MM&W;’s Style Is Enough to Raise the Dead Jazz Review

Anyone who questions the capacity of jazz to draw younger audiences should have checked out the performance of Medeski, Martin & Wood Saturday night at the Henry Fonda Theatre. The program, before a packed house, had the same kind of involved atmosphere between players and audience once characteristic of concerts by the Grateful Dead.

Which wasn’t especially surprising, given the nature of the music. Like the Dead, MM&W; bring a visceral, improvisational quality to their music, supporting it with easily accessible rhythmic grooves.

The Fonda appearance, supporting the trio’s new album, “Tonic” (their first live recording for Blue Note), showcased MM&W; in an acoustic setting, a dramatic contrast from their electronic outings. In many respects, however, it provided a more revealing image of the group’s musical intentions than the high-decibel layering of its electronic work.

In addition to their basic trio instrumentation of piano, bass and drums, they added a variety of clattery percussion textures (generated by drummer Chris Wood), with occasional fragments of sound from the mbira, the bass drum, the melodica, etc. The result was a surprisingly diverse collection of timbres, flowing through and around each other with the shape-shifting qualities of a Fillmore light show.

In the eight years since they first came together, MM&W; have grown into an ensemble with special skills as a collective unit, a quality especially apparent in an acoustic setting. Although much of the focus tended to center upon John Medeski’s piano playing and Wood’s sinewy bass, there were few moments in which any individual stepped forward--in a traditional jazz sense--for a solo with accompaniment. More commonly, the music arched around and through both solo and ensemble passages, its various threads providing constant, almost symbiotic linkages between the players.

Aside from a segment or two leaning unproductively toward rhythm-machine-like funk rhythms, it was an engaging presentation from a trio of still-developing players intent upon finding their own musical path. To their credit, they seem capable of taking a substantial audience of young listeners along on their musical journey.