WREST
“Wrest-ing never does serious bodily harm but might scare your aunties and inlaws out of the room real quick. Sound and magic tricks on sax, floor percussion, bass. What happened? We don’t know what we’re doing until we’re doing it.”
The handful of people who know this kind of music call it free improvisation; others might say “experimental jazz,” or even noise. The trio, formed in Chicago in 2012, is led by Jack Wright- a musician with one of the widest vocabularies of any saxophonist, an expert at leaping pitches, punchy, precise timing, sharp and intrusive multiphonics, surprising gaps of silence, and sounds often animalistic and obscene. A reviewer for the Washington Post said, “In the rarefied, underground world of experimental free improvisation, saxophonist Jack Wright is king.”
Wright’s saxophone is joined by percussion from Ben Bennett, playing a compact pile of self-made drums, stretched membranes, and other objects continually rearranged and sounded with “techniques of the hit, rub, and blow varieties.”
Rounding out the trio is upright bassist Evan Lipson. “Lipson easily stands among the best bassists I’ve heard lately, his terrifically strapping tone epitomizing the decision to really learn how an instrument works.”——Massimo Ricci (Touching Extremes)
Wrest is restless, using all their imagination each show to do something stranger than the night before.
