Jazz-shy Seattlest Digs the Macage Harybu Trio
In previewing Monday night’s Macage Harybu Trio show, we admitted that we don’t know jazz from Shinola. What’s more, we really don’t like the stuff. (This stuff, anyway.) Truth be told, if Matt Cameron wasn’t one-third of the act, we wouldn’t have driven to Northgate’s intimate Seattle Drum School to see them play.
We were surprised—and pleased—to find that Cameron (drums), Geoff Harper (upright bass), and Ryan Burns’ (keyboard) "take on [Thelonious] Monk’s classics" and original instrumentals weren’t much like any jazz we’d heard.
(Nor was the opening act, a seven year-old Drum School student and her acoustic guitar-playing teacher. Their duets tackled serious kid stuff like snot and butterflies and ice cream. How freaking cool must this school be?)
Some of the Trio’s songs—all fresh and loose—sounded like straight-up rock. (A keyboard can riff and squeal like an electric guitar? Cool!) A few others were reminiscent of the psychedelic trippyness of Cameron’s Wellwater Conspiracy. And there were several we don’t know how to categorize—dissonant stuff that put off soon-to-be Mrs. Seattlest but had us thinking of Mike Patton’s less accessible (but likable) projects. Think three simultaneous, weird-tempo solos—all cymbals, snares, ding-dong keys and jumping bass—syncing somehow between notes.
There was a smooth-jazzy, droning, brush-sticked slower song—but it ended just before our eyes could glaze over. And one other came complete with vocals—care of Cameron, who's also the voice of Wellwater and occasionally backs up one Eddie Vedder.
We have no idea which songs in the roughly 90-minute set were Monk covers, which were originals, or what most were titled, but each sounded just as gracefully improvised as it did practiced. Cameron did say Burns wrote one song, and introduced their last one, a serious rocker, as "Highway Star." Other than that and a sprinkling of thank-yous and one-two-three-fours, the Macage Harybu Trio grinned, bounced, and focused on their music.
If that music is jazz, we’re the genre’s newest fan.
Crappy video courtesy of our very own digital camera.
