LongBeachCulture.org CenterStage Blog

By Greggory Moore

“The Golden Arm Trio” is just a name, a moniker under which composer/pianist/drummer Graham Reynolds and his collaborators of the moment gather to perform some fantastic jazz-seeming stuff that is as much tango + texture as it is jazz, something one might conceptualize as Naked City and the Lounge Lizards melding to score David Lynch’s remake of Waking Life. What? Okay.

On this night, the Golden Arm Trio was a quartet: Reynolds on drums and a piano slightly treated with a trebly effect, Chris Black on upright bass, Jon Dexter on cello, and Josh Robbins on electric guitar. Reynolds employed his unaffected and seemingly self-conscious oratory skills to let us know that the musicians he had with him here were better than the ones on the CDs he’s done. By the end of the evening I’d heard nothing that made the claim sound suspect. They opened with the opening of Reynolds’s score for the Richard Linklater film A Scanner Darkly (BTW, Linklater also did Waking Life (which features the Tosca Tango Orchestra (part of which was the Tosca String Quartet, which plays on the Golden Arm Trio album Why the Sea Is Salt (see how the first paragraph’s starting to make more sense?))), a soft piano theme interlaced with texture from the strings, which was neatly segued into an upbeat track from Why the Sea Is Salt that brought to mind some of the more raucous tracks on the Lounge Lizards’ Queen of All Ears. The segue was a neat trick, considering the songs were completely unrelated in feel, with Reynolds whirling from the piano to the drum kit that abutted it. This song featured some very tight phrase-trading between Dexter and Robbins (something that was to be a staple on tonight’s bill of fare), and the rhythm was not dissimilar to that which you hear behind traditional Russian folk dancing.

Reynolds said something about the next song being a sort of tribute to Shostakovich’s tribute to Bach, something like that. Since I care about neither, this didn’t mean much to me—but it didn’t need to, as the song stood on its own, with some beautiful mutual bowing [pronounced like the aircraft manufacturer] from Dexter and Black. The fourth piece was a duet for cello and piano. Beginning with a redoubtable bit of arpeggio by Dexter, the frantic pace was something that could be annoying in the wrong hands (e.g., “Flight of the Bumblebee”), but here it was driving fun that reminded me of moments in Waking Life (which is a good thing. Linklater sure knows who to get to score his films).

The next piece was a conflation of “cues” (that’s movie talk, friends) from the A Scanner Darkly score, all of which were excellent in their own right. These started with some gentle solo bass work by Black, which Reynolds topped off with some rim-tapping and palm-muted rumbling. Again my reference frame of the Lounge Lizards popped up (though not because there was anything derivative going on), this time in combination with Naked City—but much more danceable. The second cue was a cello theme layered with piano and joined by bowed bass. The last cue could have easily fit into Twin Peaks, with its gentle tremolo-bent explosions of chords over top of a steady texture of mystery. This eventually gave way to an extended frenetic passage in which all four musicians let loose without losing each other, Robbins augmenting the glorious attack by concomitantly banging on one of the house pianos.

I believe there was one more piece, but frankly, I’d become so taken with the performance that I neglected to make any more notes. This was a magnificent set by a stellar group expertly moving through impressive material, and how we got lucky enough to see them in such an intimate setting (in which they somehow never got over-loud) I’ll never know. But this kind of thing happens at {open} sometimes. If you don’t believe me, go to accessopen.com and come to some shows. For more information on the Golden Arm Trio (and Reynolds’s other projects), go to www.grahamreynolds.com.