#spacetone

[spacebeach23]

1971 Microfrets Spacetone Greenburst

from:  www.southsideguitars.com/

[dustedmagazine]

Nick Mazzarella Trio — Counterbalance (Astral Spirits/Spacetone)

Photo by Mark Pallman

Counterbalance by Nick Mazzarella Trio

Steady hometown gigging can do wonders for a band’s interactive chemistry. The musicians get to know each other’s ways, and they get acquainted enough with their material to dig into its implications. Do this long and well enough and an audience catches on. It’s a beautiful thing, until someone has to move on.  

The Nick Mazzarella Trio is certainly not the first band to have followed this developmental arc. When it first formed in 2008, its leader was one of the new guys on Chicago’s creative jazz scene. Besides having an extraordinarily fluid command of the alto saxophone and a melodic sensibility that channeled the unfettered joie de vivre of Ornette Coleman, he had the nerve and shrewd judgment recruit more experienced than he was to be the rest of his combo. Bassist Anton Hatwich and drummer Frank Rosaly proved to be good influences. They played Mazzarella’s Ornette Coleman-influenced tunes with empathy and vigor and also added the fire that they nurtured working together in other bands. Mazzarella’s tunes began to make more room for the push and pull between the three musicians, and each album built upon the one before it.

This process of growth continued until Rosaly left Chicago in 2016 to move to Amsterdam. While his didn’t kill the band, it did change the game plan. The trio swapped the steady cultivation of frequent gigs in Chicago, for the life cycle of a desert plant; every once in a while when everything lined up right, they got together for a brief burst of glorious flower. When Rosaly came back to town in January 2018 they booked once concert, Mazzarella pulled out some new tunes, and six of them became Counterbalance.  

The Trio certainly hasn’t forgotten what made it great in the first place. Mazzarella lets off quick, rippling phrases on “The Puzzle,” the tarries to repeat one until it has you dancing in your head. Then he goes off again, quick and darting. But where Hatwich and Rosaly might once have laid down a propulsive, swinging groove, they now act like opposing sources of force, projecting power back and forth, absorbing each other’s energy and reflecting it back. On “Headway” Mazzarella combines his familiar nimbleness with a more weighty tone and a willingness to drop out and make way for the drummer to patiently break it down and build it back up again. Hatwich shares the lead on “Innermost,” slowly threading his way through Rosaly’s light drizzle of cymbal tones.  

Counterbalance attests to the growth of its makers over the past decade and their readiness to completely inhabit an available moment of music making. But it’s also an admonishment of sorts. If there’s a band playing one swell show after another in your neck of the woods, don’t take them for granted; go and listen. You’re being granted an opportunity that has an expiration date.  

Bill Meyer

[spacebeach23]

1960′s MICROFRETS Spacetone Stage 2

from https://www.themusiczoo.com/

[spacebeach23]

1970 Micro-Frets Spacetone Green

from http://www.guitarecollection.com/