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New York tenor saxophonist Stephen Gauci kicks off a long weekend in Chicago with a promising quartet gig tonight at Elastic with bassist Ingebrigt Haaker Flaten, reedist Dave Rempis, and drummer Tim Daisy. Haaker Flaten appears on Gauci’s newest album, Nididhyasana (Clean Feed), an all-improvised session billed to his quartet Basso Continuo, which is named after a form of accompaniment used in Baroque music. There’s no Baroque connection here, but the “basso” bit obviously refers to the presence of two bassists–Mike Bisio is the second–who do indeed give the music a low-end continuity. In fact, the lucid, intuitive interactions between the bull fiddlers sometimes threaten to overshadow the braided lines and temperate counterpoint of Gauci and trumpeter Nate Wooley–though there are extended sections where only one horn plays, when everyone’s going the group almost sounds like a double duo.
And yes, I’ve noticed the string of photos of saxophonists here in the past week.
