'CHICAGO' SHOW REPORT
Damon Locks > Tomeka Reid > Nicole Mitchell > Jeff Parker (Continuous Performance via Solos & Duos) / Experimental Sound Studios Quarantine Concerts / May 28, 2020
The post-pandemic flourish of live-streamed shelter-in-place concerts has not particularly excited me, but I can’t deny that Chicago’s own Experimental Sound Studio is presenting at a very high level with their all-remote Quarantine Concerts series, featuring great musicians almost nightly since the shutdown began. That said, the only one I’d attended previously was a bit of a letdown. It was Damon Smith, Jaimie Branch, Andrew Scott Young, and Ryan Jewell, and believe me, all four are great players, but the lo-fi footage and unstable audio inherent to the medium, and especially the fact that they weren’t able to interact in real time, all made me long to hear a live ensemble, hurtling into grooves with ensemble momentum, crackling back and forth in real time repartee. (I mean, just imagine Branch/Smith/Young/Jewell as a two-bass trumpet quartet burning live in a good room!) I know the problem is latency (“the delay before a transfer of data begins following an instruction for its tran…