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JAZZ FESTIVAL REVIEW
Wertico trio's public 'debut' just fine
Club Tour performance is first for drummer and his exemplary partners
By Howard Reich
Tribune arts critic
Published September 3, 2004
The most rewarding jazz performances thrive on surprise, catching even aficionados off guard.
But few drummers revel in the unexpected as wholeheartedly as Chicagoan Paul Wertico, who gave the third night of the Chicago Jazz Festival a jolt of energy at HotHouse, in the South Loop.
Headlining the festival's annual Club Tour, which takes listeners via bus to several Chicago jazz venues, Wertico was not only one of the major attractions on the evening's roster but perhaps its most thunderous. Leaving no beat untouched, firing off layer upon layer of complex rhythm, Wertico quickly reaffirmed his position as one of the most unclassifiable drummers in jazz--a very good thing.
One would be hard-pressed, in fact, to list many drummers of his generation who have mastered a comparable breadth of jazz idioms. He draws convincingly on the high-energy swing vocabulary of Gene Krupa, the post-bebop Impressionism of Elvin Jones, the fusion-era dynamism of Tony Williams, the avant-garde experimentation of Don Moye and on and on.
Yet the sound remains distinctly Wertico, a free-flowing, sometimes hard-hitting, sometimes pictorial, always intensely wrought approach to rhythm, color and even pitch. Though Wertico utilizes virtually every stylistic idiom within jazz--and several outside of it--he combines them in unlikely ways.
For his HotHouse show, Wertico freely told the crowd something that many musicians would not volunteer: The trio he convened had never performed together publicly before. Though Chicago guitarist John Moulder has been a Wertico partner for years, bassist Eric Hochberg's spot on this occasion was taken by the young electric bassist Brian Peters (who also engineered Wertico's genre-defying new CD, "StereoNucleosis").
Despite the personnel shift, Wertico and Moulder tore through some of their most outlandish repertoire as if Peters had been sharing the stage with them for years. Wisely, the talented young man kept his bass lines simple and straightforward, leaving the heavy lifting to the veterans.
Meanwhile, Wertico turned in a ferocious yet crisply focused performance. Although his mallets-on-cymbals introduction to Moulder's gorgeous "African Sunset" suggested the drummer was going to create one of his characteristically shimmering tone poems, before long Wertico was unleashing a tidal wave of fortissimo crashes on "The Eleventh Hour" and hitting downbeats hard on "Almost Sixteen" (the title referring to the tune's irregular meter, not the age that Peters looked).
Yet even amid the convulsions of his most extroverted solos, Wertico maintained a sense of line, direction and narrative that transcended mere virtuosity.
And in Wertico's galvanic opening solo on "Cowboys & Africans," the drummer produced so much sound, yet with such clarity of attack and speed of delivery, as to reveal a facet of his technique even Wertico devotees might not have encountered from him before.
Guitarist Moulder matched Wertico's intensity blast for blast, churning out searing, blues-based lines on "Almost Sixteen" and a cut-through-cement tone on "The Eleventh Hour."
Here's hoping these two musicians will be playing together for decades to come, for they represent one of the most worthy partnerships in Chicago jazz.
Images and Information from Chicago Tribune, Friday, September 3, 2004, Section 5, Tempo, page 3 (Photo by Michael Walker)