Pacific Northwest Trio, Boston Tenor

Saxophonist George Garzone played two Infidels Jazz shows at Tyrant Studios on Tuesday, September 23rd. Joining him was the trio of drummer-bandleader Jerry Steinhilber with tenor saxophonist Josh Cook and bassist King Dahl. I attended the early show that started at 7:00 PM; both shows sold out of advance tickets.

A recording engineer sat at the piano and set up an iMac on its closed top. The Boston-based Garzone bantered softly in his Italian-American accent, started right on time, and ended crisply a bit early as he picked up the signature Tyrant skull in communion with our applause.

I think of Garzone as the ultimate Berklee College of Music man. He attended the school himself and is synonymous with its jazz faculty. His name was one of the first ones I remember hearing from my friends who went there, and I'm sure it's the same going back through Steinhilber's generation, too.

Garzone celebrated his 75th birthday on the day of this show, which was also John Coltrane's 99th birth anniversary (we'll save this kind of thing for next year). He wore a Trane T-shirt under his unbuttoned shirt. He and Cook started both on tenor saxophones, playing in free-time unison on an original, "A Fox in the Woods". In keeping with the show theme of George Garzone plays John Coltrane on the occasion of their birthdays, it sounded like the relentless spiritual churn of mid-60s Trane.

Garzone joked about how many decades he had been playing with his chordless trio called The Fringe; he recorded "A Fox in the Woods" with that group, along with guest Mike Mainieri on vibes, for his 2000 release The Fringe in New York. He overdubbed himself on saxophones on this track, which gives you an idea of how it sounded at Tyrant.

No band can play this way without a drummer who knows exactly how to fuel it, and Steinhilber definitely does as he rocks the energy level back and forth, patient without ever seeming hesitant. Garzone switched to soprano saxophone in the middle when he broke things down to sax-drums duo, another late-Trane signifier.

The next piece, back to two tenors, was similar. Garzone was born only 18 months after Michael Brecker, who passed away more than 18 years ago, but he introduced his piece titled "Dedicated to Michael Brecker" by citing the late legend of the tenor as "a great mentor".

Each soloist got to run with their own harmonic logic for a while – everyone quoting the melody and checking in – before passing it on. I'm fascinated by what it means to play bass on tunes like this. You're supposed to keep moving around, but to which notes? When? Dahl has a feel for it that kept the band in motion, and the fruits of this mode of playing stand out to me as the highlights of what I heard. (On the 3 Nights in L.A. version I just linked, Polish bassist Darek Oles has a much tamer approach, probably because pianist Alan Pasqua is there with harmony.)

Garzone recorded "Dedicated to Michael Brecker" on one of his recent albums, 3 Nights in L.A.

Garzone's sound on the horn is immense, I doubt I've ever heard one bigger. When I think about Brecker, whom I never heard live but watched a lot of YouTube footage of, I think "explosive vertical": limitless up-and-down harmony presented one note at a time at the speed of light. Garzone winds his way through a line more expressively, while at the same time every note is crystal-clear no matter the speed. Cook is a bit like that too, but their timbres were plenty different. The two didn't make any displays of trying to push or outdo each other: they just shared the front of that small stage and ripped. They either were mindful to not solo for too long, or happened to have a natural feel for the timing of it and an inclination to keep things snappy.

Only three more tunes remained in the set. In terms of Trane, they played "Naima" with Dahl moving off the typical long pedal tones to elucidate more of the harmony. I want to leave this nerdy note here to potentially see later, in the event that a live record comes out of this night, whether or not my ears failed me. It sounded like at the end of the bridge, they had Dahl playing G-natural in the bass, which would be an interesting departure from the usual harmony of that spot (E major, I think). Even if it was just G-flat and I was off, Dahl emphasized it at the end of his bass solo, playing just that one note when he got there. Hopefully we'll see! (Double nerd: they also ended the A-section's melody with concert G-natural to E-flat, instead of what usually appears on Real Book charts, G-flat to E-flat.)

They ended with Trane's "Mr. P.C." and also played a Garzone original called "Strollin' Down Bourbon Street", which had a double-length bridge that Garzone said he built on the bridge of "Frosty the Snowman".

In a short JazzTimes review from 2002, the late jazz historian Larry Applebaum covered a record that Garzone and Steinhilber made in 1999: Chicago Trio New York Tenor. But Steinhilber's "Chicago trio" was with bassist Larry Kohut and a pianist, Jim Trompeter, instead of a tenor saxophonist. (These three also happened to play on the debut record Yatra by saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa, who comes to town for a likely very different-sounding Infidels show next month.)

Steinhilber is now based in Bellingham, where Dahl lives. Cook lives in Burlington, WA, which is just a bit further down the I-5 right before Mount Vernon. In a Rhythm Changes-like feature at the website Cascadia Daily, the writer Jesse Standon said of this Pacific Northwest trio, "All three of them had East Coast roots and connections". He might as well have said Garzone roots and connections: Steinhilber and Dahl studied with Garzone at Berklee, while Cook did the same at New York University for grad school.

Steinhilber, Cook, and Dahl released their own album called 4 Suites (or Four Suites) in 2023. The album has four long tracks where each one is a medley, or a sequence of interpolations and allusions, of a famous artist's tunes. In album order, they are Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, the Tristano school (Lennie Tristano, Lee Konitz, and Warne Marsh), and Miles Davis (guess which tune that one starts with).

As for the show earlier this week, yes it was big and seemed to ask for more formality than usual once you climbed the Penthouse stairs, but it ultimately felt low-key like a a kept secret. Garzone left us wanting more, and he gave more to the second house of people who came at 9:00 PM, as well as to those at his VIFF Centre follow-up show (without Cook) for Infidels the next night.

The Steinhilber trio also played at Frankie's earlier this year on January 12th and are coming back on November 13th.