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Self-Generated Energy Fuels Go-for-Broke Improvisation
The jolts in Linda Oh’s songs arrive early and continue all the way through. A young Chinese-Malaysian bassist raised in Australia, Ms. Oh has been studying and playing around New York for a year and a bit. Unless you’re involved in jazz education, there’s little reason you’d know of her before now, but suddenly you should.
“Entry,” her first album — coming out in early October, through her own label — is music for trio: bass, trumpet and drums. Its pieces rely on vamps, interactive energy and strong melody. They are dry and lean and insistent music, with no hiding places; they borrow some structural and rhythmic notions from Dave Holland’s music of the last few decades and a phrase or two from old bebop, but as it barrels ahead, the music’s fearless energy seems self-generated. It’s not airlessly virtuosic; it’s smart and informed and hard working, full of real improvisation, the committed, hard-won, lumpy, nonmechanical, go-for-broke kind.
Her show at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night — her 25th birthday — was her first performance playing this music. Onstage with her were two of the better young musicians in New York: the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who is on the album, and the drummer Tommy Crane, who is not. (The drummer on the album is Obed Calvaire, who will join her for a New York gig the week of the album’s release, as well as on a subsequent tour through Australia.)
Ms. Oh doesn’t waste time: the hard, gritty vamp in “Morning Sunset,” built of simple and ominous phrases and chords, made its case right away. The song “201” started with a fast curlicued bebop line, skidded into two bars of halting three-beat rhythm and quickly shifted into a loose, open, melodic bass solo, in which she seemed to be thinking like a horn player. And the long ballad melody of “Patterns,” played with passion by Mr. Akinmusire and harmonized by Ms. Oh, likewise found its almost liquid mood in a hurry.
“Entry,” her first album — coming out in early October, through her own label — is music for trio: bass, trumpet and drums. Its pieces rely on vamps, interactive energy and strong melody. They are dry and lean and insistent music, with no hiding places; they borrow some structural and rhythmic notions from Dave Holland’s music of the last few decades and a phrase or two from old bebop, but as it barrels ahead, the music’s fearless energy seems self-generated. It’s not airlessly virtuosic; it’s smart and informed and hard working, full of real improvisation, the committed, hard-won, lumpy, nonmechanical, go-for-broke kind.
Her show at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday night — her 25th birthday — was her first performance playing this music. Onstage with her were two of the better young musicians in New York: the trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire, who is on the album, and the drummer Tommy Crane, who is not. (The drummer on the album is Obed Calvaire, who will join her for a New York gig the week of the album’s release, as well as on a subsequent tour through Australia.)
Ms. Oh doesn’t waste time: the hard, gritty vamp in “Morning Sunset,” built of simple and ominous phrases and chords, made its case right away. The song “201” started with a fast curlicued bebop line, skidded into two bars of halting three-beat rhythm and quickly shifted into a loose, open, melodic bass solo, in which she seemed to be thinking like a horn player. And the long ballad melody of “Patterns,” played with passion by Mr. Akinmusire and harmonized by Ms. Oh, likewise found its almost liquid mood in a hurry.
