Two horns, one drummer. By the end, the answer is: plenty.
Corner Store Jazz
AvAnt MODerN: Nathan Wooley – trumpet; Peyton Pleninger – saxophones; Phil Haynes – drums, tunes, voice. JAzZ nOW: Peyton Pleninger – saxophones; Jonathan Ragonese – saxophones; Phil Haynes – drums, tunes
Two horns, one drummer. Tell people the setup and they ask, “What?” Phil Haynes started answering to it himself, jokingly introducing himself as the “What?” in the late eighties, when 4 Horns & What? ran for five years. Nearly a hundred records later, with Anthony Braxton, Ellery Eskelin and David Liebman among his partners, the idea comes back in slimmer form on two albums he insists are one band, with saxophonist Peyton Pleninger in the middle of both. Believe him, even when they sound different.
AvAnt MODerN opens with Haynes, the bard, speaking lines from Shakespeare. Trumpets in Shakespeare’s day had no valves, and their bright, piercing tone had to carry across an open-air theater like the Globe. Nathan Wooley’s trumpet has that same commanding clarity, while Haynes speaks, stops, and speaks again, the horns slipping in around his words. The saxophone plays it relatively straight, though its clicking keys add another layer of rhythm. Wooley’s trumpet is less predictable, moving from clear notes to sounds that barely qualify as notes and slipping in a mute along the way. Haynes pauses, then suddenly breaks into an “ahhh,” and both horns answer him.
“For Doc, Hawk & Dee” begins with Haynes speaking about body and soul, then drops into a long, melancholy horn note. Jagged bursts answer it, and when the two horns come together, they sound like an electrical circuit about to short out. The trumpet wanders away, its clear tone turning into a moan, while the saxophone answers with low notes, breath and something almost animal. Then the drums start banging out jagged accents, and the whole thing gets increasingly unruly before the horns nearly find each other again.
After the frenzy of “For Doc, Hawk & Dee,” “Together,” on JAzZ nOW, initially sounds almost like hard bop, a welcome dose of familiarity before the two saxophones start pulling in different directions. Their lines get faster and more tangled as the drums grow increasingly unruly, until the whole thing threatens to come apart before the three fall back together. “Goofus’ Step” is a different kind of fun, built around a low, repeating saxophone figure and a rhythm that never seems in much of a hurry. The second saxophone strolls into the picture like he has all the time in the world, and for a minute the three of them settle into an unexpectedly cool little groove. Then “Blu Dop” starts to fray. Repeated notes and clipped drumbeats give way to whoops and screeches, while one saxophone keeps trying to maintain some semblance of order. Eventually that sensible voice gets swallowed up, and the three land on a jagged rhythm that they toss around among themselves.
The floor gives way in “Last Dance,” ten minutes of swimming through viscous muck, with saxes moaning overhead and drums scraping more than drumming. One horn sounds a clarion call, as if it’s trying to say, get me outta here. There’s a melody buried in all that muck, but it’s not one you’ll be humming in the morning. The sax tones have sharp edges, razor blades hiding inside them, while the brushes shuffling across the drumheads provide the one soft place to land.
“Ragonese 3 (Vignettes)” strips things down even further, built around a single saxophone note that blares, fades and returns, like a foghorn heard from somewhere out at sea. At times it sounds almost like whale song, that deep blast of sound hanging there before disappearing and starting again.
By the time “A Lil’ Iowa Get-Down” arrives, the drums are laying down a repeated beat while one sax carries a melody and the other acts almost like percussion. The drums gradually take over as one sax breaks the melody into pieces and the other answers with short, rhythmic phrases. Then the saxes come together, Haynes works the edges of his kit, and after a brief slowdown the horns take off together again as the drums come crashing back in.
Two horns, one drummer. By the end, the answer is: plenty.
