When James Francies took the Kalamazoo Civic stage yesterday afternoon — arriving directly from the airport — he noted he liked the energy in the place. For the next hour, he, with the James Francies Trio, fed on, ran with, and cultivated that energy with wildly imaginative and kinetic original jazz.
They experimented with sound, vibration, rhythm, tempo — and challenged expectations — with Francies playing three different keyboards as well as singing a stretch in falsetto, creating a performance unlike any other jazz trio thus far in the Gilmore Festival.
Much of the music they played will be on Francies’ forthcoming debut album from Blue Note Records in September. Francies, 22, is considered a leader among his generation of jazz pianists. In addition to finishing his undergraduate degree at The New School in New York City and touring widely, he often plays with The Roots on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and he played on Chance the Rapper’s Grammy Award-winning hit single “No Problem,” among other projects.
The energy in the room was at least in part generated by the busload of Gilmore Piano Lab students from the Kalamazoo Public School. One of them yelled out after the first 30 minutes of continual playing that he had a question, which Francies eagerly entertained. But the question turned out to be more of an observation, that Francies looks just like Houston Rockets player James Harden. It happens all the time, generally disappointing everyone involved.
This kind of openness, good humor and willingness to improvise readily defined the performance overall.
Francies invited the audience into the compositions with descriptions of how they came about. “Open Water” began as a melody Francies heard on a loop one day while fishing in Galveston, Texas, not far from his home in Houston. “Reciprocal” is much more mathematical in that he played with the time signature, taking cycles of 21 beats and flipping two different loops to discover they work the same way.
“Sway” offered a very pretty melody that sounded like more typical contemporary jazz than the other tunes, and “Fall For It” included romantic falsetto vocals and a little riff on the small analog synthesizer he played atop the baby grand reminiscent of a few bars from Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.”
More often than not, the auditorium swelled with the busy, beautifully articulated dissonance that ultimately rose and fell in complex harmony. Shot through with hypnotic electronic sounds, Jeremy Dutton’s relentless and magnificent drums created a ceaseless throughline even during song transitions. Zachary Ostroff played bass with exaggerated physicality, leaning into the great instrument as if they were enmeshed in a weight-sharing pas de deux.
Francies gave a light-hearted warning about their eclectic and imaginative style before they began to play. “This is like a roller coaster or something,” he said. “Some things you’ll understand; some things you won’t understand. Just sit back and enjoy.”
The James Francies Trio provided more than a little thrilling enjoyment that made for a high-energy lunch hour during the Gilmore Festival.
James Francies Trio
Kalamazoo Civic
May 8
W.K. Kellogg Foundation
May 9
thegilmore.org
