Neil Welch Quartet

It is a wonderful and pleasant surprise to see a jazz musician push boundaries with such élan, taste and virtuosity that when it happens it is sometimes difficult to comprehend and appreciate fully. After watching two sets of Neil Welch perform faithfully on his tenor and bent soprano saxophones it felt as if I had seen two separate groups, and in a sense I had, with a common leitmotif of conversation. Even though the latter group was far more interesting and esoteric than the former, both were provocative and far form banal.

To be honest, after a general introduction by Welch wherein he stated it was the first live performance of the group and hearing the first song performed, I could sense that it was the quartet’s freshman effort. They opened with a hard-swinging, bop piece with an ex-tended sax solo which moved into a piano solo and ended with a repetition of the melody by the sax. From there the band played a 12-bar blues entitled “Brucker’s Blues” and then into another bop piece “Optimum Propensity”. These pieces while performed well, were nothing I hadn’t heard before. Welch was fluid and precise in his solos hitting most notes in the scale, rarely venturing outside of the chosen key, and when he dared reach out, it was merely for accent and was quick to return to the relative safety of the key. What was interesting was the interplay with Welch’s fluid, almost nonstop blowing and the pianist’s sharp, angular, staccato solos. The pianist, while lacking any sort of real dynamics in any of the songs he played, made interesting use of space around the keys he hammered down.

At this point of the show, three songs in, I was settling down and acquiescing for an evening of decent, but insignificant playing. It was at this point that one of those wonderful surprises happened. After a few intriguing, dense block chords were laid down by the piano, a slithering, sensuous melody was eluded from Welch in a distinctly eastern mode. After a trip through the melody, the bass and drums were adjoined to craft a deep, almost hypnotic groove over which Welch soared. It seemed as though a weight had been lifted, and Welch’s style liberated – free to explore regions the audience had not been expecting. In this piece no one else had a solo; Welch carried all melodic duties with assiduity.

From this piece, the pinnacle of the performance, the tunes returned to the normalcy that is west coast bop, starting with a ballad, “Tanya Faye,” named for Welch’s fiancée (who was in attendance), followed by “Collective Minds” which featured a solid groove and a playful interplay between bass and drums. From there, the quartet finished with a tune entitled “You in the Mind of Music” with rapid, virtuosic horn lines and a decent drum solo – the first reasonable action taken by her the entire evening. The group’s weak point (which really should not be so) was the rhythm section. The bassist was mediocre and the drummer missed many of her ques resulting in audible mistakes that were easily identifiable. She seemed to have trouble reading the other musicians – a problem to have in a person responsible for giving the solid foundation of the rhythm. However, Welch’s fluid lines juxtaposed with the pianist’s terse hammerings created an enjoyable auditory show.

After a short break wherein bladders were emptied and drinks refilled, Welch took the stage again but with a different group and to a different tune. Joined by a percussionist (playing a tabla or perhaps a nagada), and a vocalist who strummed away on a tanpura, Welch traded simple melodic ideas with the vocalist all of which remained riveting and mesmerizing despite the lack of harmonic movement. The tanpura is an instrument that consists of four strings tuned open, that are plucked successively to give a ceaseless layer, or foundation, that the soloist colors over. The melodies were straight-forward, but beautiful, based in a Dorian minor key which sounded distinctly Indian. The vocals and soprano sax coexisted symbiotically, Welch playing an idea only to have it repeated back to him slightly changed by the vocalist to which he would respond in kind, continuing the cycle practically ad infinitum (the song lasted over twenty five minutes). Welch’s lines were distinctly western in flavor with many bent and ‘blue’ notes woven to the aural fabric and the vocalists were traditionally Indian with heavy use of vibrato and very breathy.

The set consisted of three songs – all twenty minute jam sessions – that were unex-pectedly lyrical and provided a wonderful counterpoint to the fairly generic first set. My ad-vice to Welch; take your knowledge and obvious love of traditional Indian music and expand upon, devise new, proliferate and liberate. Pursue the track of most resistance and reach for that antithesis of commercialism. It won’t sell popularly, but you’ve got something fresh and surprising that is refreshing to hear and hauntingly and mesmerizing beautiful.