Broken Shadows
Broken Shadows
Broken Shadows is a jazz supergroup comprised of Bad Plus members Reid and Dave King, plus saxophonists Chris Speed and Tim Berne. Here the talented quartet will be performing the music of jazz icons Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman and Julius Hemphill.
$25 ($20 adv.).
press release: On Sunday, June 17, ALL will present Broken Shadows, a new project featuring Dave King and Reid Anderson of The Bad Plus, and saxophonists Tim Berne and Chris Speed playing the music of Ornette Coleman, Dewey Redman, and Julius Hemphill. Broken Shadows is a quartet of kindred spirits communing over shared loves and common inspirations, radiating not only homage, but aspiration. Their resulting sound has deep roots that reaches out into the present moment, alive and attuned and moving through our air now.
These four musicians hail from the urban northern half of America and have banded together to reinterpret the timeless sounds conjured by great men from the rural South and heartland of the country: Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden. These iconic figures created an ever resonant avant-garde from the folk-art influences of their early surroundings, a canon that comprises the hard blues and deep lament, keening celebration and hollering protest. Wound through the DNA of such avant-jazz classics such as, “Dogon A.D.,” “Lonely Woman,” “Civilization Day,” “Walls- Bridges” and “Song for Ché” are the age-old sounds of back alley bars and carnival midways, funeral processions and holiday parades, and the rave-ups of Saturday night shading into the hymns of Sunday morning.
The way saxophonists Berne and Speed perform this music with the bass-and-drum team of Anderson and King has a rocking, rough-hewn harmonic convergence wholly in keeping with their source materials, even as their improvisations have a searching, burning modernism of their own. To channel the cultural history of this music, the players of Broken Shadows rely on their personal history as friends and collaborators. Among various associations, Speed played in Berne’s Bloodcount band in the 1990s, while Anderson and King are two-thirds of the genre defying band The Bad Plus. This foursome is onto something special: the emotive breath and beat of this music being undeniable, infectious. These are players known for their ability to take it out, but Broken Shadows gives them a vehicle to get down. — Bradley Bambarger