The Story @ JJ Smyths, Dublin, 7 mar 010

You may find it ridiculous that I spent an evening in Dublin, of all places, going to hear American music courtesy of highly un-Google-friendly The Story. In my defense, 1) They're from New York and I never get to go there, either; 2) it was my last night in Ireland after a full three weeks, so I'd heard "Rocky Road to Dublin" enough times; and 3) only one of the cats was even American, the others hailing from Amsterdam, the UK, and various corners of Canada.

So, jazz it was.

Now, they're worth hearing. They don't stoke my imagination to the same extent as, for example, the Portico Quartet, who win the prize for first popular use of the hang, or Polar Bear, whose album I love in a manner so totally feverish and over-the-top that I won't begin to verbally explicate it here. The Story's playing was solid, but what flicked more switches in me was the pervasive sense that something was going on compositionally.

This is not common at jazz clubs. More so, now that so many of the hot young acts are playing original music. But the traditional jazz chart, compositionally, consists primarily in three elements: melody, harmony, rhythm. The Story's had these as well, but they got me interested because they utilized two others often ignored in jazz clubs.

1) Texture. The first tune opened with the two saxophones playing homorhythmically in counterpoint. Everyone's approach to register, timbre, and instrumental combination proved that they were thinking texturally. The keyboard has immense potential in this regard (ten fingers, two hands, big register...) which is, again, usually neglected in jazz in favor of LH chords and RH single-line playing, all predominately in the middle register. (Vijay Iyer does all kinds of things with texture, which is one of the many awesome things about his music.)

2) Form. OK, yes I'm a trained classicalish composer and effing love form. So maybe I'm a fish in a barrel when a jazz tune goes somewhere totally unexpected. It's not so difficult to do, but again, it's uncommon in small-group jazz, for reasons that go back to the very origins of jazz improvisation (they had to play, e.g. for a three-hour dance and only knew eight tunes, so they stretched them out in ways that were simple and logical and could be communicated through simple gestures during the gig such that no rehearsal was necessary). But today's jazz groups do rehearse, so it's become an easier thing to make predetermined compositional choices, and this opens up lots of formal possibilities. I loved this about The Story. Their tunes would have all these arrantly different sections, and sometimes the old sections came back and other times they didn't, and when they got to the end the end would go on forEVER, and sometimes the end wasn't the end at all.

This is just good listening, people, it's just good listening.

And as for Polar Bear, buy their record, now!