Gnawa grooves and more

The Tel Aviv Jazz Festival kicks off on Wednesday.

By BARRY DAVIS
Joshua Abrams demonstrates why he is considered one of the leading bass players globally (photo credit: PIOTR-LEWANDOWSKI)
Joshua Abrams demonstrates why he is considered one of the leading bass players globally
(photo credit: PIOTR-LEWANDOWSKI)
Joshua Abrams has been dipping into the seemingly bottomless font of sounds and rhythms emanating from Mother Africa for some time now. As he is a jazz musician, that makes perfect sense. The Chicago-based artist established himself as one of the most inventive acoustic bass players on the global scene, but then expanded his instrumental arsenal by adding the gimbri, a three-stringed, skin-covered, bass lute used by the Gnawa people of West Africa.
Next week, Abrams will bring both his instruments to this part of the world, when he participates in this year’s Tel Aviv Jazz Festival, which will be based at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque from December 7 to 9, with additional gigs by offshore stars also taking place at the various branches of the Zappa Club up and down the country.
Abrams, in fact, hails from a different part of the States, Philadelphia, which has a glorious jazz heritage of its own. But the Windy City, which has been home to Abrams for over 20 years, has a unique berth in the history of the freer side of jazz evolution over the last half century or so. Pride of place on the less structured side of the improvisational music tracks goes to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians – the Chicago-based collective that has been pushing the jazz envelope since 1965. The roster of fearless AACM members includes the late mercurial trumpeter Lester Bowie, bassist Malachi Favors, who died in 2004 at the age of 76, and now 86-year-old composer, arranger, clarinetist, cellist and pianist Muhal Richard Abrams (no relation).
Some of the original pacesetters may have departed to the free-flowing bandstand on high, but their legacy is alive and very much kicking in the capable younger hands of Abrams, dynamic sixtysomething drummer Hamid Drake and 72-year-old saxophonist Ari Brown, who will join Abrams in a trio gig at the festival next Friday (1 p.m.).
The spirit and sounds of the pioneering 1960s outfit continue to stoke Abrams’s creative fires to this day. “When I came to Chicago from Philadelphia in the early 1990s, I was familiar with its history to some degree, but being here, the AACM in Chicago has just been a huge influence on me, and that’s sort of how I came up,” says Abrams, noting that his cohorts will also, very much, contribute to putting out frontier-flexing energies and music at the show.
So, I posited, the spirit of the AACM will be transported from the Midwest to Tel Aviv next week. While agreeing, Abrams points out that we are talking about a work in progress rather than just a statement of intent from half a century ago.
“There will be the spirit of Chicago [in Tel Aviv]. I think what the AACM encourages is that everyone is trying to find your own voice and approach, and trying to look at the music in an expansive way. I am not a member of the AACM, so I can’t speak for them, but they seem to encourage an expansive view of the African- American diaspora in jazz – a tradition of music extending well beyond conventional boundaries of that. I think everyone in the group likes to look at the broad view as well,” Abrams adds with more than a touch of understatement.
The bassist-gimbri player certainly looks beyond the borders of his mother country, and feeds off sounds and sensibilities that came straight from the source, across the Atlantic Ocean. “[African music –] it’s an inspiration,” Abrams says unemotionally. In fact, the adopted son of Chicago is heavily invested in African music, and got himself over there to get a handle on the primary rhythms and textures.
Firsthand visual and aural experience of where the music comes from notwithstanding, Abrams is keenly aware of the fact that he is American, and does not have any pretenses of being something of a neo-African. “I went to Morocco in the late Nineties, and that’s when I first started playing the gimbri. I have been on a kind of journey with it, to find my own voice with the instrument, and find new situations for it. I don’t play the Gnawa tradition literally.
I try to respect the spirit of it and create new situations for the instrument, and try to pull together threads of jazz improvised music with what some call American minimalism and the histories of world traditions.”
Branching out to an instrument with a very different cultural backdrop has certainly enabled Abrams to explore new creative tracts.
“The gimbri is a very vocal instrument,” he notes. “Traditionally, it is used by the maalem, who is the lead singer. But I find that the instrument itself has a very vocal quality in a way that it is a little bit different from the bass. The gimbri is melodic but also has a percussion aspect – the skin of it is also like a drum.” Abrams says that his second instrument has an endearing oxymoronic quality to it. “Even though it is fairly limited in range – it is basically like an octave, maybe a little bit more – that limitation can be expansive. That is something that has fascinated me. And its sound is like nothing else.”
That is conveyed, in buckets, through Abrams’s output with his Natural Information Society vehicle, which has been doing inventive business across North America and Europe for the past six years. The band has maintained a fluid personnel structure – which, at one stage, also featured Drake, as well as celebrated Chicagoan flutist Nicole Mitchell – and continues to dip into numerous areas of sonic creative departures, taking in such diverse styles as straight-ahead jazz, krautrock and minimalism, naturally laid over an ever-present substratum of Gnawa-sourced endeavor.
Narrow range notwithstanding, Abrams says he is always looking to get more out of his gimbri. “The gimbri has a limited number of note possibilities, but we all know that notes are a vehicle for something more. I would agree that the limitation proves to be very fruitful, and at the same time I try to find ways to take it into different directions.”
The hypnotic and free-flowing property of Abrams’s Natural Information Society outings comes across, for instance, in “By Way of Odessa,” which features on the band’s 2013 release on Eremite Records, Magnetoception. “The Odessa song is an example of that.
The way the harmony is on that, is a bit different from the way it is in traditional Gnawa music.”
As well versed as he is in some of the traditional musical climes of West Africa, Abrams is first and foremost an American musician who has run the gamut of American and British rock offerings by the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, before getting into jazz and, eventually, looking to Morocco for inspiration.
“I am always trying to find my own approach to the gimbri,” he declares. “Some of that is just by putting it in different situations than I know it is has been in. For example, in Natural Information Society we usually play with harmonium, and maybe different forms of percussion than the traditional use. We use free drummers and horns, too. On the one hand it is a Gnawa instrument, and I don’t take that for granted. But also all instruments continue to evolve with the musicians who play them.”
That has been going on for a while. “Hamid el-Din, the great oud player, took Arabic music and applied his Nubian music to it and created a whole new voice for the oud. That inspired [American guitarist, banjoist and oud player] Sandy Bull, who then inspired The Beatles. The music goes in all kinds of different ways.”
All of which augurs well for a special mind- , ear- and heart-expanding experience next Friday.
For more information and tickets: *9080 and www.zappa-club.co.il