Engines

It was a rare treat to see the vastly different sensibilities of the musicians collectively known as The Engines combine in always surprising, and usually incredible ways last night at the Hideout's every-Wednesday Immediate Sound series. What was perhaps most striking was that none of the four members--Dave Rempis on saxes, Jeb Bishop on Trombone, Nate McBride on bass and Tim Daisy on drums--seemed to act as the prevailing influence over the music. The Engines are a band without a frontman. Instead, their compositions and free improv are each collective projects unto their own, and the quartet shows little concern for establishing a "signature sound". Though this leaves you wishing, once in a while, that they'd settle into some sort of groove, it also makes for an astonishing repertoire of hard-hitting and meticulously crafted songs, each full of spontanaeity and surprise, if not always a sense of coherence and flow. In fact, flow seems to be consciously avoided here: a wailing, chaotic, out-of-tempo flurry of improvisation will be truncated by a unison staccato gesture by the whole quartet, from which silence a serene bass drone and sustained note from one of the horns will emerge. Or, as was the case in the opener, what appears to be a straight-ahead 4/4 head played in unison by the horns will soon show itself to be little more than a vamp for an impassioned, madly intervalic bass cadenza. One tune, by Tim Daisy, did hew to a simple in-tempo ballad feel, complete with poignant swishing brushes on the snare and a tender bassline, and a Jeb Bishop tune near the end of the first set took a simple counterpoint between bass and trombone and gradually expanded it into an epic, but never grandiose conversation among all four players, complete with the traditional return of the head and a melancholy coda. But the lasting impression The Engines left was one of visceral free jazz with an underlying integrity of innovative song structures and a wealth of ever-changing tempos and textures that suggested that said "freedom" came at the cost of a lot of meticulous preparation and the excersize of a staggering level of creative intelligence.