Reviews
The Boston-based trio Mi3 features the talents of pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, bassist Nate McBride and drummer Curt Newton. Free Advice is the studio follow-up to their live recording We Will Make A Home For You (Clean Feed), one of 2005's most sonically audacious debuts. Invoking a wealth of traditional antecedents and sublime advancements, the trio delivers an ageless acoustic set every bit as intense as its electric debut, with even greater dynamic range.

Widely praised for its gritty electronic textures, courtesy of a heavily effects-laden Fender Rhodes, their premier was a discographical anomaly for Karayorgis, who returns to his original instrument, the grand piano on this session.

Maintaining a steady presence in the Boston free jazz scene since meeting at the New England Conservatory of Music in the early 1990s, Karayorgis, McBride and Newton have honed their interplay to virtually clairvoyant levels.

Embracing a mix of Post-War influences, Karayorgis reveals a fondness for the kinetic dissonance of Cecil Taylor, the abstruse lyricism of Thelonious Monk, the harmonic ingenuity of Andrew Hill and the knotty counterpoint of Lennie Tristano. A conceptual maverick, he weaves these various threads together with the flair of Ellington at his most adventurous.

As regular collaborators of guitarist Joe Morris and the rhythm section for saxophonist Ken Vandermark's Tripleplay trio, McBride and Newton have repeatedly demonstrated an intuitive rapport. Whether shifting meters, modulating time signatures or engaging in free form call and response, they retain control over the most skeletal of structures.

Mixing obscure masterpieces from legends like Duke Ellington (”The Mystery Song” and “Warm Valley”) Hassan Ibn Ali (”Almost Like Me”) and Sun Ra (”Ankhnaton”) with a mix of edgy originals, the trio unveils a keen awareness of tradition that lends an historical perspective to their adventurous spirit.

Delivered with a simmering, noirish sensibility, “The Mystery Song” reveals an aspect often overlooked in the Duke's oeuvre, but it is on Hassan's angularly descending “Almost Like Me” that the trio finds true accord. Having covered “Three-Four vs. Six-Eight Four-Four Ways” on its debut, the trio again tackles the composer's layered rhythms and complex harmonic patterns, navigating the labyrinthine structure with puckish glee and deconstructive brio.

Negotiating the Monkish angles of “Who Said What When” and “Fink Sink Tink,” the trio careens through quirky meters and asymmetrical melodies with vivacious delight. “Spinach Pie” and “Case In Point” employ Tristano's thorny sense of melody and halting rhythm, while the bluesy and plaintive Ellington ballad, “Warm Valley,” displays a tender side of the trio.

A strong outing recalling the heady trio interaction of Money Jungle (Blue Note, 1962) and Featuring the Legendary Hassan (Atlantic, 1965), Free Advice is a timeless trio masterpiece destined to surprise listeners for years to come.
Troy Collins, All About Jazz, January 2008 (link)

Different piano, same go-for-broke attitude.
Mi3’s debut We Will Make a Home for You, released in 2005, boasted happily raucous versions of tunes by Thelonious Monk and Eric Dolphy. Pandelis Karayorgis played electric piano there. On this even-better sequel, the not-as-famous-as-he-oughta-be Bostonian is back on his customary acoustic piano; the repertoire is mostly original, but the go-for-broke attitude is the same. Karayorgis, drummer Curt Newton and bassist Nate McBride have played together a lot since the early ’90s, and have a loose, tough, push-pull sensibility — they engage in the kind of rhythmic high-wire work that comes from having partners you can count on. At times Mi3 come off like a trio of slamming percussionists — as on “Fink Sink Tink,” which sounds like a lost Monk tune. The bassist and drummer’s aggressive (but always musical) approach makes this more equilateral than most piano triangles. The trio covers Ellington’s “Mystery Song” and “Warm Valley” (the latter appropriately tender), but the standout is one of Sun Ra’s loopy anthems, “Ankhnaton,” which starts Sun-ny style but which they soon make their own.
Kevin Whitehead, eMusic (link)

