The Michael Sarin Quintet at the Bar Bayeux: Michael Sarin (drums), Jerome Harris (bass), Brad Shepik (guitar); at left, the neck of Fima Ephron’s bass and the shoulder of pianist Rahul Carlberg; the evening’s emcee, Caleb Wheeler Curtis in the background. (Photo: David Yearsley)
It was only after I left the Bar Bayeux in Brooklyn last Friday night, elated after two riveting sets from the Michael Sarin Quintet, that I realized that the club’s name was a clever pun on its address at 1066 Nostrand Avenue. Oh, I get it, I muttered, simultaneously congratulating and chiding myself for the insight and the slowness with which it had come. Having contended with speed traps along the Susquehanna, harsh winds in the Poconos and sink holes in New Jersey earlier that day, I was just glad to have made it to the right place at the right time, and to have heard and seen the kaleidoscopic succession of compositions—all originals and all by the band leader, my oldest friend and, like me, a transplant to the Empire State from Bainbridge Island, Washington in the Northwest corner of the American Empire.
Also a long way from Brooklyn, the Bayeux Tapestry depicts the Norman Conquest which, as everyone used to know, took place in the year shared with the street number in stylish gold that I now regarded. In more than two-hundred linear feet of colorful needlework, the famed French textile depicts bloody conflict—a broadsword to the thorax here, an arrow through the eye there in the midnight mist on Nostrand Avenue. No unhorsings, mortal blows, or Viking longboats packed with knights armed to the top of their heads decorate the plain red velvet curtain that hangs in the Bar Bayeux’s big glass window. Yet by some accounts, the history of jazz is the history of combat, with instruments referred to as axes, cymbals hurled at insurgent alto saxophonists, tenor duels and kindred cutting contests staged so as to inflict wounds of shame on the losers.
The Bar Bayeux hosts jazz five nights a week and comedy on Sunday. The long narrow space is traversed by an unfussy, but elegant bar, backed by a pair of conjoined oblong mirrors that reflect the glow of Art Deco lamps and the deep red of the walls on which hang vintage gin posters and original art. At the far end of the bar a cluster of round tables and chairs gathers in front of the performers at the back reaches of the space. Doubtless many of these jazzers and jesters have emerged from an evening inside with injuries to their confidence, scathed by self-criticism or otherwise bruised in the struggle to stake the flag of their originality on new territory. The improvising spirit and body do not always answer the call of duty. Spontaneity and perfectionism are the Janus faces of jazz. They scowl plenty, and smile sometimes, though almost never at each other.
Last Friday’s maiden voyage of the Michael Sarin Quintet was not an exercise in five-upmanship nor otherwise competitive display, but a wellspring of collaborative music-making in which individual expression was buoyed by an artistic plan of campaign masterminded by the group’s leader.
Sarin his been living and working in New York City since the 1980s, touring extensively, often in Europe, with an impressively diverse cast, among them the late alto saxophonist, Thomas Chapin, avant-gardist John Zorn, the trumpeter Dave Douglas, the Klezmer clarinet virtuoso David Krakauer, and the saxophonist, Caleb Wheeler Curtis, who introduced the evening’s two sets. Curtis welcomed all who had come for whatever reasons—to hang out, to sample the excellent cocktails, to forget about Trump and his conquests and invasions, domestic and foreign. But Curtis gently reminded the assembled that, while conversation was not prohibited, many in the club had come expressly to hear what he rightly called the “world-class musicians.” Indeed, a host of Sarin’s colleagues were in attendance. The quintet offered them connoisseurs’ music that delighted and challenged anyone listening.
Sarin has made his career as a percussionist. His tool kit is his drum kit. He brings his own cymbals, and they shimmered, shone and flamed not just Bayeux red but in colors from across the spectrum. Relentlessly propulsive at brisk tempos, attentively atmospheric in slower ones, and uncannily incisive and encouraging always, Sarin’s approach is orchestral, full of color and invention, long phrases and dynamic contours, but also marked by unpremeditated bolts of syncopation, unexpected emphasis and humor—the lash and laugh of the skins, the bright chatter of the hi-hat, the instant omens of the bass drum. These shifting effects and clever commentaries ride on an unfaltering rhythmic flow that counts as a force of nature, though, of course, it took years of youthful practice to develop and secure its sustaining power.
