Salle Gaveau
Ekoda Buddy
December 14, 2009
Natsuki Kido - guitar
Naoki Kita - violinist
Yoshiaki Sato – accordion
Keisuke Torigoe - bass
Masaki Hayashi – piano
Salle Gaveau’s shopping list is long and varied. They bring together tango, French chanson, jazz, classical, free jazz and dashes of funk into one stylish bag with effortless cool. Their eclecticism is sophisticated but not in the way that you have to work to understand, but can just sink back and enjoy. How they get all those ingredients to work together is a bit of a mystery, but that’s part of the fun.
The musical styles extend from the musicians’ own eclectic approaches, wide-ranging experience and hands-on feel of the instruments. These musicians all lead their own groups, sometimes several different groups, and they play in even more. All of their different sounds come together into Salle Gaveau, named after one of Paris’ most famous historical concert halls, a place where, like this group, all kinds of music is welcome.
Kita’s violin takes over the front range of sounds. He ranges from classical to avant-garde to jazz and back again. Behind him, Torigoe’s bass thumps 4/4 with a nifty jazz swing, then shifts to Latin, then edges into melodic interplay with whoever is taking the melody. Kido switches back and forth from acoustic to electric, and from crunchy driving chords to lean single line runs. Sato’s accordion and Hayashi’s piano layer on keyboard harmonies and thread in interior melodic musings. You would think they would get in each other’s way, but their keyboards instead add layer and layer of complexity, as if the tonal, harmonic capacity of any song is infinite. Which, of course, you realize quickly with this group, it really is!
How can tango, a generally acoustic music, fit with electric guitar? How can the violin fly into higher registers without pulling too hard on the two keyboards? Why does it sound so effortless to shift from South American rhythms to avant-garde harmonies? How do repetitive vamps open up so much space for sharp-edged free-jazz soloing? The group is a list of confounding questions, yet they have answers for all of them. The intrigue is to keep listening and to take it all in, a task which is surprisingly easy.
Everyone the group searches for their own place and yet never get stuck there, they work from there, touching each other at points and then moving back to support and hold and probe and explore. These crosscurrents are part of the fun. They improvise like jazz, rock a bit with jam band youthfulness, but never sound like they are just jamming. Everything is considered, yet natural. There’s bluesiness and funkiness, but it all melts together like warm chocolate.
The music does not really divide, like jazz, into heads and solos, bringing to mind the paradoxical ethic of Joe Zawinul about Weather Report: we never solo and we always solo. Salle Gaveau never becomes quite so electric and they work from written music, but they clearly relish their own paradoxes. Many of the songs have a five or six-sheet score, which the musicians have to balance out along the musical stands because there is NO time to stop and turn a page. The written plan of the music, though, turns easily into the natural flow and calm drive of all the tunes.
Somehow, Salle Gaveau’s music is very visual. It is not that the music sounds like a soundtrack to a movie exactly, but a profound sense of visual power suffuses each song. You can see the melodies. The marches stomp like a parade, the vamps pump like a dancer, the lyrical wistfulness floats on a summer breeze, the pop song interludes makes you look at your drink, the ballads are drenched in tears. That ability to conjure strong images is part of the pleasure of the group. That’s a pleasure, sophisticated and intricate, that a full house of fans was there to relish.