Marc Cary doesn’t live in the Bay Area, but he’s got the next best thing. The New York City pianist and keyboardist has long maintained one of the best working combos in jazz, the Focus Trio, which is built on a rhythm section tandem with deep roots in the East Bay.
Featuring Berkeley-reared bassist David Ewell and Fremont-raised drummer and tabla player Sameer Gupta, the combo celebrated 20 years together with a three-night run at Black Cat last week, joined by special guest Elijah Easton, an impressive young tenor saxophonist from Washington, D.C. At the packed final show on Saturday night, Jan. 11, the group was in expansive form, stretching out on a program that embodied many of Cary’s gifts as a musical explorer.
A brilliant synthesist who cut his teeth in the ensembles of singular artists such as vocalist and songwriter Abbey Lincoln and drummer Arthur Taylor, Cary commands a large swath of the jazz piano continuum, summoning the touch and harmonic palette of Duke Ellington and McCoy Tyner with ringing chordal clusters. Cary is similarly fluent in keyboard pyrotechnics, unfurling thick guitar-like lines that create bright timbral contrasts.
Drawing on the Focus Trio’s deep well of music, Cary opened the set with the “AIM Song,” an incantatory piece deployed by the American Indian Movement during the takeover of Wounded Knee in 1973. “Taiwa,” a piece the trio recorded live at San Francisco’s Red Poppy Art House back in 2007, evolved considerably, flowing into an ecstatic ballad. Black Cat isn’t always the quietest room, but Cary and company seemed to cast a potent spell that hushed the audience.
Easton, a quick-thinking player with whom I was previously unfamiliar, is clearly an artist to keep an eye on. On a duo passage with Gupta, he built tantalizing tension with a succession of long, finely sculpted phrases. But it was the volatile axis of Gupta and Ewell that compelled attention. Moving in sync, their preternatural control of dynamics buoyed and propelled Cary’s flights, whether he was hinting at a melody by Pharoah Sanders or artfully reciting Langston Hughes’s jazz poem “Harlem” (also known as “A Dream Deferred”).
Gupta and Ewell will be back in action together in a very different setting that emerged around the same time as the Focus Trio in the 1990s. The two players will anchor a three-night residency Jan. 30 – Feb. 1 at the Wyldflowr performance space in Oakland with their spiritually charged free improv quartet, The Supplicants, which features saxophonists Richard Howell and David Boyce. It’s a balm to see Gupta back in the Bay Area after his years in Brooklyn, breathing new life into projects that grew out of the fecund era before the tech industry transformed San Francisco.
