Jazz + Okonomiyaki
Frenzy. Klezmer. Wistful. Surreal. Words we scrawl at a café table in the dark while listening to Adam Matlock play the accordion. It’s a beguiling instrument with pale blue bellows, and his stare is fixed above it as he composes. Matlock’s music unfurls like ribbons. Complex knots of sound unravel and he reties them into new shapes: lonely serenade, haunted carnival. Behind him, drummer Thomas Hogan layers cymbals with a militant snare, and Jeff Cedrone and Bob Gorry’s plucked guitar strings ooze reverb like drops of oil. This is Elm Fiction, the opening set of Multiplex: a new improvisational series on Sunday afternoons at the State House in New Haven. Launched in early 2019 by Gorry and fellow musician Joe Morris, the experiment will return every 6 weeks or so and present differently each time—an example of this industrial venue’s fresh programming approach.
Adjusting the mood, alto saxophonist Chris Pitsiokos disrupts the room with the energy of a whirring freeway. His chaotic punk jazz shifts from alluring to sharp, lulling with rich melodies before sliding into screeches, croaks, blares, and trills, as he holds notes higher and longer—pushing human limitation. Pitsiokos’s sax is an engine producing and producing and producing in the low lavender stage light.
Around the corner in Ninth Square, Kuro Shiro serves a dish as unexpected as the music of Multiplex. Their okonomiyaki, or Japanese pancake, is somewhere between flapjack and latke, its batter flecked with shredded cabbage and griddled until the edges are crisp around a springy center. Each bite is savory with seafood—tiny shrimp, slices of tentacle—and glossed with mayo and a sweet soy-based sauce. Warm from the kitchen, the plate arrives tableside covered in wriggling wisps the color of wood shavings: katsuobushi, or parchment-thin tuna flakes that are dried, fermented, and smoked. Hot steam makes them wave like anemone underwater, evocative of their funky marine flavor, and they continue their improvised sway while you eat.
2/14/2019