mi3 are Pandelis Karayorgis (piano), Nate McBride (bass) and Curt Newton (drums). A trio that works on a multitude of levels, with an evident influence: Thelonious Monk, despite the absence of Monk pieces in this album (instead, Duke Ellington and Sun Ra tunes are featured). The M-factor is especially explicit in the leader’s style, which privileges frequent tangential runs and semi-flourished chords in which minor second intervals are dropped like obvious consonances. But it’s not all there: Karayorgis is also very adept in polyrhythms, the composed meters that he displays throughout “Case in point” constituting a great example of fresh virtuosity over a freely swinging, liberal rhythm section. Speaking of which, McBride confirms himself as one of the most interesting bassists around, his timbre at once marauding and tradition-rooted, the interpretation always perfectly on cue with what the screenwriting of an improvisation calls for. On the opposite side, Newton is the third of a perfect pair, in that his fragmented percussive curiosity indemnifies those - such as this listener - whose capacity of bearing jazz’s “codified freedom” has sunk to an all-time low. This music is not literally unpredictable, mind you; yet the drift-anchor elements that it contains are more welcome than undesirable, providing a few points that, once linked, define an already well-developed sketch. A large-minded method of approaching one’s past while keeping both eyes on the future.
Massimo Ricci, Touching Extremes (link, about)

Pianist Pandelis Karayorgis, bassist Nate McBride and drummer Curt Newton formed mi3 as the house band for a series called MIM—“Modern Improvised Music”—that McBride curated in Boston. The group’s first album, We Will Make a Home for You, largely recorded in the storage room above a dry cleaner that had been converted into an art gallery, was electrifying, with Karayorgis playing, out of necessity, the Fender Rhodes electric piano. For their second album, Karayorgis switches to his main instrument, the acoustic piano, but the results are no less electric.

Karayorgis has absorbed and internalized the likes of Thelonious Monk, Andrew Hill, Cecil Taylor, Matthew Shipp and probably plenty of other left-of-center pianists from across the generations. Bebop informs his style, but he trades in contrast and open space. Angular phrasings and sharp-edged chords define tunes like mi3’s rendition of Duke Ellington’s “The Mystery Song” and the Monk-inspired Karayorgis original “Fink Sink Tink,” and he gets a speedy workout on his “Case in Point,” both hands darting up and down the keys.

Newton rarely just taps out the rhythm, choosing instead to improvise against the implied beat, and McBride plays freer than many bassists would feel comfortable doing. On “Who Said What When,” each player seems to be doing his own thing, but then it all gels. No one is soloing per se; someone decides it’s go time, and the others step out of the way. When they decide to play it straight, they’re equally compelling.
Steve Greenlee, Jazz Times, April 2008

Liner notes by Stuart Broomer
The members of mi3 are veterans of the Boston free jazz scene who have worked together for years, but this band's genesis took place in 2002 under special circumstances when Nate McBride was hosting a series called “mim” (modern improvised music) at Boston's Abbey Lounge, a tavern without a piano that was usually home to rock bands. Mi3 became the house trio with Pandelis Karayorgis playing electric piano. The results of the experience (both in situ and in the studio) were collected on We Will Make a Home for You (on Clean Feed), a notable release from 2005. The electric incarnation of mi3 might suggest what certain very high profile piano trios should sound like, combining some of the drive and riff-driven energy of electrified music with the fluid, complex creativity of jazz.

What's intriguing about that genesis is the way it influences the acoustic music of mi3 heard here, as Karayorgis turns to his customary grand piano. The electric beginnings give the group a distinct energy that's not usual in a piano trio, and it may come from the way piano lines (and chords too) seem to get pared down on an electric piano. The experience may have enhanced Karayorgis's percussive specificity and the particular drive that this band possesses.    

But there's far more to the energy here than just the experience of playing electric. These musicians embody the special energy of the Boston scene and its capacity for simultaneous thought and action. Collectively they've worked with a spectrum of New England musicians, including Charlie Kohlhase, Joe and Mat Maneri and Randy Peterson. Nate McBride and Curt Newton have previously worked in trios with Ken Vandermark (a Boston native) and Joe Morris, so there's a special cohesion here too.

Significantly, Karayorgis, McBride and Newton all have degrees from the New England Conservatory, where they met in the early '90s. Home to such great figures (performers, composers and theoreticians) as George Russell, Jimmy Giuffre, Ran Blake, Paul Bley and Joe Maneri, the Conservatory embodies a rigorously intellectual and visionary stream that ran through bop, cool, third stream and free jazz, long providing coherence amidst apparent division. While much of American jazz (and “jazz ed”) was simply dumbing down, becoming adamantly commercial, reactionary or both, the New England Conservatory became a sanctuary. It has helped launch the careers of international figures like Don Byron and Satoko Fujii, but it's also had a profound effect on the Boston community. Much of Boston jazz is different—edgy, spontaneous, probing and deeply thoughtful—and some of it must come from that presence, including Joe Maneri's unique emphasis on microtonality with its radical instability.

