The Twentieth Century Dog is big on rhythm too – with two drummers and a percussionist, as well as having a bass-player as leader, it is inevitable that there will be grooves of all flavours, and rhythm games running through the music like pulsing veins. Funk, Afro-beat, jazz: all booty-shaking but mind-bending at the same time.
Just as the album’s title is both brooding and punning, so the music is in a constant flux of what, were it writing, we would call ‘tone’. Grabowsky can seem to create a pastiche of an idiom out of which a deep truth will grow in the improvising, while a more solemn-sounding piece will spawn sly asides and dramatic jolts from the players, or perhaps contain an unexpectedly curdled harmony.
Throughout the entire evening the trio communicated in a common language, no matter what ‘genre’ or ‘style’ they were traversing.
The overwhelming aesthetic is eclectic though this style-laden environment is anything but imitative other than when tongue-in-cheek, and in this some humor is brought to bear. This imaginative trio explores a clearly etched ethos; one I perceive of as trajectories within trajectories; a process of creating layered textures.
