When three musicians with a lot of shared experience improvise, it can be way more than a jam; it can be like a guided tour through a beautifully illustrated encyclopedia. We hear the connections, from history to botany to physics: The world MAKES SENSE.
Don Preston hovers impassive over the grand piano and his adjacent tangle of synth patches, letting the instruments do the emoting. In his perennial devotion to Frank Zappa's music (1967 onward), in his jazz/electronic expressions and in his classical extrapolations, he has always blazed trails.
Fellow Zappa sojourner Christopher Garcia can embrace anything from fusion to indigenous music. Tonight he does it squatting before his worldwide array of drums and percussion instruments.
Having logged many years with both, tall Anders Swanson can stand watchful above his upright bass and build spontaneous bridges.
They go. After Preston jabs Arnold Schoenberg's modern harmonic goulash, the trio venture into the subconscious wilds. Swanson draws his bow in counterpoint to Preston's fragmentations, then Garcia (sounding like a full kit while floorbound!) locates the common ground between bebop and Mayan ceremony as they swing through the blues of "Walking Batterie Woman," by Preston friend Carla Bley.
Blues expands into classical beauty, which in turn reveals exquisite Spanish shadings. Swanson executes some quick slides. Garcia interrupts his own sensual flow with a single DING or THWAP. The piano eases slower and floats into a river, trailing flower petals. Then, as if rousing from a reverie, they're swinging mainstream jazz, Preston and Garcia trading fours just like 1948.
Wait -- Preston has strapped into an electronic spaceship, and for a while it's all wondrous tweaks, whooshes, burbles, echoes and loops, until he returns to earth with a snatch of Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring."
Garcia transits abstract rhythms into a whisking groove, which like magic becomes a mystical drone, then Preston and Swanson get into a quickly resolved musical tussle.
Garcia and Swanson undertake a march up country, shepherding Preston, who has dropped acid, but Preston flashes on the intersection between LSD and the military -- Mussorgsky!
Although no in-house audience attends, an encore is obviously called for. So Preston pretends he's accompanying a 1920 silent film featuring a cowboy chase, a smooch with Nell, and a happily-ever-after swoon courtesy of Tchaikovsky's "Pathetique."
Whew. When most of us are Preston's age (88), we'll feel lucky if we can get off the couch.
* * *
Watch a replay here; the concert starts 16 minutes in. Donate here. Many thanks to Mr. Garcia for post-performance insights.