The rainstorm raging outside Never Ending Books, a modest space on State Street, seemed to echo the sonic deconstruction taking place inside as the New Haven Improvisers Collective held its monthly workshop dedicated to breaking down music into its basic parts and building it up again on the fly.
The workshop focused on melodic fragments, metric patterns and the like as the basis for group improvisations that, to the casual listener, might have seemed subversive. But the collective, which welcomed 14 comers on this late-September night, was operating well within a tradition of free improvisation and open access that has a storied history in New Haven, and may have a future as well.
Its a very local expression of a certain type of jazz that I have a fondness for, and is in some ways underrepresented in the jazz mainstream, said Nick Lloyd, a leading impresario in New Haven and the owner of Firehouse 12, a multiuse space where the collective will be appearing on Nov. 7.
N.H.I.C. shows are tied in the here and now to whats actually going on with younger and emerging improvisers in the region, he said.
The workshop focused on melodic fragments, metric patterns and the like as the basis for group improvisations that, to the casual listener, might have seemed subversive. But the collective, which welcomed 14 comers on this late-September night, was operating well within a tradition of free improvisation and open access that has a storied history in New Haven, and may have a future as well.
Its a very local expression of a certain type of jazz that I have a fondness for, and is in some ways underrepresented in the jazz mainstream, said Nick Lloyd, a leading impresario in New Haven and the owner of Firehouse 12, a multiuse space where the collective will be appearing on Nov. 7.
N.H.I.C. shows are tied in the here and now to whats actually going on with younger and emerging improvisers in the region, he said.
