December 23, 1996 POP REVIEW New York times By PETER WATROUS
Thursday night's triple bill at the Knitting Factory was a study in musical literacy. The three sets, spectacularly diverse, were all products of record collections and warm imaginations, referential as well as reverential: the musicians were capturing and amplifying the aspects of styles that they clearly loved.
The show ended with a sextet led by the bassist Greg Cohen. Mr. Cohen is best known for his work with the pop singers Tom Waits and Madeleine Peyroux and the saxophonist John Zorn, and as with them, his conception is obsessed with history. Mr. Cohen likes small-group Ellingtonia, with clarinets and muted horns, but he really loves the West Coast cool sound.
So he set his front line against the heavy, swinging sounds of the rhythm section. Polyphony erupted a bit, but mostly the compositions dictated that the horns riff. It wasn't a reproduction of a specific West Coast sound; the music was harder, and instead of the dancing lightness of the school, the music had meat on it. The soloists mostly played their roles, coolly. Mr. Zorn, on alto saxophone, was the exception. He often avoided the tunes' harmonies, occasionally digging into a melody or a blues phrases, but mostly playing abstractions, and his irreverence gave the music a tingle of transgression, in the style of Eric Dolphy, circa 1961.
Thomas Chapin brought in a new quartet, with Peter Madsen on piano, Scott Colley on bass and Matt Wilson on drums. They can do just about anything, and Mr. Chapin had the group move from free- time sections to swinging parts that moved with complex harmonies. Mr. Wilson doubled and halved the tempos; the music sounded wonderfully unstable. One piece, a ballad, invoked the Blue Note Label in 1964; Mr. Chapin tore through a composition by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, using a hard, rough tone. He likes heat and velocity, and the music flew by, jammed with notes.
Babkas opened the show, and the three musicians -- Briggan Krauss on saxophone, Brad Schoeppach on guitar and Aaron Alexander on drums -- used the minor scales and melodies of Eastern music. They used odd time signatures, and they improvised with it all, complicated and angular lines that skipped and stuttered.