SFJAZZ presents TEJ Trio featuring Taylor Eigsti, Eric Harland and Julian Lage
2015-01-29
Miner Auditorium
SFJAZZ Center, 205 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA
7:30 PM, Thursday, January 29, 2015

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[7:33 PM lights down, announcements from Randall Kline]

1. [7:41 PM] ? (the suite begins)
   [set ends ~9:00 PM]
    
   Encore
2. [9:03 PM] Caravan
   [show ends 9:12 PM; group bow, then all off after a minute or so]

• Taylor Eigsti: piano;
• Eric Harland: drums, percussion;
• Julian Lage: guitar.

Kind of a strange set tonight. After a long, rambling introduction by Randall, the trio entered, and Eric took the mic to say hello and warn us too buckle up for a long trip. Dang, he wasn't kidding! The set was performed as one extended, continuous suite, with various song-like sections punctuated by solos and stretches of sampled or laptop-mediated synthesis from one or more of the participants. Rather than try to establish any tracking, I simply listened, though by mid set, I was catching on to the syntax of the set and felt like I could have called the changes half decently by that point.

Given that they were both “playing” MacBooks, it was really hard to distinguish the electronic contributions of Taylor and Julian from one another; Eric's post was easier to pick up on, as he had a large semicircular v-drum set up on the right of his regular trap set.

A lot of the electronic parts seemed to be introduced as ambient space noises: wooshes, hums, bells, and so on, but also some snippets of old time baseball broadcasts and at least one of a female singer that sounded to me like a processed recording from a 78 rpm original. Cool!

When I described the set as having song-like sections, what I meant is that they were all so deconstructed as to defy any attempt at recognition on my part. According to Eric, talking at the end of the show, they covered a bunch of classics from Charlie Parker, John Coltrane and others, but I was unable to catch any of those tunes by name while the vibrations flew by. In fact, if Eric hadn't made that comment, I would have described the show as being most like an extended Grateful Dead space jam, or like one of the Telstar shows that Phil has been doing over at TXR every now and then: generally formless, but lots of fun!

Consequently, it made me quite happy to identify Caravan, almost like scoring a soccer goal or something! I was surprised to note that most off the audience stuck it out until the end: given how abstract things were, I expected to see more walkouts than I did.

All in all I thought it was a good show, not really what I expected, but sometimes the best part of a good show is the parts that lie outside your expectation!

Back to the previous event! ☸ Up to the 2015 yearbox! ☸ Up to the 2015 event list! ☸ On to the next event!