BRATTLEBORO — Two bands with wildly different yet compatible takes on jazz, Joel Harrison's Mother Stump and the Julian Gerstin Sextet, appear at the Vermont Jazz Center at the Cotton Mill on Saturday, March 7.
Mother Stump is a blues-roots project by a guitarist and composer whose previous work ranges from jazz through Indian music and chamber music. Gerstin's sextet explores the rhythms and sounds of Martinique through lyrical jazz compositions.
Together, this concert promises a wealth of soulful new music.
Harrison, a Guggenheim Fellow and winner of Jazz Composer Alliance and Chamber Music America awards, has 18 CDs as leader to his credit. They range from collaborations with Indian sarod master Anupam Shobahakar, to chamber music settings of Paul Motian's music, to the band Free Country - free jazz settings of country classics.
Harrison's colleagues on these works include some of the most important names in current jazz: singer Norah Jones, saxophonists Ned Rothenberg and David Binney, guitarists Liberty Ellman and Nguyen Le, bassists Stephan Crump and Hans Glawischnig, pianist Gary Versace and drummers Dan Weiss and Clarence Penn - among others.
In Mother Stump, Harrison scales back to a trio and turns his attention to his roots, showcasing his guitar on blues-based pieces by performers like Buddy Miller and Luther Vandross. (There are also a couple of eclectic nods to jazz avant-garde composer George Russell and songwriter Leonard Cohen.)
“The focus here is on my playing and not so much on my writing and arranging,” Harrison says. “It's a mixture of jazz, rock, Americana, and soul. A nod to my formative years, my roots as a guitarist in Washington D.C., with six old guitars and two old amps. It's a lot of history that I'm trying to make new.”
Harrison's traveling companions in Mother Stump are Michael Bates, bass and Jeremy Clemons, drums.
Harrison and Brattleboro-based percussionist Julian Gerstin met and performed together in Berkeley, Calif., in the 1980s, and Gerstin appears on one of Harrison's first CDs, “Transience.” With Mother Stump in the area on a New England tour, Gerstin jumped at this chance to reintroduce his old friend to local audiences.
“Joel inspired me in those days to think harder, play harder, and stretch my ears,” Gerstin says. “I liked the idea of combining jazz with world music, but hadn't considered it in any depth. Joel started showing me what might be done.”
In the years since, Gerstin has lived and studied music in Martinique, a small island in the Caribbean, and worked with numerous projects playing Cuban and African traditions as well as jazz, African and Latin dance music.
“Martinique is a small island, but has its own remarkable musical traditions, including some instruments found nowhere else,” Gerstin says. “I spent years learning to play those styles and instruments, and now in order to play them here in the States I've had to invent the music for them. I try to use specific Martinican rhythms I want to play, but write melodies and forms that will goose the jazz musicians I work with. I'm working with some great players, and they really bring the music alive.”
Appearing with Gerstin are Vermont Jazz Center's director Eugene Uman on piano; Wes Brown on bass, a veteran whose work has ranged from Earl “Fatha” Hines to avant-gardist Fred Ho's Afro-Asian Ensemble; and Doug Raneri, drums, who has performed with Michael Brecker, Charlie Haden, Yusef Lateef, and area Latin favorite Viva Quetzal.
The horn players are Jon Weeks on saxes and flute, whose credits include The Temptations and several regional Latin ensembles (Creacion, Soy y Canto, Wilo y De Lomas y Sones); and Jake Whitsell, sax, best known for his work with Vermont favorites Kat Wright & the Indomitable Soul Band.