Sangeeta Michael Berardi: Earth Ship

 What a joy to have Sangeeta Michael Berardi’s Earthship, launched in 1996 and roving ever since in the deepest corners of the cosmos, reappear in the sphere of terrestrial hearing. Recorded in Woodstock, New York, it’s only taken 12 years to reach your ears, but the music and the spirit that quickens it are so fresh, the sessions might have taken place this morning.

Sangeeta, or Geeta to his friends (who number, at last count, roughly a hundred-thousand – it’s impossible not to love this cat, who looks like the offspring of a yogi and a gnome), has been a hidden giant on the improvisational music scene since the late ’60s.

 Although he’s played from Connecticut to the Catskills to California to Cassiopeia with nearly everyone in the post-Trane pantheon, this CD represents only his second commercially released recording as a leader, the first being an eponymous 1980 LP with Archie Shepp, Rashied Ali, Roswell Rudd, Eddie Gomez, and Mario Pavone.

  His creative co-conspirators on Earthship are equally exquisite – Jim Finn, tenor sax and flute; Hilliard Greene, bass; Peter O’Brien, drums; and co-producer John Esposito, piano (plus tubs, on three cuts).

As befits the generosity – the questing, collaborative nature – of these sessions, four of the nine tracks were “co-created spontaneously in Real Time,” which is to say, in Eternity. These include a lovely pair of guitar and flute duets between Geeta and Finn: “Sahara Song,” which evokes, for me, not so much a wind riffing in the dunes as the intensely melodic voices of the Mbuti people of the Ituri rain forest; and “Evening, Woodstock,” a tiny gem whose crepuscular chordings and pensive fluting combine to make a haunting musical haiku.

Sangeeta, who played tenor saxophone back in the day, before physical problems made him curtail his blowing, has long been a devotee of John Coltrane, and the master is paid homage on this CD – in the titles of two tracks, in various quotes and echoes, and in the choice of “My Favorite Things,” that Richard Rodgers classic so memorably transfigured by Trane. The latter is proof positive that Geeta’s devotion to Coltrane has nothing to do with slavish imitation. We first glimpse the tune in a shimmering, muted wash of pedaled chords, as if heard through the veil of a waterfall in a crystal cave. This lyrical apparition is double-tracked with Geeta’s robust digressions on the melody in the foreground, backed by Peter O’Brien’s fully present drums and percussion. Far from being the sincerest form of flattery, this Geeta-Geeta duet is a fresh take on the old tune, a new favorite thing under the sun.

Calling Coltrane, a second selection of work from the Woodstock sessions, will be released by SunJump Records in the spring of 2009. Till then, we can soar and sail on this skyworthy Earthship from the Yoda of free jazz – the melodic, harmolodic, dharmalodic, and karmalodic Sangeeta Michael Berardi.

– Mikhail Horowitz