What: Chris Potter’s Underground
When: Tuesday, June 30th at 9PM (Today!) (Monday’s show reviewed below)
Where: The Pilot at 22 Cumberland between Bay and Yonge (Map)
Tickets: $28 at the door – arrive early as seating is limited and first come first serve. Doors open at 8PM. Dinner is available at the Pilot.

(See end of Review for more Chris Potter listings for this week on Tuesday and Friday)

Starting at 9PM and finishing up at around midnight, Chris Potter’s Underground wowed the audience from start to finish at the intimate Pilot setting this evening, with two great sets of serious head-bopping, jiving music, that held your attention throughout, accessible to the jazz neophyte and a real delight for the jazz fan. The band played both original music off Potter’s albums and interpretations of other musicians’ work.

Chris Potter is a musician’s musician – about half the audience was music students from York, Humber, and UofT – he takes any piece and turns it on its head in so many different ways that make you listen and watch in anticipation, constantly engaged. His albums are good, but his performance here was stellar. I spent the whole concert bopping my head, swinging my shoulders, tapping my foot, tapping my hands, and at the apex moments, finding myself doing all of the above at once without thinking about it. It was a heck of a lot of fun and a heck of a good show.

Chris Potter’s Underground – with Adam Rogers on guitar, Craig Taborn on Fender Rhodes, Nate Smith on drums, and Potter on alto sax, soprano sax, and bass clarinet -played original tunes like the title song from “Underground” and Potter’s new album “Ultrahang”, new never-before played compositions like “Flight to Oslo”, old standards like Duke Ellington’s “Single Petal of a Rose”, and unexpected oldies with seriously imaginative turns like their melodic, swingy ballad of Bob Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe”.

What made the show great was not just the quality of the playing or the selection of the music, but the tightness of the band, the seamless transitions, and the incredible variations on the melody. While most jazz concerts follow the same old pattern of melody, sax solo, guitar solo, drum solo, keyboard solo, back to melody, and then new song and repeat, Underground has a new and exciting way of approaching performance, which is strong and engaging. However, it does get a little repetitive in nature by the nth song.

It’s kind of like a game, a really clever game for the listener that wants to be challenged. We start with the melody, which is just there to teach the audience the rules. Then the band, who together have obviously spent hours and hours of intense time practicing to get so comfortable and seamless with one another, do some minor deviations from the melody, playing with it but not straying too far. They’re still making sure the audience is on the same page.. Next Potter does the melody with some riffs and Adam Rogers on guitar follows along and plays the melody – with occasional variation, too. This is all good, but get ready for greatness. Adam Rogers gives us a very clear guitar solo where we can see him playing with the melody, turning it on its head, revisiting it, and going off on a tangent that’s clearly related, and returning again. Potter follows with the same only the energy is now up to eleven, and there’s impressive, melodic riffs, bits, but he still keeps us grounded in the melody.

Part of what makes these solos great is how grounded they are in the piece. They aren’t just out of left field like so many musicians’ solos often are. They are clear progressions from the melody and the bass line. They relate to each other and as they go the musicians play off one another. Maybe the Fender Rhodes player Craig Taborn is playing with a particular little variation or sequence, and as he moves on, Adam Rogers takes it over, while Taborn continues to solo.

We come back to the melody here and there, it’s revisited in all the solos, different things happen, and there’s never just pure solo  – 1 to solo 2 to solo 3 to solo 4 and back to the start again. Even in individual solos there’s all kinds of tight, well-rehearsed, and spot-on transitions. The phrase gets sped up and slowed down, the rhythm changes, the mood changes, the soloists play off one another in seamless transitions which are in no way choppy. They never just “hand off the piece” to one another, but are constantly engaged and are working together in each of the solos. They put us through intense dissonance, or intense anticipation, only to satisfy us with a great release as they finally hit that note. Even the transitions between Potter on alto sax to soprano sax to bass clarinet worked pretty easily.

When we return to the melody at the end of each piece, and we usually do – though there isn’t really an “end” to many of the pieces but a careful, suave transition from one piece to the next, from one speed to the next, from one mood to the next – it’s not the same as it was at the beginning of the piece. The elements are still there, but there’s new food for thought, too. The transitions from piece to piece are both subtle and clear. And it’s not your average boring slow song, fast song, slow song, fast song, choppy back-and-forth.

The group finished at midnight with a standing ovation, came back for an encore and received another standing ovation. And it’s no surprise why: these guys know how to put on a show. They know how to play together and they know how to give us something new, something different. They take a song that may seem not all that interesting and turn it into a real tour-de-force. As I sat outside the door earlier in the evening, waiting to get in and take my seat, I could hear the group practicing together and doing technical exercises on their own. The result was a strong concert throughout and instead of a weak and rocky start, we were treated to a good, strong start with just a taste of the fun we were about to experience.

These guys know what they’re doing and they’re playing again this week, so don’t miss these must-see shows. Chris Potter’s Underground will be at the Pilot again tomorrow (Tuesday, June 30th) at 9PM; Potter is giving a FREE workshop at Nathan Phillips Square at 2PM on Tuesday as well; and come back to the MainStage concert on Friday to see Chris Potter play with bassist (and long-time collaborator) Dave Holland.

———————————————

What: Chris Potter workshop – FREE
When: Tuesday, June 30th at 2PM
Where: Nathan Phillips Square

AND

What: Chris Potter plays in the Dave Holland Quintet
When: Friday, July 3rd @ 8PM
Where: Nathan Phillips Square, MainStage Concert
Tickets: $35 at the door, general admission seating, first come first serve

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