The Pieces

Keith DeStefano's crazy Puzzlebox comes together.


	print	email	reply	rss feed

Published: Apr 20, 2010

[ jigsaw jazz ]

When the conversation turns to Puzzlebox's epic "6:25 PM" on the new A Place to Be CD, pianist Anam Owili-Eger says something puzzling:

"It's a Keith DeStefano primer in that it contains bits of the different types of tensions and consonances in his crazy head," he says. "It has strange melodies and others conventionally melodic, traditional rhythms as well as polyrhythms, and nodes of tension as well as other sorts of release."

Is this merely complicated jazz theory-speak, or is he saying his bandleader has is a little bit mad? Certainly, Philly bassist/composer DeStefano has walked a unique path. He's performed with area greats like Odean Pope and Tyrone Brown. He hosted Matt Davis and Dan Paterson in the original version of The Puzzlebox Experiment (2005's Just When I Thought) and acted as one-third of the electronic groove outfit Yellowbrain. Darkness? Complexity? He's been there.

"I always loved the way Mingus juxtaposed dramatically contrasting moods, and played around with extended forms," says DeStefano. During A Place to Be's centerpiece, "Half Remembered Theme from a Film Noir," where he's using elements of third-stream jazz, it's hard not to recall Gil Evans and Philly sax god Bobby Zankel, as well. "The harmonic structures in this CD are definitely denser than the first," he says. "There are a lot more darker moments."

It took awhile for DeStefano — awarded an American Composers Forum Subito grant for Just When I Thought — to follow up Puzzlebox's debut. "I wrote a whole lot of music and knew I wanted a bigger band, so I've expanded to an octet," says DeStefano, who got opened up to the textural possibilities of more instruments during his time with Pope. There he learned to combine arranged music with free jazz — see "Hair of the Dog" and "Onomatopoeia" on the new CD.

"You have to be extremely stubborn to maintain your vision over that long a period; you really need to have to have an irrational belief in yourself and what you're doing. Sometimes it's more psychotic than quixotic."

An integral part of DeStefano's psychosis and how it manifested itself on A Place to Be is his friendship with the Herbie Hancock-like Owili-Eger. If the first CD was casual, spontaneous and based upon compositions he had sitting around, DeStefano's new one is more challengingly self-referential, and therefore more difficult to find collaborators for. "Anam's a good friend, and my job is to make him as musically uncomfortable as possible, because that's when he plays best," teases DeStefano. "There's a 4-over-7 section in '6:25 PM' that'd scare the shit out of a lot of musicians, but he kills it. Amazing. I take it for granted that he's going to kill everything he plays."

"I didn't really like him when I first met him," jokes Owili-Eger. "As I got to know him as a musician, I realized how similar we were as people. If nothing else, we both like Jameson whiskey and hoppy beer."

Both men speak of Puzzlebox as an evolutionary process. It used to be like other jazz bands, in that everyone plays the head, a few people solo over the form, then the band plays the head out and the tune is done. In its latest form, the one we hear on A Place to Be, the music is more cinematic and orchestral.

"Even though the songs are tightly arranged, there're many sections where we have a lot of freedom to create and really push the songs into new theatrical places," says Owili-Eger. "He must have real trust in us to let us do that to his songs."

Either that or Keith DeStefano is mad.

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Puzzlebox plays Fri., April 23, 11:30 p.m., $10, Chris' Jazz Café, 1421 Sansom St., 215-568-3131, chrisjazzcafe.com.