Sun of Goldfinger Hits Pittsburgh

Thursday was Sun of Goldfinger day- and night - in Pittsburgh. The group consists of David Torn (guitar), Tim Berne (alto saxophone) and Ches Smith (drums, electronics). They just released an album on ECM that's credited to all three of them but titled Sun of Goldfinger. So the album title is pretty much the name of the group. For more details, check out my interview with Berne and Torn here.

On the afternoon prior to the show, the guitarist and saxophonist came to the University of Pittsburgh and held an informal chat in a recording studio on campus. I was free for the afternoon and stopped by. The night before, they had played in Madison, Wisconsin where my friend/former bandmate Grant helped present them. So when Berne saw me in the room he said, "I have a message from Grant that I'm supposed to deliver to you."

For almost two hours, the two of them took questions about their music and they expounded on things like how they approach free improvisation in general and in this group. They also played one whole track from Sun of Goldfinger (a 22-minute piece) and an excerpt from another. Berne talked a lot about studying with Julius Hemphill. Having spoken with them already, I was familiar with a lot of the topics they covered but it was cool hearing it in person and seeing their willingness to share their approaches with people.

Later that night, they played at the Spirit Lodge. Being an improvisational group, they time between setting up and starting the proper set blurred a little. Having seen Torn live a couple times, it's clear that the twisting of knobs on his sampler/effects arsenal is often part of the performance as a whole. It can be better to focus on the sound and not the visuals. The surprise came early on when I noticed that one of the sounds coming from the stage was not generated by Torn. It was Smith, who had a table with electronics that were making the noise in question. At least five, and maybe ten, minutes, went by before he picked up his sticks and started flailing. Things had been rolling along already, but his work on the kit really get it off the ground. Smith is amazing in general and would probably be just as powerful playing a solo set.

There were times during the set where Smith's electronics were too loud in the mix, definitely overpowering Berne and sometimes threatening to do the same to Torn. As a whole, though, the 60- to 70-minute set they played felt pretty mind blowing. Eventually Smith started to bang out a groove and everyone came together, only to tear things back down and rebuild.

Once during one of these instances, Berne was playing practically unaccompanied and pulled out a long line of ideas that almost sounded like something out of a Bloodcount performance. Torn tapped into some dirty blues riffs that took him back to the early days that he had mentioned at the lecture, when he used to be all about the blues. While it had traditional elements in it, the delivery made it more of a passing reference and not an attempt to push his comrades into da blooz. Smith astounding all night, playing drums with one hand while manipulating electronics with the other, playing something that sounded like a drum loop but was actually live. My last bit of chicken scratch notes from that night reads, "Funk groove?" It must have felt kind of like that. All sorts of wild stuff happened that night.

White Hole - the quartet of guitarists Dave Bernabo & Erik Cirelli, saxophonist Patrick Breiner & drummer PJ Roduta - opened the next with a set of four originals that ranged from super spare and quiet to raucous and sharp.