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New York Yorker 3/8/05
Listing
VILLAGE VANGUARD
178 Seventh Ave. S., at 11th St. (212-255-4037)—Through March 13: What does Bill McHenry have that the majority of his saxophone-playing peers lack?
An individual voice, for one thing. This quick-witted young tenor saxophonist is joined here by the open-minded septuagenarian drummer Paul Motian, the bassist Reid Anderson (of Bad Plus Trio fame) and the guitarist Ben Monder.
New York Times June 24th 2003
Synergy With a Jazz Festival
By Ben Ratliff
Bill McHenry Quartet
Featuring Paul Motian
The tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry has a thick, untroubled sound, and his sense of melody descends from Ornette Coleman. (The idea is that a line should be pretty and make internal sense, but it's done when it's done; it's not counted off within measures.) Here, along with the bassist Reid Anderson and the guitarist Ben Monder, he appears with the drummer Paul Motian, another musician who takes his time and phrases how he wants to in the service of a complete thought.
It's a loose record (for Fresh Sound) with a mixture of swing and free rhythm; it's evidently made as records were 40 years ago, with little preparation. The songs leave off when it feels good for the musicians to do so; all the empathy gotten at seems real.
There's some beautiful harmony between Mr. McHenry and Mr. Monder's glowing chords, and in one tune, "Dimensions," there are a few tape splices dissolving frenetic playing into slow playing and vice-versa: a weird, good idea.
This band, with Mr. Motian, plays on Thursday at the Village Vanguard (178 South Seventh Avenue, at 11th Street); Mr. McHenry is to play at the Vanguard again on Sunday, with Mr. Motian on drums and Charlie Haden on bass.
A Review of the Village Vanguard gig
Night after Night enigma varitions by Steve Smith, Music
Editor Time Out NY
Saxophonist Bill McHenry is an utter mystery to me, in the best possible sense. He's a young jazz musician attempting to carve out a distinct identity for himself in a city that boasts innumerable fine players, and in a music that prizes individual identity, yet arguably has few stones left to overturn -- or so it might seem, anyway. And somehow, he's unarguably succeeding.
Ben Ratliff, the excellent and broadminded chief jazz critic at The New York Times, has been writing perceptively about McHenry for some years now, which made the saxophonist a player I'd long hoped to encounter live. And certainly, the quartet McHenry led at the Village Vanguard tonight was the band with which to hear him: Guitarist Ben Monder and bassist Reid Anderson have been among McHenry's foremost collaborators for a decade now, and the group was completed by the protean Paul Motian, a drummer for whom the overused adjective "legendary" seems entirely fitting.
Jazz is a music that eventually prizes iconoclasts, but positively reveres antecedents. Part of the game in evaluating a young player is figuring out where he or she came from, stylistically. And that's what makes McHenry so pleasantly perplexing. He partakes of the lineage, certainly: As a saxophonist, he's studied Sonny Rollins and Dewey Redman, but sounds like neither. His musical presence is more circumspect; his sound is smaller, but not at all ungenerous. McHenry's compositions in some respects recall those of Thelonious Monk and Ornette Coleman, but not entirely, and not slavishly.
To call McHenry's progress rapid is something of a gross understatement; listening to his 1998 CD, Rest Stop, and his 2003 release with tonight's band, Bill McHenry Quartet Featuring Paul Motian -- both on the invaluable and well-named Spanish label Fresh Sounds New Talent -- you're hard pressed to accept the fact that the same saxophonist made both records. (The same is true of Monder, who plays on both, and whose own latest release, Oceana, is an engrossing experience.)
If a single word can be used to describe McHenry's style, it would be patience. Even at quicker tempos, his conceptions spin out in their own time, often at peculiar angles with unexpected resolutions. Like Coleman, McHenry possesses a gift for unspooling elliptical melodies that nonetheless linger in the mind's ear, which are then wrapped in Monder's dense chords or caressed by his throaty lines. Anderson's reflexes are so sharp as to verge on prescience: He always seems to know where even the most seemingly wayward improvisation is headed, pacing it with a steady pulse or commenting upon it with a fluttering countermelody. Motian propels the group with constantly shifting patterns dependent more on touch and timbre than steady beat, broken up by sudden silences as startling as his rare outbursts.
Of the seven selections played in tonight's first set, six were new compositions. In the opener, provisionally titled "Roses," McHenry pushed a clean, unhurried melodic line through dusky clouds from Monder and Anderson, dragging wispy contrails in its wake. Still more tentatively titled, one suspects, was "Narcissism Has Entered My Subconscious, But It's Hooking Me Up," in which the melody seemed to pour out in a singular exhalation, set against the syncopations of an abstracted Latin pulse. Monder's liquid chords and punctuating twangs sometimes recalled the sound of Bill Frisell, but his tone and time were all his own.
