Ambient astral jazz horn player Cole Pulice rolled through Medford’s Deep Cuts with guitarist Pat Horigan for a night of mood music directed at the ASMR crowd. If there’s a youth movement in jazz, it’s here. A far cry from the zooted histrionics of a late John Coltrane or Charlie Parker, we’ve got a jazz so mellow it could unboil a teapot. Are the kids all right?
Sure they are! Pulice is part of a credible contemporary movement to dial down the temperature of jazz to cooler climes. Sometimes slower tempos, sometimes mixed in with FX processing, sometimes sounding like stuff you’d hear on elevators, often striking a more introspective tone.
Artists moving in a similar space include a deep and diverse cross section of musicians such as harpist Mary Lattimore, the trio Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes, ambient chamber popper Lia Kohl, Carlos Niño & Whomever. Labels such as International Anthem and Moon Glyph have triangulated distinct strands of jazz and electronic music into a sandbox for the ear. It’s a space that has not quite coalesced into a genre, and it may never, but it’s spurring real creativity.
How did we get here? A few breadcrumbs along the trail. The not-too-distant history of popularized devotional music, in which the religious imprint is felt in experimental hybrids such as Alice Coltrane and her Oms. John McLaughlin taking his Mahavishnu turn. Sun Ra, who turned himself into a kind of cosmic pope of the jazz universe. The internal striving of Pulice’s sound reminds you of the ritual aspects of these artists and how they mapped their rituals onto new forms of popular music.
Another breadcrumb: New age music. Names such as Enya, Vangelis, Yanni and even elevator jazz god Kenny G. These artists evacuated familiar musical motifs of their historically situated content and reformalized them in a timeless space with all the rough edges sanded away. Fans didn’t listen to the music so much as run it through their ears like fingers across rosary beads. Pat Horigan’s abstract and minimal accompaniment on guitar hit like new age by way of Pat Metheny.
I can’t resist dropping Brian Eno’s famous quip here: “The trouble with new age music is that there’s no evil in it.” Is there evil in Pulice’s music?
If not evil, then at least a value supplied by a third breadcrumb: ambient music. This is a music that takes itself seriously enough not to devolve into the pure aural confection of toothless new age hits. The minimalist gestures, wide open spaces, abstract motifs are beautiful, but they also betray a hint of sublime terror. Like we’ve lost our footing, our sense of self, our personality, turned into dust and carried away on a cosmic breeze of pure mood and being.
With the right kind of ears you could detect the same breadcrumbs of devotional jazz, new age and ambient leading to the front door of opener Natalie Hogue. The local artist played a solo set, seated on stage with a sampler, attached to a mixer and a laptop. A fairly minimalist setup that wrung a maximalist amount of moods from her instrument. A bonus: The sampler appeared to possess the haptic sensitivity of registering slide pitches up and down so, similar to a steel pedal, Hogue could highlight her progressions with vibrato accents.
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