30 years ago.

With audio veteran Wayne Peet (who spends as much of his time in front of the mics as a keyboardist as he does behind the mixing board) handling both live reinforcement and a live recording, the additional good news is that there should be a quality document of the occasion for posterity.

It's hard to imagine a better way to celebrate flipping two digits into the second half-century than this.  Happy Birthday, Jeff!