Trevor Watts blows back to the Big Apple

Back in 2005, alto/soprano saxophonist Trevor Watts performed in New York for the first time, in a duo with percussionist Jamie Harris. Plenty has changed since then. That venue, CB’s Lounge, is long gone. So are two mayors and three presidents. The venue at which the pair played on 19 November, The Jazz Gallery, was then still in its first location down in SoHo. The city hadn’t yet experienced Hurricanes Irene or Sandy, nor the pandemic.           

What has not changed is Watts’ wizardry, a unique sound on his instruments honed since the earliest days of London’s free jazz scene. Those formative experiences were often in the company of the late drummer John Stevens and while the two men did often work as a duo, Watts and Harris draw less from the sparseness of the Spontaneous Music Ensemble (SME) and more from the celebratory aesthetic of Watts’ Moire Music; indeed one piece they played, ‘Ghana Friends’, was a specific dedication to departed members of that group. That piece was explained as being reinterpretations of music Watts and Harris had previously played in a trio with pianist Veryan Weston.     

Looking back at the review this author wrote of that 2005 show, an assessment of Watts’ circular breathing was that he “used the difficult technique organically instead of as a disconnected exercise, extending melodic lines within pieces.” Eighteen years later the same holds true, perhaps now even more pronounced, particularly when bouncing along the percolating rhythms of Harris.

The Jazz Gallery show was the 16th and last of an American tour that took the two men across the country and was specifically supported by the Robert D. Bielecki Foundation. There was the comfort of a partnership of decades but also the shorter-term symbiosis that comes from travel and investigation of a particular repertoire. Those who only know Watts from the SME may have been surprised at both the lyricism of the pieces—and they were compositions—and their brevity, the longest at nine minutes, the shortest about three, the seven totaling 50.         

If there was a word to describe the duo, it would be warmth. Watts, whether on alto or soprano, which he switched between from piece to piece, has a more burnished tone than his British contemporaries and the latter instrument often had a snake-charmer-type quality. Harris used a soft touch on his four congas, emphasizing the contact of skin against skin. The latter also added vocals, both words and exhortations, to a couple of the pieces, transforming the room from a jazz club to a tribal space and the audience from listeners to participants in a spirit quest.           

Another would be folksy, encompassing traditions from medieval England and Western Africa to Middle Eastern bazaars and, perhaps, given the duo’s travels, some strains of Americana.

It was only on the final piece, the aptly titled ‘Open’, that the rhythms fractured and the melodies become more abstracted. It was four challenging minutes of the type of “non-idiomatic improvisation” Watts helped developed nearly six decades ago.