Mi3 has a distinct relationship with the tradition, both in its broadest parameters and in the influence of some critical (and often overlooked) figures. There's an abstract energy in Karayorgis's flights that signals the substantial presence of Lennie Tristano in his listening, a reaching outward to the harmonic limits in those spiralling runs. Similarly, Nate McBride can suggest the bass playing of Charles Mingus, evident in the expressive note bending and propulsive drive. The band's greatest achievement, though, is the individual and collective ability to maintain a brilliantly casual balance between form and freedom, with Karayorgis's knots and splashes, McBride's suddenly flashing runs and Newton's furiously-random-sounding knitting of metallic percussion sounds all suddenly lining up in perfect accord.       

On the previous CD, four of the nine tunes were by Thelonious Monk and there's a distinct relationship to Monk's music in mi3's work. While American jazz musicians have tended to “normalize” Monk, Karayorgis is closer to the European tradition of radical Monk advocates, like Alexander von Schlippenbach, Mischa Mengelberg and Irene Schweizer.   While there are no Monk tunes here, he might provide some of the historical perspective through which this music is constructed, an erratic jauntiness that informs Karayorgis's writing, as in the consciously Monkian “Fink Sink Tink.” As the composer describes it, “‘Fink Sink Tink' is a blues I wrote in 2004 using a couple of Monkian techniques: a repeated figure that is moved to different parts of the measure and a prominent flatted 5th in the melody. Of course it's in Bb like all of Monk's Blues! The title comes from the different ways my daughter and two of her friends pronounced the word ‘Think' when they were toddlers.” The Monkish playfulness also comes through in some of the brilliantly timed keyboard splashes of “Spinach Pie,” while “Case in Point” provides another view of a Karayorgis composition first heard on Disambiguation (on Leo) by a quintet co-led by the pianist and Mat Maneri. It's a two-part tune, the first section a duet between Karayorgis and Newton, the second a Tristano-inspired line.

Nate McBride brought in Ellington's “Mystery Song” having been first exposed to it in a 1961 version by Steve Lacy. It's definitely Ellington the radical who's heard here, whether filtered through Lacy's piano-less quartet and Monkian view or through his own explorations, as Karayorgis explains the presence of “Warm Valley”: “It's one of my favorite Ellington ballads. I suggested using it because I was looking for a Strayhorn/Ellington ballad with rich harmonies and strong melody, plus I loved the Money Jungle version! We have developed a way of working on such ballads that I think is well suited for this tune.”   Invoking Ellington's brilliant encounter with Charles Mingus and Max Roach is emblematic of this group's appreciation of the piano trio at its most aggressively interactive. Nate McBride has performed an especially vital service in reviving the compositions of the largely overlooked Philadephia pianist Hasaan Ibn Ali. Hasaan influenced John Coltrane's harmonic conception (along with Dennis Sandole), but his only issued recording came in 1964 when he made The Max Roach Trio Featuring the Legendary Hasaan . The album has proven a treasure trove for mi3, who recorded Hasaan's “Three-Four vs. Six-Eight Four-Four Ways” on We Will Make a Home for You and here perform “Almost Like Me.” Hasaan was a master at integrating rhythmic and harmonic complexity and the combination is a paradigm for the music that mi3 makes. The rhythmic layering is particularly delightful here, with Newton freeplay tumbling across Karayorgis's walking left hand. Sun Ra's “Ankhnaton,” first recorded in 1960 on Fate in a Pleasant Mood , manages here to be both stately and exotic, its ostinato summoning Ra's imaginative Egypt.

There's something in mi3's bar-band beginnings that unites it to the tradition, the almost covert creativity that Ellington practiced in the Cotton Club, Hasaan in the R&B bands that meant steady employment, or Sun Ra in the world re-enacted in the fictive show-bar of Space Is the Place . There might even be a reason why that name mi3 suggests a kind of secret service, and why the band gravitates to strong tunes and assertive bass patterns. The band's music is insistently plural, a complex art that can survive indifference and adversity to communicate on many levels.

Stuart Broomer

May 2006