Concert Review: Chimera @ Jazz on Jay, 08/24/2023

Chimera leader and bassist Michael Bisio promised “music that defies description” in pre-concert info for the band’s Jazz on Jay show Thursday. The band itself held that promise: Nobody spoke until the end of their seamless 65-minute (shorter than usual) set, and not to describe – only to introduce the musicians. 

But let’s try anyway.

Drawn and blended from sources near and far, the music was seldom jazz as commonly reckoned; or emphatically was jazz in the abstract sense of group invention with total freedom. 

It surged and subsided as a seething sea of improvisation, where several islands of patterned sound peeped above the roiling waves. An unconventional but at least recognizable “I Fall in Love Too Easily” formed then faded half an hour into the non-stop exploration, and a fun and funky vamp rolled into earshot around 10 minutes later, then tiptoed away.

Getting to “Easily,” which guitarist Timothy Hill sang, was no easy ride, and some fans folded their camp-chairs and left, mystified. Those who stayed enjoyed feeling lost in the mist, on a mapless voyage—likely fans of Codona, Sun Ra, or the Pharaoh Sanders band with Leon Thomas. As familiar as the jazz-standard melody and words of “Easily” were, the song seemed to have beamed in from Mumbai via distant planets.

From the first, the dominant flavor in an at times confusing sonic menu was Indian raga; although pretzel’ed more strenuously than singer Aditya Prakash managed at Music Haven a few weeks ago.

Violinist-singer Iva Bittova sang in what sounded like Urdu over Bisio’s thick bass drone while Timothy Hill picked a delicate repeating guitar filigree and Steve Gorn added clarinet comments. If this description sounds conventionally jazzy, this didn’t last for long as sounds formed and faded, usually in some reference to each other but at other times in defiantly new patterns.

Bittova quickly proved the quartet’s most fearlessly inventive improviser. Her voice rose and fell, leaped and glided, a pure instrument that explored Indian rhythms, phrasing and word shapes or seemed to emanate from some more primal place. Her violin playing was equally abstract or grounded; sometimes percussive, jolting in jagged emphatic cadences; or smoothly gliding through melodic forests like a firefly. Setting the violin aside freed her to make an instrument of her whole body as she wailed, bobbing in a crouch, clapping between sung syllables, waving her arms in wing-like rhythm. Timothy Hill has also mastered the strange; while his guitar playing generally moved in ordinary ways, he also sang in Tuvan overtones, combining a deep drone with an eerie whistle at once. Anybody suspiciously looking around for an effects pedal harmonizing those sounds soon gave up; It all came from his almost-closed mouth. Steve Gorn’s woodwind playing usually felt as comfortably conventional as Hill’s guitar, switching among clarinet, wooden bansuri flutes in different sizes and tunings, and a small, almost shrill pipe. He found his freedom in how he placed commentary into the stream of cascading, wandering or thoughtfully musing note clusters.

Bisio’s bass formed the rhythmically propulsive, steady launching pad for all this, setting up repeating patterns most often but occasionally going as far outside as any of them.

Together, they played with that paradoxical tight looseness of well-practiced improvisers who know where to go before their bandmates get there. It was playing in tongues in the sense of not needing conventional coherence to connect. No new invention over-stayed its welcome; in fact, some could have pleasingly lingered longer.

The way “I Fall in Love Too Easily” took shape and then evaporated, for example, felt like a large and spicy sandwich of the exotically strange layered above and below, before and after, a tasty core of cool-jazz coherence. The band’s free explorations also produced some uncanny moments, enveloping ambient sounds into their flow: a siren early on, a motorcycle revving. In a wondrously humorous moment, Bittova spun around on hearing a dog bark, faced and welcomed this intruder into the song, and instantly sang the dog’s own song back. 

The 2023 Jazz on Jay season concludes on Thursday, Aug. 31, with Doc Horton and the Jay Street Band.

Photo Gallery by Rudy Lu