Gerard Masters Trio
Sound Lounge, Sydney
5 May, 2006
Tucked away on the lowest floor of the Seymour Centre, a building itself hidden from public view by construction scaffolding and temporary wire fencing, SIMA’s venue The Sound Lounge in Chippendale has nevertheless become Sydney’s premiere Friday and Saturday night jazz venue.
The ochre carpet and brown-red walls create a warm, heady atmosphere. On the night of the Gerard Masters Trio’s performance in early May, about 40 figures sat around flickering tea candles on small black tables spreading out from the stage.
The trio’s performance was based around challenging compositions by pianist Gerard Masters and bassist Cameron Undy. Masters has a knack for slow and searching tunes; Pendulum and Neil Finn are in the right idiom for the newest member of the trio, drummer Evan Mannell, who is ever-attentive to the nuances of timbre and dynamics. That attentiveness is the crux of the trio’s method. With brushes Mannell cradle-rocked his ride cymbal or, in a gentle swing, massaged the snare skins, or scraped his sticks up and down the rim of the floor tom. He is concerned with investigating the widest spectrum of tone colour. His spurts of energy swing hard but he is just as likely to break into a rock beat. He most of all loves his battered cymbals.
Many of the original compositions were built out of contrasting, seemingly unrelated sections. There was something unconvincing about the centrepiece of the first set, a composition which moved from a loose Watermelon Man-style groove into a passage of flailing quasi-profundity. Subtlety was not a guiding rule. In the second set, Masters’ solos deigned to gimmicky karate chops up and down the keyboard and direct intervention with the piano strings.
The trio gave a more traditional reading of the wry standard Whisper Not and, late in the second set, a sleepy southern blues – for a few minutes they had the aura of a great soul singer’s backing band. In a laid-back mood, they self-elected to play an encore, The Poet.
Fuelled by the talented impressionist Evan Mannell, the trio has laudable ambition to draw together a diversity of styles with an over-riding emphasis on tone colour. An album featuring this latest incarnation with Mannell would be welcome.
M. K. ASPREY is a Sydney writer whose short stories have appeared in Island and Total Cardboard. His website is www.mkasprey.cjb.net
