Concert Review

Boston’s version of what New York calls a downtown jazz scene moved uptown Wednesday night, when the Fully Celebrated Orchestra and Joe Morris’s quartet made their double debut at the Regattabar. The knowing enthusiasm of the full house suggested that alternative audiences are willing to patronize mainstream venues when the music is appealing, and except for the FCO’s suits, the bands made no concessions to their new surroundings.

The FCO, now a quartet with the addition of trumpeter Keici hashimoto, opened with a keenly paced and impressively executed eight-tune set. The band’s core instincts involve bold, expressionistic playing, and Django Carranza drums with emphatic glee, Timo Shanko furiously plucks and bows his bass, and leader Jim Hobbs’s alto sax exudes passion. These emotions are channeled through compositions that span a variety of moods, and that on Wednesday led listeners from relative calm to frenzy. Indian raga, free-form swing, waltz, ballad, Latin, and funk rhythms were employed before the climactic rave that gained in impact from the preceding variety.

Hashimoto is a valuable addition to a band that seemed in no particular need of fixing. He blends beautifully with Hobbs and Shanko in ensembles that might be described as shaded unisons; and his solos, uncommonly clean for free brass playing, are of a piece with the leader’s hypnotically intense statements while employing far fewer notes. The trumpet-alto-sax blend moves the FCO away from a previous similarity to the late Thomas Chapin’s trio, while the diversity of the compositions avoids mere rehashes of Ornette Coleman and Don Cherry.

Bob Blumenthal,
The Boston Globe
March 12, 1999