Born in Austria and now US-based, Alex Machacek is a guitarist who works mainly in jazz-rock fusion. His virtuosity has prompted the great guitarist John McLaughlin to remark that his music starts where other guitarists end.
On a tour of four cities in India, Machacek's trio, comprising Neal Fountain on bass guitar and Jeff Sipe on drums, performed in Bangalore at B Flat in Indiranagar recently.
It was past 11 p.m., and the trio had been playing for nearly two hours minus a 15-minute break, when I left, but they probably went on for another half-hour before finishing. The tone of the gig was set by the first two pieces, after which Machacek announced, “The first song was almost a song. The second song was not a song, but wholly improv [improvisation].” The music till then had been, and would continue to be, but for a couple of pieces immediately after the break, largely free improvisation in the tradition of one prominent strand of modern jazz.
Actually of the first two numbers it was the first that struck one as being more improvisation, with its boundless energy, fast beat and furious solos, from each of the three musicians in turn. Not that there was less improvisation in the second piece, but that was quite sedate, sounding almost like a ballad, and could have passed for something written by the great pop or Broadway composers of the early days of jazz, when the interaction between jazz and pop was very strong.
The pop motif entered again after the break, when Machacek's wife, Indian-born Sumitra Nanjundan, joined the trio on vocals for two ballads. She started with “Spring Can Hang You up the Most”, a hoary pop standard, accompanied only by Machacek, and then sang one of her own compositions with the full trio. On the latter only Fountain took a solo while on the former there were no improvisations at all, so this little segment of the concert sat oddly with the rest of the performance during which all three members of the trio got solo improvisations into each piece.
From the first announcement Machacek either made a point of not mentioning any titles for the pieces or they didn't have any, since they were improvisations.
In fact for the nine pieces I heard out Machacek mentioned titles for only two, “Very Sad” and “Austin Powers”. (His published albums do have titles for all pieces, but these could have been tagged on afterwards to tracks that were originally wholly improvised. “Very Sad” appears on two albums and “Austin Powers” on one, indicating that what might have started as improvisations are now compositions with a basic theme. Another such track is “Indian Girl [Meets Austrian Boy]”, (clearly an autobiographical title). But that didn't matter: it was the music that did. And that, with a couple of caveats, was top-class. The first caveat relates to the vocal pieces, which, with Nanjundan's lovely husky voice, could have got excellent jazz treatments featuring great improvisations, but didn't, except for Fountain's lone solo on the second piece.
Beautiful music it certainly was but sitting oddly in a jazz concert.
The other was the band's tendency to go a bit too loud at times, especially Sipe when hitting the drums rather than cymbals or using sticks rather than brushes, which he did quite a lot.
All three members of the trio, playing with energy and inventiveness and evidently masters of their instruments, came up with innovative improvisations which made the music enjoyable, while well integrated into the mainstream of jazz even though grounded in the tradition of free jazz, even jazz-rock.
