The Tranzac Sept. 9

Remember the days when a pre-canon Ornette Coleman could play a week of shows at a tiny club in Greenwich Village and the whole city would be abuzz? No, of course you don’t. At least not if you’re part of this web site’s target demographic. Free jazz hasn’t seen such days in decades. Well, my friends, a microcosmic version of the above event just occurred. In town touring with Bjork, drummer Chris Corsano set up an afternoon show and brought in sax shredder Steve Baczkowski from Buffalo. The Tranzac’s tiny front room was crammed with about 70 people and from the duo’s first notes, were taken to planes as yet uncharted. They cut into a sick Ascension-like wail right off the bat, essentially at an unrelenting pace more fit for hardcore. Corsano’s technique is beyond the realm of comprehension–one of those drummers for whom all is possible. He’s got quite a bag of tricks, from dribbling the stick on the snare at a hummingbird’s pace to placing bells on all the drums for vaguely gamelan-esque tonalities to placing strings on the snare and bowing a drone out of them. The pace at which he engages is this trickery is nothing short of brutal, his mind and hands racing toward ten new ideas while executing one or two or three with absolute virtuosity. Baczkowski himself was no side show. His pelvic thrusting and hair-in-the-face theatrics would have been embarrassing in the hands of a lesser sax player, but it was all more than justified. Though tonally in the realm of Albert Ayler, he dispensed with the common themes of the Ayler ouvre, replacing them with total squawk atrocity. At one point he ripped the reed off his sax and began blowing through the instrument directly (aghast was I that such sound could be produced in this manner). At another point he whipped out a trombone-like device comprised of two pieces of plastic piping, which sounded like a more dynamic didgeridoo. A beautiful woman I assume was his girlfriend was sitting on floor right in front of him and burst out laughing every time he gesticulated this very dong-like instrument in her direction (it got close!). It was as if he were playing this big ol’ plastic cock just for her (though, eyes closed, he couldn’t have known). But this bit of comic relief didn’t even come close to taking away from the majesty. During the last pre-encore jam, Corsano played as if he were about to leap over the drums and punch someone in the face. It all ended on a dime and the crowd applauded for what felt like five solid minutes. I’ve been considering giving up music ever since.