Astereotypical 2003 reviews

Unn 1999 reviews

Ast 2000 reviews

 

NYTimes
Jim Black, the drummer and de facto leader of Pachora, was a force in constant motion at Rose Live Music in Brooklyn on Wednesday night. The hummingbird churn of his fingers on a dumbek, or goblet drum, was punctuated by an array of passing textures: the startled cough of a cymbal grasped in midcrash, or the hurried rustle of a shaker, or the deadening whomp of a detuned floor tom. Mr. Black, with his busy amalgam of Balkan and Middle Eastern rhythms, was working in a mode both familiar and dated. “We’re Pachora. We’re from the ’90s,” he said cheerily at the start of the band’s first set.

Rose Live Music has lately been presenting a series of drummer-led bands: a fine idea, if not quite a necessary corrective for the New York jazz calendar. (This week in Manhattan the venerable drummer Roy Haynes holds court at the Blue Note; Lewis Nash, a worthy inheritor, is running the bandstand at Birdland.) The series inclusion of Pachora, a band once synonymous with the avidly cross-cultural downtown scene of the Clinton era, doubled as an event booking of its own, at least among a certain crowd.
Technically, Pachora — Mr. Black, the clarinetist Chris Speed, the guitarist Brad Shepik and the bassist Skuli Sverrisson — never disbanded. But the group released its fourth and most recent album, “Astereotypical” (Winter & Winter) in 2003, and has since been a sporadic concern, though its members still work together in other bands.
Mr. Speed and Mr. Shepik articulated most of the set’s melodies in tandem, flighty and fast, with notes spilling over from one phrase to the next. “Freaky Person,” the opening track on “Astereotypical,” deployed them in close synchronized harmony, over a dartlike, asymmetrical groove.
In their solos each took a liberated approach to rhythm, moving in and out of the gravitational pull of the music. And each sought an incantatory approach with his phrasing, sliding between pitches like a devotional singer: Mr. Speed, with his microtonal scrawl, no less than Mr. Shepik, playing an eight-string tambura.
The musicians upheld a relaxed chemistry, managing to make their capricious music feel almost roomy. And on the set closer, “Dratch,” from the 1999 album “Unn” (Knitting Factory), they summoned a bygone urgency. At one point in the ebullient chorus, as Mr. Black verged on rushing the beat, the notion of folkloric improv felt radical and new again, like a cause worth rallying around.By NATE CHINEN
Published: March 18, 2010