LIVE: Don Byron w/ Jeff “Tain” Watts, Luis Perdomo & Dezron Douglas @ The Falcon, Marlboro, 02/20/2022

Everything looked completely normal as my friends & I climbed the network of stairs leading up to Live At The Falcon: The falls were roaring, the building was lit up in yellow & green lights, and the air was filled with that extra-crisp Catskills chill we’d all grown to know and tolerate. But this was the first weekend where music was being presented after a month-long grieving period for the Falcon’s late impresario Tony Falco, and that one was going to sting for a while.

“First of all, I miss your dad,” reed wizard Don Byron told Lee Falco after Tony’s son introduced the band, and the almost-full house cheered the sincere sentiment we all felt. The elder Falco had developed the Falcon into a cultural oasis dedicated to promoting living artists, both on stage and on the walls of the Falcon’s high-ceilinged performance space, and the fact that this is an extremely rare situation hit home when the Falco family announced Tony had passed back in late 2021 due to complications from COVID. 

The stage had been warmed up in the last few days by two great cover bands, including Falcon favorite Reelin’ In The Years. But this night was the first time we’d see the kind of major artists Tony Falco brought up to Marlboro on a regular basis. And although Don Byron is one of the coterie of monster players that live in the area, he was being backed by the kind of world-class players you rarely saw outside of NYC. It was Falco’s booking of killers like Byron that brought me down to Marlboro several years ago, so to see the former UAlbany adjunct professor fronting a lineup like this (with no new recording to promote, by the way) gave the evening the taste of normalcy we all craved.

Byron kicked things off with “Lefty Teachers At Home”, an original about “a couple arguing about the first time they heard ‘Strange Fruit.’” The swinging opener answered the question both I and Rudy Lu had: Which Don Byron was going to show up tonight? Would it be the avant-garde thrill-seeker who’d burned it up with Aruan Ortiz; the technical wizard who introduced a new generation to Lester Young; or the funky ringmaster who brought Junior Walker into the jazz genre? 

With “Lefty Teachers”, Byron put all those personas in a blender and hit “Puree.” The pumping melody he pulled the band into after a short meditation in the clear was straight and true, with Luis Perdomo comping & filling on piano while bassist Dezron Douglas and uber-drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts brought their special sense of foundation to the proceedings. But Byron’s lines on clarinet, bass clarinet, and tenor sax were anything but traditional, flashing a Monk-like lack of concern for what’s considered “acceptable” to anyone else but himself. The thing is, though, that as with many Monk compositions and solos, you may initially think, “That can’t be right…” But then you listen, and then you listen to what’s happening around Byron, and you have to think, “That’s dead-solid perfect!”

Byron continued the Nutribullet theme of the evening by mixing a Bach sonata with more sideways originals like “Delphian Nuptuals” and “Joe Btfsplk” (the latter named for a Li’l Abner character whose luck made Charlie Brown’s life seem charmed), as well as heartfelt tributes to klezmer icon Mickey Katz and former Byron teacher George Russell, who Byron credited for “allow(ing) me to interpret Stravinsky the way I wanted!” The thing linking all this music was an overwhelming sense of joy – not just in the music itself, but with the musicians who’d been forced by the Covidiocy to cool their creative heels for way too long. The smile Byron wore for most of this show was wide, bright, and chock full of happiness.

Perdomo is one of the best support players a leader could want, because he provides that leader with exactly what the music needs to be that much better. That said, Perdomo is a leader & composer in his own right, so when it was his turn to step out front, he gave us angles and pictures all his own: His solo on Coltrane’s “Giant Steps” was absolutely righteous, as was the multiple contributions Tain Watts offered throughout the evening. Tain doesn’t play drums – he makes them sing, shout, roar, roll and tumble, and he had jaws dropping all evening. As for Douglas (who Byron introduced as “my motherfuckin’ man”), he wasn’t just keeping the foundation fat; he also gave us rich, deep solos that stood up proudly next to everything his partners were doling out.

The quartet bracketed “Giant Steps” with Benny Golson’s “Along Came Betty” and Woody Shaw’s “Beyond Our Limits”, taking the classics and making them their own in one long, beautiful medley. Byron danced in his chair to Perdomo’s solo on “Beyond”, and he pulled out the bass clarinet on “Giant” to counter on Tain’s monumental solo. It was a perfect end to a righteous evening, for us and the group. “That shit was an experience, I’m telling you,” Byron enthused as the crowd went wild. 

Spring looks like it’s going to be hot at the Falcon, with scheduled shows by (among others) Brandee Younger, Johnathan Blake, Tim Ries and Alexis P. Suter. But somebody needed to get the ball rolling again, and Byron’s quartet of fire-breathers did what Tony Falco would have wanted: They made the music (and the Falcon) live and breathe and jump again.

Photo Gallery by Rudy Lu