Married since 2010 and musical partners for years prior, Tom Rainey and Ingrid Laubrock are family. That degree of closeness and compatibility steers their various projects together from an ongoing duo concern to various ensembles. Guitarist Mary Halvorson has collaborated with both drummer and saxophonist regularly for much of that time, forming the third point in the improvisational triangle that is Rainey’s working trio and evincing fluency in a shared language of improvisation that could be construed as familial given how well the three gel in compound. Combobulated conveys the tenacity and versatility of these trifold musical bonds in the most emblematic context possible: a single set of live music captured at the group’s home turf of Firehouse 12 from the fall of 2017.
At core, collective improvisation relies on split-second communication; cues conveyed through gesture, glance and instrumental integration with ego ideally sublimated in service of sui generis application of agreed-upon aural ingredients. The performance’s title piece, which scrapes the underside of nineteen minutes, is a grand example of these techniques in practice. Rainey’s sticks rain over his kit. Halvorson’s plectrum scrapes and careens across her Guild hollow body’s strings, loosing a torrent of distortion-dipped brambles. Laubrock’s tenor delivers a near-continuous stream of burnished phrases. The deluge continues for nearly six-minutes before a sudden dispersal leaves just tenor in isolation, laced by the slightest of room echo. Another interlude features Rainey, rolling across his cymbals and rims at a rapid-clip, soon joined by Halvorson cloaked in a roiling cloud of texture-rich effects that approximate a phalanx of disorienting air raid sirens. The three players exit as they entered at full, ears-abrading steam.
Five additional pieces are all approximately equal in length and offer apertures into the trio’s designs with shorter-form structures. “Point Reyes” joins Rainey’s malleted surfaces with the aqueous sonorities of Halvorson’s pedal-treated washes and Laubrock’s whale song tenor. “Fact” is a mash-up of capricious guitar pyrotechnics with Rainey’s raw force drumming that finds Laubrock mining the edges of her colleague’s more aggressive cross-purposes like a flustered officiant frantically refereeing a boxing match. Across each encounter, a refreshing unpredictability reigns with spontaneous course corrections always yielding fresh terrain rather than escape-canceling cul de sacs. Rainey, Halvorson and Laubrock are well past the point of allowing audience or other exterior expectations dictate their direction and have instead reached that place of communal confidence where the journey is reward. It’s an empowering place to be and one that ensures that no two performances will ever overlap with any certainty, combobulated, indeed.
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