By Owen McNally - Hartford Courant
July 30, 1994
If Thomas Chapin had been an early 20th-century painter instead of a contemporary jazz saxophonist, he would have been a member of the Fauves, that pack of wild French artists, including Matisse and Rouault, whose works simmered with fury, fragmented images and violent colors.
Chapin pushed his saxophones and flute to the bursting point, squeezing out colors and manic, joyous figures in a high-energy performance with his trio Friday night at Hartford's 880 Club.
Under his fleet fingertips, he has the whole free jazz reed tradition of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, Eric Dolphy and Albert Ayler. But the tumultuous free jazz spirit of the 1960s is merely a launching pad for his ascensions.
Intoxicated with the love of sound much as poets are drunk on words, Chapin created a surreal sonic spectrum ranging over bleats, blats, honks, melancholy wails, field hollers, shouts of ecstasy, cries and whispers. There was even an eerie plaint that made you look twice to see if he had sneaked a didgeridoo onto the bandstand.
Chapin's visceral explorations plunged into the primal, with free-form figures spiraling deep down into the unconscious, mining the dark, sexual energies of the id.
Moods changed with mercurial swiftness.
One minute he was splattering abstract expressionist figures all over the place like some demonic Jackson Pollock of the saxophone. But in the next instant, he immersed the packed club with funky rhythm and blues licks, transforming miraculously from a cerebral Coleman or Coltrane into a sensual Sam 'The Man" Taylor or Louis Jordan.
Around midnight, the saxophonist was still steaming with sound and fury. And in a surprise, late-night collaboration with poet Vernon Frazer, he blew fiery flute figures as the poet/hipster intoned his lines.
Chapin's trio mates, bassist Mario Pavone and drummer Mike Sarin, played with unflagging energy. The trio's hallmarks are tight interplay and intuitive leaps of imagination.
Presented by the Connecticut Jazz Confederation, the concert was an independent spinoff from the Greater Hartford Festival of Jazz. The four-day festival opened Friday with a variety of events, including a lecture on Duke Ellington by the Grammy Award-winning jazz writer, producer and disc jockey, Phil Schaap.