Natural Information Society & Drum Divas Live Show Review: 8/23, Jay Pritzker Pavilion, Chicago
BY JORDAN MAINZER
For an event called Preservation of Fire, it was only fitting that Natural Information Society would be joined by who band leader Joshua Abrams called “the tenor flame of Chicago,” saxophonist Ari Brown. Together with percussion collective Drum Divas, Natural Information Society played the event curated by Alejandro Ayala (aka King Hippo) and presented by The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE), a night of slow-building, cosmic grooves, acoustic instrumentation that called you to dance by daring to resemble swaths of other music.
The headliners, Natural Information Society, were celebrating their latest album, descension (Out of Our Constrictions) (eremite), recorded live at London’s Cafe OTO in 2019. (It’s their first album to be recorded live and to feature a single composition, though the album is separated into four tracks.) Many of the record’s key players were part of last night’s incarnation of Natural Information Society: Abrams (giumbri), of course, Lisa Alvarado (harmonium and whose paintings adorn the album cover and the backdrops of last night’s set), Jason Stein (bass clarinet), and Mikel Patrick Avery (drums and cymbals). But while the album was recorded with legendary English free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker, last night’s concert featured Brown, along with Nick Mazzarella (saxophone) and Mai Sugimoto (saxophone and flute) for some added depth. As descension is a very defined composition, built around a specific theme with Parker’s improvisational flourishes on top, I was blown away by how the performance struck the perfect balance between faithfulness to the material and allowing the individual players’ unique expressions.
As on the record, the ensemble started with Abrams leading the way, Alvarado and Stein providing some harmonic pulsations, and Avery’s four-on-the-floor drumming propelling a Chicago house-like beat. Quickly, Brown, centered on stage, began his tenor wails. For those who hadn’t yet heard the record but had seen Natural Information Society before, I imagined their reaction similar to mine when I first heard descension, that this ebullient sax-led forward march was closer to Sons of Kemet than to the hypnosis of Mandatory Reality. Brown’s playing was perhaps a steadier shade, a more consistently soulful bastion of joy as compared to Parker’s all-over-the-place proclamations of celebration and mourning. There is certainly an aspect of solemnity and sociopolitical resistance in descension, whether projected in context or intended. In the liner notes of the record, Chicago artist and professor Theaster Gates writes, referencing Parker’s circular breathing, “Breathing in the wake of George Floyd’s death then takes on a new dysfunction – a new tonal idiom. To be choked or to be unbalanced, for a note to be held back or a sound to be silenced, no longer feel like jazz devices, but rather, a reaction to the complexities that occur on our streets & in our cities.” It was, then, extra reflective to hear this composition outside in downtown Chicago; whereas you can really only tell the recording is live after hearing the crowd cheer following a particularly skronking Parker solo, hearing woodwinds in conjunction with everything from street chatter to sirens was thematically consonant rather than tonally dissonant.
Of course, all the wonderful aspects of the recording--Avery’s thumping cowbell gallop, Alvarado’s polyrhythms, the lead tenor saxophone and Stein fluttering in tandem or in a call and response--were still there. There’s a playful quality to descension, too, as it threatens to quiet only to build back up, convincing you it’s about to emphasize the harmonium and saxophone before Abrams’ twangy guimbri comes full circle. That Natural Information Society continues to defy expectations on a composition like descension is simply astounding.
And Drum Divas came to, in the words of lead vocalist Dorothy Sunshine Lyles, “lift the vibrational frequency.” As the entire 8-piece band came out gradually, their songs emphasized the rewards of patience. They had peaks and valleys, sure, but it was the almost ecstasy of their percussive and vocal harmonies, fully formed, that was the highlight of their set. They fed off of each other’s energy as much as the crowd’s, swiftly changing tempos, adding and subtracting as skillfully as someone with a loop pedal. Like Natural Information Society, they aimed to spread joy almost to combat the current state of seemingly ever-present turmoil. For every gentle, woodwind-imbued moment, the band would pick the crowd back up with dynamism. The faint vocals and distant trilling of Lyles and Sapphire and assorted djembe, frame drum, and mallet percussion playing and even clapping made the beats sound ever-more expansive, making you believe that these women could, actually, journey to the cosmos and back.