From about 1993 to 2003, no Seattle jazz band was less true to its name than Stinkhorn. Far from smellin’ things up, the quartet wafted sweetly squalling sound that was as arresting as its namesake’s pong is in forests and gardens. (There, as the biologist says, the rapidly growing fungi are so “extremely phallic” that they “thrust botanical invasion psychology into realms best analyzed by Freud.” Whence the name of the most common variety, Phallus impudicus.) Well, Stinkhorn is no more, but in its place, soprano and tenor saxophonist Michael Monhart and electric guitarist Brian Heaney have cultivated the formidable, soaring Sunship.
Again, there is much to glean from the band’s name. Sunship was arguably John Coltrane’s announcement of his final ascent. It had a ferocious abandon that Sunship shares, but with an asterisk: The band is now a quintet, altered in various, positive ways by the presence of one of the great new-music instrumentalists, trombonist Stuart Dempster. His rich, measured contributions, which his band mates readily admit causes them frequently to pause in contemplation, have proven a boon for the post-Stinkhorn project.
Renowned internationally in avant-garde new music, the UW retiree is far from having said his last, on stage and disc. He got to know Monhart in the mid-1990s through informal duos as well as large-ensemble celebrations of the late, intergalactic jazz traveler, Sun Ra, in whose spirit they both clearly rejoice. He’s been with Sunship for a year. “He played with Stinkhorn quite a few times, at the end, too,” recalls Monhart. “He’d come in and sit in on shows.”
Once Sunship was established, “all of a sudden he said, I’ll show up for rehears-als,” says drummer David Revelli. “We were really surprised, and thrilled. Now he’s totally integrated, and into it.” All the band members clearly are de-lighted. Dumpster’s trombone, they note, fills out the group’s sound, and with Monhart’s tenor sax provides more options for voicings, and stacking harmonies.
Says Revelli: “We made a big racket as a quartet. Having Stuart reminds me to be more dynamic. If I’m bashing away, when it comes time for his solo, I’ll pull back a little. He keeps us more tempered.” Heaney, who from a mid-teens start in punk rock has drunk in all the major developments in electric-guitar playing, with no prejudice against the heavy and the metallic, agrees: “I’ve gotten away from the aggressive, loud stuff, because of that.” But don’t buy altogether his humorous self-deprecation – “I mean, does he really want to hear some jack-off wailing on electric guitar?” – Because Heaney will always wail when the time is right. But Monhart, who particularly on tenor can rasp the paint off any venue’s walls, does say: “We both shriek a little less.” He continues: “Now he’s started writing for the band. His stuff is unlike our own, but it fits well. The time signatures are mixed up, but we do a lot of that, so it really fits our style.”
And, says Heaney, “he also brings such playfulness to the improvisation, and that changes the color or the mood of our improvisations. Playfulness wasn’t something we did much.”
Monhart and Dempster clearly share an interest in rarified aspects of music and aesthetics. Before coming to Seattle in 1980, Monhart studied at the Buddhist-infused Naropa Institute in Colorado (home to such distinctive divisions as the Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics). He was studying music there with drummer Jerry Granelli, working with him in a band that backed poets like Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlowski. When Granelli moved to Seattle, to work at Cornish, he suggested that Monhart continue to working with him here, and with a certain bassist named Gary Peacock, who was already a crucial figure nationally, in free jazz, and who since soon after that time has been a third of Keith Jarrett’s top-flight trio.
In 1987, Monhart moved to Japan and studied Tibetan chant, as part of his graduate studies in ethnomusicology at the UW. It was, in fact, a year of participatory research, as he lived in temples, as a Buddhist monk, just as he had spent 18 months as a young man in a Trappist monastery in this country.
Stinkhorn was among various projects he maintained for several years, here. By about 2002, “it was inactive,” he diplomatically says.
Heaney is more forthright: “We played 10 years together and it was not as fun, and if you don’t have gigs to play, it just gets old. Dave and [bassist] Andrew [Luthringer] came over, and at first it was like Stinkhorn with a different rhythm section. We didn’t approach it any differently. We played Stinkhorn heads, etc., because we shared so many interests.” By now, says Monhart, “we’re at the point where we’re writing stuff that is really our own.” Their range and imagination are royally announced on the EP, Sunship, which is most easily acquired simply by going to one of the band’s show like the one on January 6 at Egan’s Ballard Jam House – and asking for one. Revelli and Luthringer, who is originally from Boston, met in San Francisco and have played in bands together since 1988, and worked in various settings and genres, there, including “a lot of lesbian singer-songwriters.” He and Luthringer “were like a package deal” after they happened to make inroads into that world, Revelli explains
However, he adds, “most of our bands were not too different from Sunship. We’ve tended towards the more aggressive and lyrical side of free jazz and fusion. Somewhere between Ronald Shannon Jackson’s Decoding Society and the more acoustic side of Ornette Coleman. And throw in the more aggressive side, like Sonny Sharrock or Peter Brötzmann.” Their jobs brought them to Seattle, says Revelli, a San Francisco-raised, veteran of the feted ambient techno/acid jazz/jazz fusion/dub outfit, Grassy Knoll, originally a one-man pioneering computer/sampler band to which Bob Green recruited Revelli and others. (Revelli describes its sound as Bitch’s Brew meets Grand Funk Railroad meets Black Sabbath.)
Monhart and his band mates express contentment with where all this has taken his and Heaney’s longtime collaboration: “For as long as Brian and I have been together, this is the best we’ve ever sounded,” he says. “Our sound is very current, but it’s fairly accessible.” At previous shows at Egan’s and Mr. Spot’s, audience members, who often just happen to be around when the shows get under way, stay on and hear the band out. The quintet has increasing appeal with younger audiences, testimony to its interest in playing to, not at, its listeners.
http://www.earshot.org/Publication/pub/07january.pdf
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