Bynum and his pals bring it on home
When cornetist and composer Taylor Ho Bynum brings guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara to Brookline Tai Chi for a trio performance tonight, he'll be close to the more offbeat venue where he and Fujiwara got their start playing together more than a decade ago.
Back in their high school days, Fujiwara used to come from Cambridge to join Brookline native Bynum for gigs at the now-defunct Tuesday's Ice Cream in Brookline Village.
``We did a weekly gig at the ice cream store when we were 16 or 17," explains Bynum, now 30. ``I worked there [scooping ice cream] for six years. My boss let me do a weekly music series."
Bynum has moved on to bigger things, even if most are too adventurous to attract major notice from the jazz mainstream. He still makes it back to the area semi-regularly for gigs with a pair of Boston-based bands, the Fully Celebrated Orchestra and the Aardvark Jazz Orchestra. In New York, he continues performing with avant-garde piano great Cecil Taylor's large ensemble.
He also belongs to a quartet with his first jazz mentor, trombonist and Northeastern University professor Bill Lowe, and has spent a decade working in various contexts with his second, Wesleyan University professor and legendary composer-saxophonist Anthony Braxton. With Braxton, Bynum has done everything from their CD ``Duets (Wesleyan) 2002" to co-conducting Braxton's European Creative Orchestra on a Braxton composition for 100 tubas.
Bynum was also with the Braxton sextet that performed at the Institute for Contemporary Art last November, when Braxton, in a Globe interview, called Bynum ``one of the most brilliant of the new third millennial masters of his generation."
Bynum gives an embarrassed laugh when reminded of the quote, but he does think that composers and instrumentalists his age are working from a different set of circumstances than their predecessors.
``My generation has come up where you have access to all the music in the world," he says. ``I mean, it's so easy to listen to Indian classical music or West African drumming or hip-hop or heavy-metal or classical music."
At the same time, he says, today's splintered jazz scene makes it harder to find a community of like-minded innovators to develop with on bandstands, the way it was done in the early days of swing and bebop.
``There's not a consistent musical community to be in," Bynum says, ``so in a way everyone has to create it for themselves. For me, the trick is to find a way to play all the music I enjoy, pull from all those influences and have that be part of me, but then also not do it in a genre-hopping kind of a way. I think a lot of music is very referential now, and I try to stay away from that."
In that regard, his splashiest success to date is the 2005 CD ``Other Stories," recorded with Bynum's nonet, SpiderMonkey Strings. The group got its start when Bynum's brother-in-law, filmmaker Dana Jackson, asked him to compose a score for a string quartet; Bynum later added tuba, guitar, vibraphone, drums, and his own cornet.
Bynum's cornet work leans more toward Braxton-like timbre experimentation than classic jazz -- or classical -- trumpet technique. With lots of improvisation.
Nonets are expensive and difficult to maintain, however, so Bynum also leads a separate sextet. And he's further economizing tonight by bringing just half to Brookline. Halvorson, like Bynum and Fujiwara, grew up nearby. She and Bynum met while touring with Braxton a couple of years ago and discovered they both attended the same high school (Brookline High) and colleges (Wesleyan, plus short stays for both of them at The New School University) about five years apart.
Bynum says he's been writing the trio its own repertoire, but that writing for small ensembles doesn't come naturally.
``For compositional things," Bynum says, ``I tend to like big groups. The people I really love as my compositional heroes -- like [Charles] Ives and [Duke] Ellington and Braxton -- often work with big groups because of the way it gives you multilayered possibilities. I'm trying to discipline myself, both for musical curiosity and marketplace reality, to write for smaller groups. I think it's sort of trying to figure out that balance."
Taylor Ho Bynum performs at 8 tonight with guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara at Brookline Tai Chi. Tickets $10, $5 students. Call
617-277-2975 or visit www.brooklinetaichi.com.
