Gawky Stride by Ab Baars Trio

20 Years Ab Baars Trio (and Counting)
by Kevin Whitehead

… In many ways, 2011’s Gawky Stride is a turn toward looser, less structured territory. As in ICP, the longer the musicians play and work together, the less they need formalized rules. For the first time on record, they play free improvisations, “Spray of Rooks” and “Lace Rocked Foam.” (The titles, but not concepts, come from poems in Derek Walcott’s collection White Egrets.)

“In the past few years,” Baars says, “we’ve rehearsed a lot even when we didn’t have concerts. These rehearsals were mostly about improvising—working on opening up and developing the trio’s awareness of form, and to be more playful without losing sight of a piece’s concept. The goal is to be as free as possible—to feel unrestricted by the material but challenged to apply our individual performance techniques to it. It’s not about playing the compositions in a ‘strict’ or ‘clean’ way but playing with ‘beau geste’: with a generous spirit.”

Indeed. There’s almost palpable friction between (and within) bass and tenor parts on “Lace Rocked Foam”—but then Wilbert loves those scrunching ‘wolf tones’ other string players avoid. For much of “Ochre Verges” clarinet and arco bass play a cat-and-mouse game of ‘listening and not listening,’ with drums picking up and braiding their threads—until they align over sighing high notes in the endgame. On the free “Spray of Rooks,” the rhythm players’ ramshackle broken-time swing pushes without stating a pulse; “Indigo Weight” has time-playing without walking bass, ratatatt without fixed drum patterns, and melodic tenor with a fragile, egg-shell timbre. Like “Gawky Stride” it’s got a shapely, suspense-building melody.

“Toru’s Garden” and the haiku-concentrated “Bannered Breakers” find Ab on shakuhachi, which he’s studied in Japan, Canada and Holland. To these ears, he aims for a more idiomatic sound than on his other axes—though as he points out, teacher-hopping is very untraditional.

For the state of the trio in its third decade, I’d point to “Wake Up Call,” also in ICP’s book, though the trio give the definitive reading. It’s a typically Baarsian construction with multiple momentum-halting exclamation points, torturous mountain ascents and squealy blasts for their own sake; bowing liberates the bassist’s inner clarinetist. But the collective improvising they dive into after a couple of minutes is the sweet meat, where Amerindian inflections (tenor) and rhythms (bass) come back in completely non-obvious ways, not least because Van Duynhoven as ever resists shopworn tom-tom markers."
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