Madtown Sounds: Roscoe Mitchell, Sur Sudha, Nils Bultmann

Avant-garde jazz legend Roscoe Mitchell, the Nepali trio Sur Sudha, and violist Nils Bultmann (who plays with the Madison Symphony, but is also a jazz musician and composer who's recorded with Roscoe Mitchell) came together for an evening of music last week at the Madison Center for the Creative and Cultural Arts. What a combination. I didn't know quite what to expect, although I'm a fan of hard bop, even as it edges into avant-garde (over the decades my tastes have recovered from the rocky start of having gone on a date at the age of seventeen to see Cecil Taylor perform, and falling asleep), and although I was pretty sure I'd enjoy Sur Sudha, if nothing else based on the many happy hours I've spent in South Asian restaurants with sitar, tabla and flute music playing in the background. And the viola? It turned out that the heft and register of Bultmann's free jazz improvisations on the viola were perfectly paired with the sitar (inventive composers, please write something for this combination). One of the pieces from the first set had an unusual and hypnotic seven-beat rhythm. If the three-quarter meter (when not too oom-pah-pah) always feels like the pulse of the Trinity to me, and five-four time reminds me of someone stepping out and in, loop-de-loo, from a waltz, the seven beat felt like an elliptical orbit, inexorably returning to its beginning after almost disappearing from sight. And to hear Roscoe Mitchell on the saxophone—his playing was like a expressionist artist painting dramatic swaths of sound, over and through the steady beat of the tabla.

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