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Marty Ehrlich Quartet - Tri C Jazz Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art 4/25/07
It's getting so that the only really adventurous performances of the Tri-C jazz fest are the ones that have been held at MOCA. Over the prior years they've had Greg Osby, Dave Douglas, Sam Rivers and Jason Moran. It's a relatively small setting and the acoustics are very good. The festival did a poor job, even by their prior standards, of getting any information out about this, particularly who was in the quartet. So I'd been exposed to rumors that it would include Craig Taborn and Michael Formanek. Like most rumors this was wrong so the pianist (and melodicist) was James Weidman and the bassist was Jerome Harris on the bass guitar; ordinarily I'm not too pleased with anything but a standup bass but this worked out very well. The drummer was Pheeroan ak Laff, who I hadn't seen since he appeared with the Threadgill Septette a looooonnnnggg time ago.
The first set got off prompty with "Hymn" that was a good way to ease into things with Ehrlich on alto. Most of the songs were from News on the Rail, which has been out over a year, right? That wasn't my favorite release by him but the versions of the songs, "Hear You Say", "Seeker's Delight", "Dance No. 2" and the title cut from what I can remember, all were major improvements over the studio cuts. Ehrlich alternated between alto, clarinet and bass clarinet. It seemed to take the group a while to really catch fire but the last two cuts, the first a Robin Holcomb number that sounded like a standard bloozy shouter with Marty wailing on bass clarinet, and "Dance No. 2", from the first set really started cooking. There were also a couple cuts from "Line on Love" thrown in too.
After a brief break the band returned to start off with a new song written as a tribute to Leroy Jenkins and a duet with Weidman on an Andrew Hill song of which I can't remember the title (it isn't one of his more famous one). As Gary noted on the Hill thread, the other time I saw Ehrlich was with Hill's band at the KnitFest and after that with Mark Dresser and Andrew Cyrille as part of C/D/E (Dresser was in the basement with a different group for 4 consecutive days). The second set was somewhat shorter than the first but still very well done. On one of the latter songs Ehrlich played bass clarinet by himself and did a good job of using the room acoustics to enhance the performance.
Ehrlich is this year's artist in residence so I imagine that the entire band will be working with the Tri-C students; as usual I think the students are in excellent hands.
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