Four guys drift into a club to sip the water of life and grouse about world affairs. Let's call these experienced dudes Vinny Golia, Eric Revis, Joshua White and Alex Cline, and call the club the World Stage in Leimert Park. Vinny speaks through a bass clarinet, a sopranino saxophone, a soprano saxophone and a wooden flute. Eric makes moves on an attractive standup bass. Joshua hunches at the house piano, and Alex settles behind a toylike drum kit.
Vinny's bass clarinet moans that there's a lot of dark crap going down out there. Alex's drums and cymbals pour Vinny a drink, slide it over to him and snuffle sympathy. Eric's bass butts in, muttering smack about ignorant suckas, which gets Joshua's piano banging on the bar. The bass clarinet declaims like Robert Burns, calling for some beastie perspective, and the piano responds by blowing out its storm into a subsiding whirlwind as the drums give it brotherly shoulder pats.
Eric's bass isn't through, though. It's still stomping and cussing; even its highs sound low. A worried mood seems ready to break into argument, but Vinny's wheedling sopranino sax says hey, hey, do you remember when . . .? Soon they're all tossing out memories, like one hot summer in New York hustling down a Village street as crazy music and women's voices poured from some loft -- and now the four friends are all laughing.
The piano says that moment was great, but with all the city lights you couldn't see the stars, not like the ones that blaze above the desert. That sets the guys off at a camel trot until they realize they don't know where they're going, and they get briefly agitated until they realize they're RIGHT HERE. The sopranino sighs; the bass recognizes the constellation patterns and gathers everyone around; the drums kindle up a small campfire; the wooden flute makes its first appearance to tell a quiet story about the goddess who came down from the mountain.
The piano locates cicadas on its wires and encourages them to buzz messages to one another. Woody resonance amplifies in the form of a deep-breathing soprano sax. The bass prods everyone from subconscious brainwaves into revived action, with the soprano twisting down into the desert root systems, and the piano scrambling around the scree of a nearby hill.
The four vanish for a while and reappear on an outdoor basketball court, where the drums and bass bounce a lopsided ball around while the reborn bass clarinet cuts between, yelling for a pass. Huh -- they have located an amazing groove that somehow ain't no groove. A stroked cymbal and a bass-clarinet overtone let loose a final joined vibrational cry that says, Yes, we did all that in an hour, and we didn't plan a damned second.
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You can still watch the concert here; it starts about 10.5 minutes in.