Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Bluesiana / Velden am Woerthersee / Austria
Concert date: 17.03.2009
Attendance: 50
Ticket price: €30.00
The renowned musicians united as Unified Presence hardly need a big, detailed introduction. William E. Calhoun, David Gilmore and Jamaaladeen Tacuma are top-shelf jazz fusion instrumentalists, the kind plenty of bands would kill to have in their lineup. Will Calhoun has by now become a regular at Blusesiana, practically part of the furniture for club owner Gudrun Kofler, and following in his footsteps, bass guitar legend Jamaaladeen Takuma and the sharp-minded jazz guitarist David Glimore are now regulars at this charming club too.
This time the club, which is first and foremost a gathering spot for “bluesophiles”, saw a somewhat smaller turnout. In fact, only the biggest music connoisseurs and jazz fusion purists showed up. As is the custom in the club’s program, Unified Presence started playing at half past nine in the evening. The band opened the show with a number of lazy, experimental tuning and warming the muscles up to proper working temperature. The main instigator was none other than Will Calhoun, who started banging on cowbells, which instantly made the Austrian crowd think of idyllic Alpine pastures, so the people in the club, in support of the drummer, started mooing like cows. That was the first sign of a great get-together, loaded with positive energy and the shock extravaganza of this trio’s unique jazz fusion virtuosity. Takuma and Gilmore warmed up slowly. Gilmore kicked things off with a few totally dissonant guitar figures, testing out the effect of different sounds on his pedals. After about five minutes the trio breaks into a funk gallop and things get a whole lot more serious.
Unlike similar experimental trios, Unified Presence cultivate a very melodic and not overly demanding form of jazz fusion, which makes it accessible to absolutely anyone. Of course, the bulk of this rests on the shoulders of David Gilmore and the basic fact of what kind of stuff this guitarist is made of. Let me borrow a reference from Free Form Funky Freqs, where Vernon Reid builds the main melody and where Jamaaladeen Takuma also plays. FFFF are much, much more experimental, dissonantly fragmented and a lot more demanding to listen to, and the energy they have is, I’d dare say, much darker than with Unified Presence. Unlike Vernon Reid, who is often elusive to logical empiricism, Gilmore is a far more old-school guitarist, and his approach is much closer to the classic jazz figure. On stage, unlike Vernon, he naturally has fewer pedal effects and other extravagant prosthetic gadgets for twisting the sound. Unified Presence mostly build their energy and expression on a free-flowing funk gallop that hypnotically sucks everyone present into its grip with this bombastic rhythmic chemistry.
The main connecting link of the band is Takuma, whose bass playing both delivers the required tightness to the rhythm and fills out the sonic picture with melodies with great confidence, especially in the moments when Gilmore “escapes” into his “switch-off” passages, loaded with witty improvisation. The trio was very loud for Bluesiana’s tiny club space, and the hellish funk march was dictated first and foremost by Will Calhoun. The communication with Takuma and Gilmore is incredible. We got to witness Will’s solo passages many times. Takuma and Gilmore patiently waited for Will to “shake it out” through his soloing. And it was unbelievable how damn precisely all three of them dropped back into the melody on exactly the right beat after such Will escapades. Tight down to the millisecond. It was a joy to watch and to revel in that flawless communication, where there wasn’t a single moment when the trio might have “stumbled” in any of the rhythms they picked.
Takuma was also a lot more relaxed and communicative than when he played with Free Form Funky Freqs. During the song Pushor Man, he even stepped up as lead vocalist. This tightness, versatility, unpredictability and flawless sense of each other, functioning on the edge of spontaneity, resulted in the building of an extraordinary funk jazz energy that swept through the club and victoriously convinced absolutely everyone present to finally “switch off”, at first rather reserved, move closer to the trio and surrender to the wonderful energy. In one word, it was the creation of magic, the perfect working chemistry of a trio based first and foremost on primal feeling and sensing of rhythm. The basic pattern, handed over by either Will, Jamaaladeen or David, was spontaneously built upon as the song developed, and that was the greatest pleasure of the whole thing. Watching a melody and a “groove” grow so spontaneously. A song, that is, in the sense of its primal genesis.
Of course, this time too, at one point in the set Calhoun didn’t skip his famous Drumwave, on which he built a pattern, saved it to memory and triggered a “delay” that the trio then spontaneously latched onto, building yet another top-notch sonic extravaganza of pure jazz fusion experiment. In other words, the most a visitor and fan of this kind of music can get out of seeing a band like this. The band tackled, for example, the song Hankiskas, which comes from Gilmore’s studio album “Ritualism”. The song Footprints by the legendary saxophonist Wayne Shorter was definitely not missing either, and the band placed it in the opening part of their program. Near the end Gilmore threw in a witty rendition of Star Spangled Banner and, after scraping his guitar neck against the microphone during an improvisation passage, revealed his enthusiasm for Hendrix, to whom he had already bowed a bit earlier by slipping a snippet of the intro to Purple Haze into one of his solo acrobatics. Bluesiana’s intimate space proved once more to be the perfect alibi for boundless enjoyment. It’s simply unbelievable when Takuma stands a meter away from you, following Calhoun half in a trance, chasing both of his bandmates through experimental escapes, loudly dictating the sequences of tonalities to himself while racing wildly up and down the neck of his bass guitar. Those are the fascinating moments a concertgoer gets when they come to greet their musical gladiators. Something priceless, in short.
Anyone looking for a primal funk kick with an element of top-notch experimental switching off, that keeps a logical thread of high melody running throughout, despite the bold instrumental discoveries of boundless freedom in relaxed solo breakaways, should by all means not miss Unified Presence’s show in Ljubljana on 22.03.2009. It will take you back to the golden days of the nineties, when top jazz musicians from all over the world visited the stages of Ljubljana’s Križanke and Cankarjev dom. Treat yourself to some time with musical primitiveness.
After the show the band didn’t go backstage at all. Instead they simply opened up a few boxes, stacked piles of CDs on the stage, sat down around them and started selling them. Of course everyone present descended on them with requests for autographs, photos and so on… An approach without a shred of haughtiness, in other words. Haughtiness that, given the huge pedigree of these three artists, nobody could have held against them.
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
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