Discover Catharsis With Jazz Quintet’s ‘Find The Common, Shine A Light’

In the past 16 years, trombonist and bandleader Ryan Keberle said, he’s “lived in just about every possible neighborhood in all of central Brooklyn: North Slope, South Slope, Park Slope, Prospect Heights, Carroll Gardens, Greenwood Heights.” For both Keberle and his wife, their current home on Eastern Parkway just across from the Brooklyn Museum “is by far our favorite spot,” he said.

Part of the charm for Keberle is in the neighborhood itself. “We love the feel on Eastern Parkway and the kind of peaceful setting that the street has, and the cultural center with the museum, the library, and the farmer’s market,” Keberle explained. But Brooklyn’s status as a center for jazz is also a big part of the draw. “It’s absolutely a real community of jazz artists. That’s exactly why people moved to and still live in Brooklyn. At least a few days a week I’m playing rehearsals and sessions and gigs in Brooklyn and it would be hard to live anywhere else.”

Keberle worries that the jazz community here is fragile, threatened by the same climate of “unrest, uncertainty and fear” that inspired the latest album by his quintet, Catharsis. The group will debut Find the Common, Shine a Light at a July 5 show at The Jazz Standard. The record was conceived just after November’s presidential election and recorded just before the inauguration, but Keberle said the record is a protest against more than Trump’s victory.

“It’s a little bit deeper than the presidential election and current administration. It’s something that’s been happening a long time, and that is our capitalist society running out of control,” Keberle said.

He fears that Brooklyn, and the artistic community that has developed here, is threatened by the same “greedy, corporate, oligarchical society.”

“Brooklyn wasn’t always the artistic center that it has been for the past 15 or 20 years,” he said, “and it’s not going to be if these trends continue. I was just having this conversation with a young vocalist who graduated from the New School. I was asking her where she lived, and she lives in Bushwick, which is I think where most young artists are moving to. She has a real two-bedroom apartment; she’s “only”—I put only in quotation marks—paying $1,350 per person for a two-bedroom apartment.”

“That to me is ludicrous. How are they going afford to stay in New York for the amount of time it takes most people to really make it when they’re paying $1,350 a month in rent, probably $1,000 a month at least in student loans?” Keberle asked, “How far out are you willing to move, how shitty a neighborhood are artists willing to live in to stay in New York City? I don’t think it’s a sustainable trend. I hope in five or ten years from now, some of these neighborhoods will still maintain their character and will still be a haven for artists. I can’t say I’m optimistic at the moment.”

The drive to create an album that challenges the troubling political developments Keberle was seeing resulted in a stylistic shift for Catharsis. Beginning as a quartet seven years ago (and later adding Camila Meza as a vocalist), the group was shaped by a lineup that didn’t include a chordal instrument. Catharsis features trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, bassist Jorge Roeder, and drummer Eric Doob alongside Keberle on trombone. But when working on “Become the Water,” the protest anthem that opens the record, Keberle found the non-chordal approach didn’t work.

“I couldn’t figure out a way to let the music speak in the way it needed to speak,” he said. The trombonist, whose first instrument was piano, decided to use a Fender Rhodes (piano) on the track to deliver the “harmonic and emotive qualities” necessary in the song he describes as a plea to “find commonality as a country.”

That strategy succeeds gloriously, with the ringing keyboard chords providing a bed for the plangent horns. Meza’s vocals are a chant and an invocation: “Become the water / Put out the fire / Find the common / Shine a light.”

The song turned a key for the band, Keberle said. “What that did—and this is the exciting thing about having a working band—is it opened up a new door for us. Since we’re now including chordal instruments, Camila (whose first instrument is guitar, not voice) brought her guitar. We began discovering new and exciting sounds for her guitar to produce as well, not always a chordal setting, but like the track, “Ancient Theory,” you’ll hear her singing this wordless melody in unison with her guitar, and that was an exciting song for us to do.”

“One of the great things about leading a band,” he said, “is you never really know where the music is going to go. Some bandleaders try very hard to keep their finger on that process, to keep their own personal direction as kind of a dictating force. But for me, working with these literally genius musicians, the excitement has come lots of times from letting them dictate where the music can go. And this is where we wound up now, with this latest album. There are chords all over the place!”

That the new direction grew from the group’s decision to record an explicitly political record, Keberle said, is consistent with the development of jazz as an art form. “Jazz has a history and a legacy that people continue to be inspired by and carry forward. Jazz has historically been all about change and all about revolution and working against the status quo to heighten the musical experience.”

That has sometimes offered musicians the opportunity to directly advance social justice. “Jazz was one of the first places in our society that we saw integration amongst races,” Keberle pointed out. “Ten years before Jackie Robinson crossed the racial barrier, Benny Goodman was hiring Teddy Wilson on piano.”

Music can also have a more diffuse political effect that Catharsis hoped to capture, he said. “Any creative art, whether it’s music or visual art or film, written work, encourages critical thought. It inspires people to seek a better life for themselves. Music specifically, because it’s a universal language, and can be a language without words, can be especially intimidating to powerful figures at the top because it’s not something that’s silenced easily.”

Find the Common, Find the Light was released on Greenleaf Music on June 16. Ryan Keberle and Catharsis will play two shows at The Jazz Standard (116 East 27th Street in Manhattan) on July 5 at 7:30pm and 9:30pm.

The lineup for the performances features Scott Robinson on saxophone, Camila Meza on guitar and vocals, Jorge Roeder on bass, and Obed Calvaire on drums.