Looking back, the first ten years of the 21st century in the United States have turned out to be the most craptacular decade for anyone born after 1939. However, there’s at least one 21st-century development in San Diego that’s cause for rejoicing, and that is the annual local music festival, Spring Reverb.

Dana Reason.

^{Courtesy photo}

Sponsored by the dedicated musical explorers of the Trummerflora collective for the past 9 years, Spring Reverb has gathered some of the most free-thinking musicians in California and beyond for a weekend of musical creativity without boundaries. Free improvisation, electronic music, contemporary classical, ambient, jazz, computer music, rock, and pop music have all taken the stage at Spring Reverb shows.

The venues change from year to year, but there’s usually at least one show where you can have a tall cold one (this year featured a concert at Desi ’n’ Friends). The past 5 years have included one concert at the Museum of Making Music in Carlsbad. If Friday’s concert was representative of past events there as well, these shows are friendly, informal, intimate, and distraction-free.

If you wanted to hear just one concert that guaranteed the highest concentration of well-known improvisers, Friday’s installment of Spring Reverb was the show to attend. L.A. wind player Vinny Golia and San Diego bass legend Bertram Turetzky collaborated for one set, followed by another local bassist (and former Turetzky student), Mark Dresser, L.A. percussionist Alex Cline, and Dana Reason, a Canadian pianist now headquartered in Corvallis, Oregon.

Fans of jazz or free improvisation may be acquainted with Golia, Turetzky, Cline, and Dresser, but Dana Reason? Who’s that?

I first encountered Reason back in the Nineties, performing with other improvisation students from UCSD. I don’t know if those few times I heard her then were representative of her work at the time, but like many young improvisers—especially those going through the UCSD music program—she tried so hard not to sound like anyone else that she ended up sounding like all the other musicians trying so hard not to sound like anyone else.

Ten years or more after those student days, Reason has found her voice, and it is an attractive one indeed. It bears similarities to some of Marilyn Crispell’s recent work with lush modal sonorities, although where Crispell is big and extroverted in her musical loveliness, Reason is coy and subtle. Although capable of being aggressive when necessary, Reason’s playing Friday evening revealed a sensibility that makes full use of understatement and guile, quiet fragments and wisps that may seem teasing on their own, but when strung together over the length of a piece, are slyly persuasive. Little splashes of scales and arpeggiated harmonies become musical pseudopods, delicate exploring tendrils that advance, turn back on themselves, and yet pull the whole thing forward.

There’s also an element of 20th-century classical piano music to her thought—the fragmented, block forms, shifting meters, and piquant dissonances of Stravinsky; the asymmetrical rhythms and spicy harmonies of Bartok; the sardonic wrong-note neo-classicism of early Shostakovich and Hindemith; a judicious use of late-20th-century extended techniques such as rubbing the keyboard lid or running her fingernails over the keys without actually depressing them to create a quiet whirring sound—but it’s all in service to a searching, probing improviser capable of sensitively switching directions, pushing forward or pulling back as the moment demands.

Indeed, one of my biggest impressions of Reason was what an egoless performer she was, how much she laid back and let her colleagues come forward, how little she pushed the music but instead allowed it to happen, coaxing it to go one way or another, but, if it happened to wander off in a promising direction, hopping on for the ride and adding what she could.

Reason played with her right leg in a splint, the result of walking an out-of-control Labrador retriever. If you ever saw The Truth About Cats and Dogs, you’ll remember the scene where the big dog gallops towards its hunky owner, dragging Janeane Garofalo behind it on roller skates. Reason’s injury was like that, except her Lab wasn’t charging towards a cute guy and she wasn’t wearing roller skates. (Reason’s Oregon state citizenship is currently under review for allowing that to happen). She pedaled her entire set using her left foot, with her right leg thrust over towards the audience in a 45-degree angle to the floor. Had you closed your eyes and listened to the beautiful sounds she produced, you never would have guessed that they came from such an uncomfortable position.

