pachora press

 

 

THE NY TIMES 1998
Gleefully Rattling Around the World
The Knitting Factory recently started to book weeklong engagements in its cozy basement space, the Old Office, and it was an incalculably smart bit of farm-team thinking. Some bands, used to one-nighters, will make quantum leaps in the fluidity of their sound, and probably find themselves audiences to fill the larger space upstairs. Pachora, a quartet of young musicians who are all movable parts in the downtown improvising scene, is an example. At its late set at the Old Office on Thursday, the second night of a five-night stand, the band showed considerable growth since making its first recording last year; the elastic music was full of beckoning pleasures that can only be learned the hard way.
Jazz musicians are often turning to the East and North Africa for modes and rhythms to enrich American-bred improvising sensibilities, and Pachora is among a raft of new bands immersed in Eastern European and Moroccan music (though given the strong influence of downtown groups like Masada and the Tiny Bell Trio, who also use Eastern tonality and odd rhythms, sometimes it's a chicken-or-egg question). It may be hard to reconcile the jazz impulse with Pachora's ethnic sources until you hear the band live.
The melodies of Pachora's pieces -- mostly originals, with a Greek and Turkish traditional melody included in the set -- were tied to elongated and often uneven time signatures, like 9-beat or 13-beat rhythms. But the strong dance melodies and dirges weren't tyrannical; the musicians stretched them and broke them up, intuitively swimming into sections of soloing over modes.
Chris Speed, the clarinetist, played high-register lines throbbing with melismatic expression. The drummer, Jim Black, kept the rhythms strong, even while lunging for textural diversions: a saxophone reed scraped across the ridges of a cymbal, a brush tapped on the bottom of a steel bowl. His principal drum was a high-pitched, goblet-shaped dumbek; he also integrated the rattling sounds of chains, shakers and gourds into the pulse.
Brad Shepik, playing a Portuguese guitar with nine strings, locked into the fast extended melodies with Mr. Speed and the electric bassist Skuli Sverrison, but at different times all of them took off into their own improvising languages, Mr. Speed wailing like a devotional singer, Mr. Shepik with a rapid single-note style, Mr. Sverrison with a melodic and rhythmically exact disposition, periodically breaking out into chords.
The music was all about exultation, and was a long way from dry musicology and shtick, the twin terrors of cross-cultural projects. Pachora plays through tomorrow at the club, at 74 Leonard Street in Tribeca.
- Ben Ratliff


The Boston Phoenix 1998
Pachora: East Meets West
What started as a trickle of albums of new improvised music based on Balkan and other Eastern European musics has swelled to a sizable flow of new releases. A handful of New York-based musicians shared among a half dozen bands, such as the Tiny Bell Trio and Brad Shepik's Commuters, are largely responsible for the spate of new albums. But throw in John Zorn's Masada and klezmer-based improv bands that draw on the Jewish music of the same regions, as well as eclectic ensembles like Myra Melford's Same River, Twice quintet that routinely allude to the music, and you have an important downtown New York trend.
The latest addition to the Balkanization of new music is Pachora (Knitting Factory Works), by a rambunctious quartet of the same name featuring clarinettist Chris Speed, guitarist Brad Shepik (né Schoeppach), electric-bassist Skuli Sverrisson, and drummer Jim Black. The album's high-spirited blend of bouncy Balkan dance music mixed with the fluid interplay and extended improvisations of new music makes them one of the most enjoyable examples of this emerging style. And their appearance a week ago Thursday at Johnny D's underscored their ability to take traditional music in new directions.
Weaving music from other cultures into jazz isn't exactly new. It dates back at least to Jelly Roll Morton's Latin tinge, but it became an increasingly pronounced characteristic of jazz after 1960, in the wake of John Coltrane's hugely influential use of music from Indian, Middle Eastern, and African sources. The musics of the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Greece, and Turkey provide Pachora with plenty of scales, melodies, and dance rhythms to use as analogues to the blues and swing feeling of jazz. It's this fresh angle as much as the "exotic" melodies and odd meters that give Pachora their appeal.
The tunes also provide a reference point for audience and musicians alike. This is important because the music -- and the musicians' roles in it -- changes unpredictably and often. On the recorded versions of the songs "Ranitsa" and "Paidushko," Speed uses expressive moans and trills and exotic scales to shape and color his short riffs and long, skittering lines. Shepik plays a Portuguese guitar called a saz, which has a thin, brittle sound that gives his playing a lively sizzle as he moves from background accompanist to foreground soloist. And Sverrisson can function as a third horn or as harmonic/melodic foundation. Drummer Black keeps time and propels the band with an infectious groove, but his rapid patter of clicks, tings, and lightning little fills also provides melodic interest on "Buchini," where the rest of the band serve as rhythm section.
Their set at Johnny D's mixed unorthodox reworkings of traditional tunes like the opening "Dever Oro" and the Turkish "Pinar Basi" (the third number) with band-member originals like Speed's "Kaponota," a rolling waterslide of a melody in a toe-tap-defying 11/8 that the band dipped into with special grace. Their blend of vibrant electric-bass and guitar textures and woody clarinet tones with Eastern European and Mediterranean dance meters and folk melodies gave "Ranitsa" and a traditional Greek song an especially bright urgency and sense of abandon. The peasants who created this beautiful material would certainly appreciate Pachora's bittersweet beauty and vitality, though they could never have anticipated the loving lengths to which this band stretch it.
- Ed Hazell

 

Chicago Reader March 1998
Many of the bands from New York’s downtown jazz scene pride themselves on being stylistic omnivores, and art first glance Pachora is no exception. On the quartets first and only CD (on Knitting factory Works), it uses Balkan, Bulgarian, and Turkish themes and rhythms as springboards for elaborate improvisations. But this combo’s real power comes from scrupulous self-restriction. Chris Speed blows paint-peeling tenor saxophone with Tim Berne’s Bloodcount, but in Pachora he sticks to clarinet, playing graceful, sinuous melodies that are doubled by Skuli Sverrisson’s nimble electric electric bass. When Brad Shepik plays electric guitar with Matt Darriau’s paradox trio and Dave Douglas’s Tiny Bell Trio, he loads up on effects to fill space with cloudy swells and busy fusion heroics; in Pachora he limits himself to fleet, single-note lines on Portuguese guitar and Turkish saz. Drummer Jim Black has the hardest time holding back, but even during his most aggressive all-over-the-kit forays he steadfastly articulates the music’s odd-metered dance rhythms, adding just the right touches of color with his sensitive use of shakers and gourds. This is Pachora’s Chicago debut.
-Bill Meyer