Nearly all jazz balances improvisation against composition, but a band like Floriculture makes you realize how many degrees there are of striking that balance. That’s because it takes each side to extremes, and pulls together some far-apart traditions.
In the band’s music, the composition — by the group’s leader, Carl Maguire — is serene and complicated, with discomfiting, big-interval melodies; in opposition to that, the group-improvisation pockets grow torrid. Sometimes the two ways of playing are alternated. Sometimes they’re mashed together.
On Tuesday night the quintet played at the in-the-round, high-ceilinged performance space at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with minimal amplification and slowly moving visuals by the artist Joshua Ponte projected on the walls. The set drew from a new album, “Sided Silver Solid,” on Firehouse 12 records.
Stephanie Griffin, on viola, and Oscar Noriega, on clarinet, gave the band a surface identification of contemporary chamber music. But then Mr. Maguire’s warmly dissonant chords on a Fender Rhodes electric piano; John Hebert’s broad, resonant tone on bass; and Dan Weiss’s coloristic drumming gave a flavor more like Miles Davis’s music in 1967, loitering on the lines between acoustic and electric jazz, swing and free-time and funk. And at some point in the set each player got some solo space to make an expressive statement outside what these focused, well-controlled compositions asked for.
In the band’s music, the composition — by the group’s leader, Carl Maguire — is serene and complicated, with discomfiting, big-interval melodies; in opposition to that, the group-improvisation pockets grow torrid. Sometimes the two ways of playing are alternated. Sometimes they’re mashed together.
On Tuesday night the quintet played at the in-the-round, high-ceilinged performance space at Monkeytown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with minimal amplification and slowly moving visuals by the artist Joshua Ponte projected on the walls. The set drew from a new album, “Sided Silver Solid,” on Firehouse 12 records.
Stephanie Griffin, on viola, and Oscar Noriega, on clarinet, gave the band a surface identification of contemporary chamber music. But then Mr. Maguire’s warmly dissonant chords on a Fender Rhodes electric piano; John Hebert’s broad, resonant tone on bass; and Dan Weiss’s coloristic drumming gave a flavor more like Miles Davis’s music in 1967, loitering on the lines between acoustic and electric jazz, swing and free-time and funk. And at some point in the set each player got some solo space to make an expressive statement outside what these focused, well-controlled compositions asked for.
