Search - Rich Woodson, Ellipsis :: Control & Resistance

Guitarist-composer Rich Woodson spent his formative years playing in Austin, Texas, rock bands, but that background doesn't immediately come to mind in the debut of his band Ellipsis. Instead, it's a tight collection of players from New York's Downtown scene, schooled in free jazz and adept at wending their way through PoMo mysteries. They're well-suited to Woodson's music, an oblique mix of jazz and rock sonorities wedded to an original structural methodology. Each of his pieces here is a sudden complex of elements, a patchwork of shifting beats and motifs that creates its own logic. Tension figures build only to suddenly stop; distorted guitar is matched with bowed bass; moments of rare lyricism are jolted by anarchic bursts. In fact, the pieces are a lot like their titles, perverse weddings of the routine and the bizarre, invocations of a world where chaos and repression leisurely walk hand in hand. The band includes saxophonists Aaron Stewart and Peter Epstein, bassist Mat Fieldes, and drummer John Hollenbeck, and they do a brilliant job of making the parts fit together, blurring the lines between the composed, the conducted, and the spontaneous. Woodson has cited the influence of saxophonist Tim Berne, composer Charles Wuorinen, and rock bad boy Frank Zappa, and listeners will likely add Captain Beefheart's Magic Band to the list, but Woodson's an original. With Ellipsis, he's assembled a fine instrument for realizing his vision. --Stuart Broomer