The group was billed as the Dana Reason Trio, but her bandmates Dresser and Cline created much more dynamic textures and musical rhetoric than her regular trio members, at least as evidenced on her newest recording Revealed and videos such as this one. On Revealed, Reason has much more presence than she did Friday night, which might have been her deferring to the higher musical dues her colleagues have paid or simply being drowned out by Cline’s frenetic percussion work, which wouldn’t have suffered being taken down a few notches in volume.

Cline had everything but the kitchen sink surrounding him for 270 degrees, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he had brought a kitchen sink along, but decided to leave it in his van at the last minute. Gongs and pans and cymbals were struck as they laid on a horizontal bass drum, often sounding like rattling, clanging ethnic percussion. He sometimes incorporated what appeared to be a child’s toy, a foot-high plastic oval chicken which produced jack-in-the-box hollow tinklings when shaken.

Dresser is a versatile bassist who can play straight ahead or out, and he definitely was in the latter category Friday evening, incorporating some of the most violent pizzicatos you’ll ever hear on a bass, filter-sweep pedal effects, incredibly high harmonics, and unusual bowing techniques (up and down instead of back and forth).

The first set was devoted to Vinny Golia and Bertram Turetzky, both of whom have played together in San Diego many times, giving them, as Turetzky announced in one of the generous introductions that preceded each of their 5 selections, a kind of ESP. Unlike Dana Reason, who brought plenty of written music to use (or ignore, as the case may have been) for her set, Golia and Turetzky played freely improvised music.

Golia had so many clarinets, flutes, and saxophones propped up next to him or in a travel bag that Turetzky joked that the real Museum was the one next to Golia. Each work began with Golia pondering which wind to play, making a selection, and then soloing, to be joined shortly afterward by Turetzky. The description of their music making as “ESP” was not far off the mark, given the duo’s uncanny ability to complement each other while spontaneously creating melodies and textures.

Golia has a penchant for playing multiphonics, alternating the highest and lowest registers of his chosen instruments (clarinet, contrabass clarinet, contrabass flute, or piccolo). At other times, he pulled out different varieties of ethnic flutes, from which issued trills, microtones, and spastic twittering melodies.

Turetzky is a pioneer in performing new bass techniques, and he had these at his command: vivid pizzicato glissandos; bowing on the other side of the bridge while plucking strings with his other hand; ricocheting the bow against the open strings to create a rustic, almost peasant-like dance rhythm and sound; and rapping and tapping the body of his bass with his fingertips. One of the techniques, which looked as if it had been called for by some wacky experimental composer in the 1960s, was actually prescribed by the German composer Heinrich Biber in 1673: threading a piece of paper around a bass string to produce a drum-like sound.

The warm spoken introductions before each improvisation, and the banter between Turetzky and Golia were as charming as their musical creations. After describing how he and Golia listened to each other, because the alternative, “not listening” is a waste of time, Turetzky quipped, “I’m too old to waste time.”

He then gave a brief talk about Heinrich Biber’s innovative bass techniques, and then looked over to Golia, saying, “Any time you’re ready, young man.”

Golia answered, “I’m listening to your history lesson.”

Turetzky looked towards the audience and apologized. “I’m still a recovering academic.”

The music Golia and Turetzky made, though, was anything but academic. Fanciful, mercurial, and confident, they carried the 60 or so listeners in the room along with them on entertaining and enervating musical journeys.

Here’s hoping that Spring Reverb continues to bring wonderful out-of-towners to San Diego to interact with local musicians for many decades more.

For a copy of the program, click here.

Further links to explore:

Dana Reason: http://www.wildroseartists.com/

(Click on the “Dana Reason” tab, then click on the “Music” tab to hear recordings)

site.bertturetzky.com

A very fun interview with Bert Turetzky: http://www.bruceduffie.com/turetzky3.html

www.vinnygolia.com

www.mark-dresser.com

www.myspace.com/alexclinemusic