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Ponga — Ponga
(Loosegroove lg 0018-2, 1999, CD)

by Jon Davis, Published 2000-10-01

Ponga Cover art

In jazz today, it seems the most prominent musicians are traditionalists, some as extreme as Wynton Marsalis, refusing to go much beyond the bounds established in the age of bebop. Tune to a jazz station on the radion, and you’re more likely to hear something recorded in the 40s than in the last 30 years. There was a time, roughly the decades of the 60s and 70s, when prominent jazz musicians were reaching beyond the confines of tradition. Not just by incorporating rock rhythms into the music, but freeing themselves of the conventions of song structure and expected instrumentation. Gone are the days when jazz pianists run their Rhodes through a ring modulator, when sax players use wah-wah pedals, when arrangement takes a back seat to improvisation. These things still go on, but only on the fringes of jazz, not in the mainstream, and generally not among the first rank of well-known players. One of the great things about that age of experimentation was the similarity in spirit between the boundary-pushers from jazz and those from rock. When you get a certain distance out there, genres seem to lose their relevance. Ponga reminds me a lot of some of the great music of the 70s, especially Soft Machine and Weather Report, but this improvising quartet are anything but derivative. For the most part, they utilize relatively old technology — electric piano, organ, analog synths, drums, and saxes, often processed by low-tech effects devices — which is where they earn the comparisons to old fusion groups. Where they stand apart from any of their peers is the rhythmic fury and willingness to throw caution out and just wail. The line-up, with two keyboards, sax, and drums, also lends originality to the sound. (Sorry for the rant.)

Filed under: New releases, Issue 20, 1999 releases

Related artist(s): Wayne Horvitz, Bobby Previte, Ponga

 

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