But Sarin is much more than a consummate rhythmicist, unfalteringly rigorous yet irrepressibly creative. He is a musical omnivore: he eats everything with his ears, digests the nourishment with his genius.
He commands an astounding musical memory stocked with everything from the college fight songs he used to pick out on his living room spinet, to ad jingles, to movie themes, to the whole history of jazz, swaths of R&B, soul and pop. These staples are augmented classical music, including, of late, reworkings of modernist Eastern Europeans like Lutosławski and Shostakovich which he has been undertaking in recent years in the company of the ingenious deconstructivist arranger Michael Bates. Sarin can sing you anything from this vast catalog on request and in exactly the right key.
That comprehensive knowledge and craft is coupled with a keen sense of social and political contexts, as well as a feel for the connection of music to place and people. Composition is not an academic exercise for Sarin, even if there is much erudition in his complex scores with their searching harmonies, daunting cross-relations, penchant for contrapuntal dialogue, Cubist melodies, and shifting time signatures cut through by syncopation. The work is rhythmically expansive, which means geographically expansive. Among Friday’s set list, “Caetano,” to the great musician, poet, and political activist Caetano Veloso, has a Brazilian lilt and flair. The rhythmic ebullience of the north-African infused “A’ashiri,” which means homeboy in Moroccan Darija dialect) projects a carefree self-assuredness.
From the start, “Crimper” set the high-minded, if still-accessible tone for the evening. The title seems to refer to human trafficking—crimping being a synonym for shanghai-ing. The 5/4 meter of the opening section conveys horrors and violence, the texture aggravated by seasick chromaticism and jagged, tangled leaps. These shackling procedures give way to a more contiguous, comforting melody in lilting triple time that seems to evoke hope or simply the beauty of the seas as seen from captivity—assuming a vantage point of the waves from above deck.
Another uneven 5/4 time signature followed directly on from “Crimper” in “A.I.n’t Shit.” Replete with the irritating routines and tiresome tautologies of LLM and machine learning as represented by self-cannibalizing canons and an incessant single-note piano ostinato, Sarin’s archly human wit cut through the computerized clutter, the composer become living ghost in the machine powered by his solipsistic drum phases churned out like an IBM punch card getting fed through the mainframe.
The first set finished with “Flag Wavers” marching relentlessly upward then down in unambiguous, undoubting on-the-beat chords before arriving in the end at hand-over-heart D-major unadulterated by foreign harmonic elements. These foursquare fulminations were ironized by the snap of Sarin’s snare and the jeering of his ride cymbal, and by Shepik’s careening solo the cut against the red-white-and-blue grain. Later, “Disheveled Dandy” responded to this permanent-press patriotism with an air of unkempt contempt.
Sarin wrote and arranged all the evening’s music with the evening’s four other performers in mind. The unusual use of two electric bassists shows the composer’s admiration for Fima Ephron, who supplied the low fundament, and Jerome Harris who explored the high baritone and tenor strata with his countermelodic investigations. Harris put down his bass and took up his guitar on occasion to raise the ensemble tessitura in dialogues with the Brad Shepik, another Washington Stater also long in New York. Shepik proved an intrepid improviser on “Wheels,” dedicated to him; the guitarist scurried and soared above the Afrobeat, unfazed—indeed uplifted—by Sarinian complexities. Pianist Rahul Carlberg, son of pair of Sarin’s musical colleagues, offered up a ruminative solo introduction to “Meditation” that progressed from the tentative to the poised. Carlberg has the rhythmic smarts and fleetness to keep pace with Sarin’s shifting temporal frames, and his pianism ranges from the pointillistic to the tastefully loquacious to the mighty two-fisted tremolo.
This whole lot of night music was all new material from the composer-arranger-performer-bandleader, bravely and brilliantly presented by his group. As with anything this fresh, there were moments of doubt where decisions had to made on the spot. At these crossroads, Sarin continued to drum while singing the part of anyone who had missed an entry, or he shouted instructions above the glorious fray, as he did just before evening’s end in the high-octane “Geri,” dedicated to the American jazz pianist Geri Allen. After a long, coruscating crescendo of a drum solo in which the maestro surged to the foreground accompanied by the rest of the ensemble, Sarin cried out “last time, last time!” to his bandmates and they joined forces for the final refrain of the evening.
Here’s hoping this is not the last time, but rather the first of many for the Michael Sarin Quintet, a band with many other dates to mark and clubs to conquer.
