BY JOHN LITWEILER
Underground jazz musicians are an international community -- everyone seems to know everyone else, everywhere -- so it was only right that Americans, Canadians and Europeans representing several generations played together this week at the Hungry Brain nightclub on West Belmont. The occasion was the three-night Phrenology Festival, and on Monday, the second night, the program was cool jazz, hot jazz and utterly eccentric jazz. Did the stylistic juxtapositions reveal anything about the state of the art in Chicago, Boston and London, the artists' home cities?
The cool jazz was by Chicago's engaging Guillermo Gregorio Trio. The leader composes detailed scores in which isolated sounds and broken phrases join into musical lines. Some passages suggested Anton Webern, as when notes bounced between instruments -- it was the sonic equivalent of a suspended mobile in motion. Better yet, his four pieces revealed a rare, refined sense of the tension of sound and silence in musical creation. Best of all, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, vibraphonist Jason Adasiewicz and Gregorio himself on clarinet were sensitive, complementary interpreters and improvisers who lent drama to Gregorio's abstract scores.
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