Trio defies convention - and crowd noise

November 16, 2009|Steve Greenlee, Globe Staff

Seventeen years after it began tricking neo-Deadheads into listening to jazz, the trio of keyboardist John Medeski, drummer Billy Martin, and bassist Chris Wood is the certifiable leader of an entire movement. Jam-jazz is a bona fide subgenre, claiming bands like Garage a Trois, Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey, and Soulive.

But Medeski Martin & Wood has refused to sit still. The trio has shifted gears relentlessly, recording with a DJ (on the album “Combustication’’), teaming up with guitarist John Scofield (on both “A Go Go’’ and “Out Louder’’), covering John Zorn (“Zaebos: Book of Angels, Vol. 11’’), veering into the avant-garde (“The Dropper’’), and going totally acoustic (“Tonic’’). This year the trio upped the ante, releasing a trilogy of albums on its own label. Next week those albums - along with a live album, a remix album, a double-LP, and a DVD - will be reissued as part of a box set called “Radiolarians: The Evolutionary Set.’’ It’s an impressive collection spanning a wide range of styles, and it’s the finest thing the band has done yet.

It’s a shame, then, that it was difficult to appreciate Medeski Martin & Wood’s prowess Friday night at the House of Blues. At the risk of sounding like an old curmudgeon, why do people shell out hard-earned money to hear a band and then flap their jaws for the length of the show? OK, the House of Blues is not a jazz club (and perhaps that’s where this critic belongs), but the long, loud conversations that took place throughout the place competed with the music to the point where the concert became background music. Really, if what you’re looking for is background music, why wouldn’t you throw a party at your home and pop a few CDs in the stereo?

What Medeski, Martin, and Wood do best is create a hybrid of shuffling New Orleans jazz, funky soul, and avant-garde disguised as a jazzy strain of jam band music. They opened with a long take of “Flat Tires’’ that spent at least five minutes finding its groove by assembling harsh junkyard sounds: metallic percussion, a car-engine electric bass, and a chaotic swirl of organ noises. They were a three-man Sun Ra Arkestra. Medeski clearly gets bored playing one keyboard for too long, or even one set of keys at a time. A few times, he had his left hand on the Hammond B3, his right on the melodica, and that instrument’s tube in his mouth. Even when he sat at the grand piano for the gospel blues of “Satan Your Kingdom Must Come Down,’’ his crazed approach defied musical conventions.

It’s too bad so many people in the packed house missed all that.

Steve Greenlee can be reached at greenlee@globe.com.