Everything Katalyst does feels like a groove. Many a jazz artist of the '80s and '90s failed to connect with an audience through losing the heartbeat -- through leaning on clever riffs and complicated changes, which, y'know, most of us need like itchy socks. Katalyst can grow many rhythmic branches, and get sneaky about throwing in melodies and flavorful colorations, but they make sure we're shaking and smiling all the while. They've been around South L.A. long enough to make a couple of exceptional records.
The mood was casual, the band in T-shirts. Baseball cap on backward over copious hair, David Otis stuck his alto sax in his shaggy beard and blew whaaaa . . . was that sound? Guess he'd plugged into some kind of synth, but he sure did wail, and the way he tripped away with the slapcrackin drums of Greg Paul Webster made for a ride just between the two. But Marlon Spears' big electric bass rolled out the rug, followed by some truly krazed keys from Brandon Cordoba, and the joint was jammin.
Otis mostly employed a regular funkboppy alto tone for the rest of the set, revealing a happy ability to exploit the whole vertical staff without losing either our interest or the beat. Cordoba's variety of keyspressions constituted his main foil, the two tossing the spotlight back and forth.
This sport transpired in the context of compositions set up by attractive riffs developed with two- and three-part harmony segments that included Jonah Levine's trombone, the whole thing sounding kinda urban, kinda African, not especially reminiscent of anyone in particular, which is an achievement. The set came to a roaring end with a surging, hesitating, high-communicating jam between Webster's insistent drums and the articulate percussion of Ahmad DuBose-Dawson.
Almost too much music for this tiny Highland Park bar. No one seemed broken, though.