McHenry's take on "I Can't Get Started" seemed shy, even diffident, his circumspect posture affording no schmaltz or posturing in the well-worn standard. The next tune, spontaneously dubbed "R.J." for a friend in the audience, featured a catchy theme built of Monkish ascents and bluesy tumbles, and elicited some of McHenry's most extrovert growls and slurs. "Taylor," named for another friend in the house, conjured the dreamlike reverie of Motian's trio with Bill Frisell and Joe Lovano; a lyrical solo by Anderson, accompanied by a radiant, fluttering tonal wash from Monder and a timeless shimmer from Motian, provided the set's most exquisite moment.
Another ballad followed, "Stinky Cove" -- a perhaps-unfortunate name for an evocative vista from McHenry's Maine childhood. An old-fashioned, romantic melody not so far removed from "Body and Soul" could easily have lapsed into mannerism, were it not for the band's general understatement and the quiet intensity with which McHenry picked apart and thoroughly investigated isolated notes and patterns during his solo. Ending the set was an unnamed, propulsive number -- a severe, stormy whorl that served to encapsulate in miniature the remarkable sense of welcome disorientation that had marked the entire set.
After the set, I was energized, elated and gabby, to say the least. I still don't quite know where McHenry is to be classified in the standard jazz taxonomy -- but what a welcome surprise it is to be so flummoxed.
New York Times May 27 2004
Young Man finds Melody with help of Master
by Ben Ratliff
The tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry started the first set of his first week of his first engagement at the Village Vanguard with a series of long tones, as if he were testing the acoustics. They were plump and buttery, and as his band started making a textural buzz around him, the first melody of the night seemed to spill forth on its own.
It was ''Idea No. 1,'' one of a half-dozen originals played on Tuesday that showed Mr. McHenry adhering to a singsong melody-to-melody compositional style of plainspoken rapture developed by Ornette Coleman, Paul Bley, Dewey Redman, Keith Jarrett and Paul Motian, among others. As it happened, Mr. Motian, who is now 73, occupied the back of the Vanguard's stage, playing drums in the 31-year-old Mr. McHenry's band. (The quartet will continue at the club, at 178 Seventh Avenue South, at 11th Street, West Village, through Sunday night.)
There's a great deal of sense in this picture, the master playing sideman for the student. After all Mr. Motian wasn't just accompanying the leader; he helped create the aesthetic possibility for it. His drumming style, in general and on Tuesday, has been calm and thoughtful, self-edited and expressive, open and unprogrammed; it tries to come up with something new in each bar of music while retaining a groove.
Much of the same spirit can be heard in Mr. McHenry's saxophone playing. It honors the rhythm and harmony of bebop while generally operating in spacey rubato time. It rarely gets fast and saves expressive outbursts for carefully chosen moments. (He ends solos particularly well.) He likes strong, slow melodies and connects them to speech; he bends notes with a kind of radical plaintiveness, jumping large intervals in one curving sigh.
The improvising got fairly free, so these moments stood as ends in themselves, rather than just adornments. His playing has a low center of gravity and generally sounds as if it were coming from someone much older. With Reid Anderson on bass and Ben Monder on guitar, the band played a number of pieces from an album, ''The Bill McHenry Quartet Featuring Paul Motian,'' released last year on Fresh Sound.
The pulse asserted itself: Mr. Anderson played with a strong, dark tone, and Mr. Motian, accenting the rhythm however he wanted, occasionally walloped the bass drum at subdued moments. Mr. Monder worked as an element of contrast: he can be fast and mathematical, and his deep applications of distortion counteracted all the purity of expression and the stirring, pastoral suggestions of the music, like a skeptical monologue during a séance.
But outward differences in style finally didn't matter. Mr. McHenry, Mr. Anderson and Mr. Monder have worked together for almost 10 years, casually and formally. They almost breathed improvisation together.
New York Times Friday December 23,
2000
Jazz Review
Hearing Eras Clash in One Saxophonist
By Ben ratliff
Time Out Feb 2006
Pick of the Week
by K.L.Williams
Top live show: Bill McHenry Quartet Village Vanguard; Tue 14 - Sun 19 Innovation
isn't supposed to be easy, but any contemporary jazz musician
will tell you that revolutionizing the art form is even more
daunting when a whole century's worth of brilliance is staring
over your shoulder. Those aiming for great achievements don't
stop trying, though, which probably explains why it's getting
easier to pick tenor saxophonist Bill McHenry out of the crowded
field of thirtysomethings in the clubs. His sound—a slab of
marble sculpted from the roar of masters like Dewey Redman and
Sonny Rollins—has always turned heads, but these days, McHenry's
fastidiously off-kilter compositions are also asserting themselves.
There's almost a quantum leap in acuity from 1999's Graphic
to 2002's quartet disc, …featuring Paul Motian (both from the
Barcelona imprint Fresh Sounds).
DownBeat Magazine May 27 2004
Feature
by Jennifer O'Dell
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