Ifa, The Spirit of Divination Trio with Raqib Hassan, Larry Roland, Dennis Warren
Live at The Western Front Cambridge, Mass., 1/30/94
Reviewed by Scot Hacker
In addition to tenor sax, Hassan plays a small flotilla of double-reed instruments from around the world, including (but not limited to) musette (a la Ornette Coleman and Dewey Redman), the Turkish zurna (a smaller, all-wood double reed), and the Tibetan gyaling. After having the opportunity to sit in with Sun Ra and the Arkestra at the New England Conservatory last year, he was inspired to assemble this trio to fuse the music of North and Central Africa to what's left of the post- Coltrane continuum. Dennis Warren (percussion) and Larry Roland (bass) both have an ongoing musical relationship with Cecil Taylor alumnus Raphe' Malik, and the trace elements of that lineage linger on in their style, as can be heard in the difficult balance between barely contained raw energy and a self-imposed respect for restraint and discipline.
The first set opened gradually, with Warren tumbling headlong into a solo of crunching beauty, Roland following hard on his heels with a humming, Reggie Workman-like test of dexterity, and Hassan finally joining in on the dry, nasal zurna. Within minutes the trio had reached a pitch well above feverish, and built up and out from there to points unknown. When there could be no further, a long, slow coast brought them back to ground level and onto a playing field of copious harmonics and polyrhythms. Warren and Roland latch-hooked into one another's grooves like yarns in a Turkish rug.
The second set began less furiously, and deepened quickly into a solid funk, with Roland's slippery phrasing humorously off-center. Warren worked the entire kit simultaneously, without sounding cluttered. He is capable of displaying a brutal, lightning-quick power that somehow still seems delicate and tempered. Hassan's astute double-reed work was forceful and mesmerizing -- he snaked through difficult rhythms with glee, as if coaxing spirits from a deep hole. Roland dives into his bass laughing, almost screaming at times, eyes bugged open with amazement at the scene going down around him. His style is at once smooth and ragged; he crumples rhythms in his hands like paper, then unfolds them again easily. The trio format provides plenty of elbow room, and this they filled with a liquid energy that moved in cycles, spreading up out of their hearts in flushes and heaves, in discussions that grew heated then peaceful again.
The show was billed as "Ifa, the Spirit of Divination," Ifa being a Yoruba gnosticism which attempts to connect to the spirit world through intuitive signs, playing the border between what is seen and what is felt. Hassan (himself a devout Sufi and member of a Dervish order) clearly sees and feels the connections between the intuitive nature of playing jazz in the trans-African sphere, and his own spirituality. "They're both about coming face-to-face with the reality of yourself," he said.
This process has become a personal test for these three of late, as they have been confronting the loss of a common friend to a brutal Roxbury stabbing last month. Hassan has eulogized this late friend in a recent composition with which they closed the show, titled "Echoes of Being." The tribute is a brooding (not depressing) ballad of sorts which evokes the tenuousness of life. A solemnly rhythmic pulse grows into a series of soliloquys on being itself, or, rather, on its passing.
[Writers] [Birdhouse]