Jack Silverman Quartet at Drkmttr, 12/17/2021
On Prince of Shadows, Nashville improv adventurers Jack Silverman Quartet deconstruct genre conventions to find deep grooves and way-out sounds. Their full-length debut via Centripetal Force Records straddles signifiers of a kaleidoscopic array of subgenres of psychedelia — crossing the I’s and microdotting the T’s, if you will, to create a thoroughly modern, unmistakably 21st-century moment in American improvisational music. Saturday, Silverman & Co. return to The Blue Room at Third Man Records to celebrate the release.
“I’m having more fun than I’ve ever had,” says Silverman, the group’s guitarist and bandleader (as well as a contributing editor to the Scene and a former staffer). “At the risk of sounding hokey, it’s almost like a spiritual connection. … Almost every gig I play with this band, I’m having a blast, because I feel like we’re so comfortable with each other that we can just let go and not worry.”
That connection between players — that mystical goo that makes these mutant tunes shine — pulses through the songs, giving the affair a “Don Buchla meets the Dead” vibe, a voltage-controlled oscillation between the experimental ether and the corporeal groove. With Brook Sutton on bass, Robert Crawford on drums and multi-instrumentalist Matt Glassmeyer acting as a one-man Arkestra, it’s tough not to have fun.
The quartet has a heady but not migraine-inducing approach to evolving riffs and rhythms. It’s less about flashy chops and solos and more about tonal interplay and responsive listening. You can feel all four players laying back in the pocket of the beat, like a cuddle puddle of kittens on a big bean bag chair — it’s clear they’re listening deeply and intently to each other. The sound is fuzzy and enveloping, shifting subtly; not in a hurry to be anywhere particular, except to be here now.
“We play the same songs totally differently from time to time,” says Silverman, “just spontaneously without any discussion of it.”
Despite being a veteran player and longtime fixture of the Nashville music community, Silverman has a giddy excitement in his voice when he talks about his bandmates. He’s in awe of the musicianship surrounding him.
“Sometimes I’ll have a set list, but someone will just start playing part of another tune — and we just start playing it, but maybe in a completely different groove,” he says. “You can take these motifs … that are the same song and approach [them] totally differently. I kind of always lean to more psychedelic music, because it is music that I feel like is more transporting and immersive.”
After a 2022 show at The Blue Room, filmmaker Greg Mallozzi reached out to Silverman about contributing to the soundtrack of his forthcoming documentary Mind Traveler. The doc follows Andrija Puharich, a fringe scientist who studied parapsychology and extrasensory perception — for a portion of his career, at the behest of the U.S. government.
“I realized that some of my favorite music is movie soundtrack music, and so that was kind of the impetus,” says Silverman. “We got a little money and we’re like, ‘Oh, OK, we can go in the studio and work on this tune for the movie’ — and thus came the album.”
While an obvious touchstone is the dusty spaghetti-Western symphonics of Ennio Morricone, the quartet’s melodic approach recalls Henry Mancini’s tautness and Lalo Schrifin’s sense of effortless cool. Produced by Roger Moutenout and featuring guest fiddle player John Mailander, Prince of Shadows explores its tonal ideas in a circular manner befitting a film — and indeed the far-out character at the center of this film — with patterns that dissolve and return in new forms. The quartet shows off their sense of humor in how they play with this: The slippery, catchy and distinctive modal motifs in the titular tune show up in new contexts in two other compositions, and their titles are anagrams of the original: “Phasic Fernwoods” and “ESP Fashion Crowd.”
From the gnarly rumble of “Transliminal Criminal” to the old-school jazz bass lines and dubby reverberant space of “Nightfall on the Nile,” Prince of Shadows connects with undersung guitar explorers of the past — think George Benson’s CTI Records catalog or Funk Brother Dennis Coffey’s solo work — without getting caught in the formalism of nostalgia. Even separate from the context of the film, the LP offers up a deep text to engage with and explore, but never discourages the listener from just vibing. The ensemble slips big ideas into interstitial spaces, gliding gleefully into a future where genre and the constriction of categorization are a thing of the past.
