Motoko Honda is one of the more intriguing figures on the Bay Area music scene. The Japanese pianist and composer is a formidable improviser and vividly imaginative composer, and it’s rarely clear how these two overlapping musical practices are going to play out in performance.
Simple Excesses Quartet, the new band she introduced at Mr. Tipple’s Aug. 13, is thoroughly equipped to maintain this ambiguity. With three prodigious players who are all recognized composers and leaders with their own projects, the quartet’s name could refer to the group’s impressive and abundant personnel.
Cory Wright moved between flute, and alto and tenor sax with his typical authority, taking particular advantage of Honda’s knack for combining lyricism and rhythmic churn. Bassist Matt Small provided lithe bow work when he wasn’t pacing Honda’s picaresque pieces with powerful pizzicato lines. And drummer Jordan Glenn, whose wide-open feel for time and expressive textural palette make him an indispensable motor for many left-field jazz ensembles, responded to Honda’s narratives with expert calibration.
Honda opened the evening’s second show with an extended piece she introduced as a journey into murky woods. It wasn’t so much programmatic as cinematically evocative, from the trepidation of the ethereal opening motif through the gathering headlong momentum paced by Wright’s sinuous tenor sax lines.
He switched to alto sax for “Random,” a marvelous geometric construction that stacked and disassembled a tightly grouped pattern with fourth-gear efficiency. On “Snow Giant,” a piece inspired by a dream of her piano professor at Bethany College in Kansas, she conjured a beatific figure dancing with joy.
The piece included long spacious passages with minimal accompaniment that gradually built to a swirling vortex. At her most fierce, Honda camped out on the left side of the keyboard, her elbows, forearms and hands thrashing out dense flurries of chords.
Mr. Tipple’s, the Hayes Valley supper club that serves as one of the region’s premier showcases for straight ahead jazz, isn’t the kind of venue that would seem to fit the demands of Honda’s music, with its extreme shifts in dynamics. But the audience seemed carried away on the journey, with only a few conversations under the music. Honda described the tunes as a work in progress, and given this Simple Excesses performance, the work is paying off. As Oscar Wilde once noted, nothing succeeds like excess.
She celebrates the release of a new album by the Cymatics Trio Aug. 29 at the World Stage in Los Angeles. Exploring an entirely different repertoire, the group features Honda on prepared piano and effects, Tony Green on bass and effects, and Breeze Smith on drums, percussion, and effects.
