The Nu Band hasn't come to Pittsburgh since 2004. At that time, trumpeter Roy Campbell, Jr. and alto saxophonist Mark Whitecage were in the band, along with drummer Lou Grassi and bassist Joe Fonda. (Campbell passed away in 2014. Whitecage died last year.) That evening got off to a rocky start because the building on the Pitt campus that was supposed to house the show was already in use. Some scrambling happened but another stage was found pretty quickly. (While all that was going on, I was interviewing Grassi for a JazzTimes profile, about my second or third assignment for the magazine.)
This past Monday, May 9, a new Nu Band (to us at least) made its way to Pittsburgh. Technically, they were across the Mon River in Millvale, but that's close enough. Grassi and Fonda (the latter a visitor to the city in other musical projects in more recent years) were back, along with trumpeter Thomas Heberer and guitarist Kenny Wessel. The restaurant Sprezzatura served as a great setting for the music (note the backdrop in the photos) with great acoustics for the group.
The Nu Band is a cooperative group where all four of the musicians bring in compositions and no one serves as a leader, de facto or otherwise. The four of them exude a great sense of camaraderie as they're playing, quipping to each other between songs, revealing how genuinely pleased they seem to be with each others' company in addition to what they create together. During "Numerants," the final song of the set, after Wessel and Heberer had soloed, Fonda started digging into his bass. But first he looked over at Grassi and said, "Oh yeah, we'll do a little duet." This type of thing probably happens onstage frequently with improvisors, with the idea being expressed non-verbally. The fact that Fonda said it out loud, for all of us to hear, speaks the joie de vivre the band created onstage.
It was hard to get a good photo of Wessel because he kept bobbing back and forth while he was playing, swaying to the sound of the music. The guitarist had played with Ornette Coleman back in 1992 when Prime Time came to the Carnegie Music Hall. (He also appeared on the Tone Dialing album.) My memory of that evening was a guitar tone that sounded heavy on chorus, like it was coming through a Roland Jazz amp. This week, Wessel played with a sound that combined a richer, dreamy tone (somewhat like Bill Frisell) with the occasional dip into a high lonesome kind of twang, all of it coming with a vocabulary of bent notes and great twisted fragments of melody.
The contrast between Wessel and Heberer gave the music some of its most fascinating moments. They dug into some colorful dialogue together, blending the rounded sound of the guitar with the anything-goes tone of the trumpet. Heberer (also a member of ICP Orchestra, to name but one group that brought him to town before) played all over the horn, including the sub-bottom range, where he growled like a trombone. He squeezed notes until they were reduced to static. At one point, the static kept coming even after he removed his lips from the mouthpiece. (I never figured out how he did it, though he might have been using his voice and tricking us the whole time.)
Grassi's flexibility played a big part in what slayed me on Monday too. As someone who has spent time playing Dixieland as much as he's played free music, his approach to his kit really incorporates that wide scope into what he plays. When he played more straightahead, there was a serious amount of drive to it, when he was free, it felt electric. I only wish I could have gotten a shot of him cradling his crash cymbal after he repeatedly struck and muffled it during a solo.
Fonda, the ever-effusive MC at various points during the two sets, frequently thanked the audience for their enthusiasm. I was going to say the pleasure was all ours but the four musicians seemed to be have as much fun as the small but devoted crowd did.
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