Exceptional jazz from three Free Spirits

Philip Elwood
EXAMINER MUSIC CRITIC

Wednes, Feb. 7, 1996

TY: REVIEW

AND THEN there is guitar great John McLaughlin, drum great Dennis Chambers and the adventurous Hammond organ harmonist Joey DeFrancesco.

The trio, called Free Spirits, played a nearly two-hour set at the Great American Music Hall on Tuesday; they'll be there again on Wednesday, but you won't - unless you have your ticket already. This is one of those engagements that the musical in-crowd - the guitar and drum hipsters in this case - picks up on, and buys up fast.

The Free Spirits are far more than your regular jazz trio. Essentially the group is a guitar and drum duet - like a boxing match - with organist DeFrancesco sitting behind his Hammond B-3 keyboard and acting like harmonic fulcrum as McLaughlin and Chambers, the protagonists, carry on a complex instrumental conversation across the organ console.

And one must note that what McLaughlin and Chambers have to say is most remarkable music. In fact, as pure jazz as one could hope for.

They solo, they play in duet; they chase choruses across rhythm and tempo variations, toss stop-time breaks at one another, insert licks from pop and bebop; rock and blues - and thoroughly enjoy themselves while challenging one another.

Sometimes DeFrancesco, chording on the keyboard and keeping the foot-pedal rhythm churning along, looks right to drummer Chambers, then left to guitarist McLaughlin like a tennis fan. His Ben Franklin haircut (and eyeglasses) make the scene notably bizarre.

McLaughlin, playing a Gibson hollow body jazz guitar, occasionally employs distortion and ring-modulation but most often he's flying all over the box with clean chorused tone. Chambers uses heavy field-drum sticks, sometimes switching to tympani-style padded mallets. He and McLaughlin aren't just master instrumentalists - they are also magnificent musicians.

I don't recall seeing and hearing a more impressive and versatile drummer than Chambers, and I go back to Baby Dodds and Gene Krupa. Chambers works over his whole kit - the cymbals, tom-toms, snare and bass drums - as casually as a maid dusting books. His rhythmic shifts, often abrupt; his use of dynamics and rudiments (various types of rolls, flams, ruffs, paradiddles) and his ability to come in like a breeze-driven shower and then erupt into a gale-force percussion hurricane is literally overwhelming.

The Music Hall crowd followed Chambers' every move then, when the drum storm finally hit, they, too, exploded - with ecstatic cheers.

All this is going on while McLaughlin is providing lightning-flashes of guitar lines, sometimes searing smears, sometimes obviously impossibly fast runs. He creates melodies, develops them to a point - often playing counter-riffs as if he was dueting with himself - then wanders off into thematic abstractions. All this happens as part of the ensemble, not in solo sequences.

Behind his dueling colleagues, DeFrancesco provides a harmonic and rhythmic backdrop, often tossing in bits of bebop, blues riffs and cascading cadenzas.

In nearly a couple of hours the trio worked through a half dozen selections, many of which had the ring of Miles Davis charts; "Round Midnight" was one of the few ballads played. A couple of times McLaughlin drifted into a calm, reverie-like solo.

Nice.

Wed., Feb. 7, 1996 San Francisco Examiner, All Rights Reserved, Unauthorized Duplication Prohibited.