No Johnny-come-lately

It may have taken nearly two decades in coming, but Johnny Alegre’s first bona fide album is finally here, and it’s like he never left. Alegre’s new band and CD Affinity, which gathers arguably the best jazz ensemble players hereabouts, represents a new watermark in the music, and helps reassure that good things indeed come to those who wait.

It’s been quite a while, and as far as we can remember Johnny has been threatening to come out with an album complete with his "sidemen," but we can forgive him his occasional perceived arrogance after a few listenings to the CD (technology has finally caught up with him because vinyl waits for no one) on the Candid label, from the opening hypnotic strains of East Indies to the fading embers of Remember Now, because what we get is a musicianship as stunning and candid as can be. In a certain mellow tone too Alegre is like Einstein –or is it Eisenstein –because once Affinity plays we can throw all concepts of time and space to the wind and concentrate on the ever present and ethereal now. Everything is relative as the music plays.

We’re not too familiar with the technical terms, but we know a good thing when we hear it. Alegre anyway has the good fortune of having a band on the same level as him: some veterans on the progressive jazz scene (think ECM-type), a couple from the relatively new wave though still grounded on the masters. Saxophonist Tots Tolentino is an old classmate of Johnny’s at the UP Conservatory in the mid to late 1970s, both pioneering members of the university Jazz Ensemble; bassist Colby dela Calzada an old colleague of his since the RJ parking lot concerts when Colby was with Mother Earth and Johnny with Phase II, which even then were already trying to rearrange and stretch the boundaries of rock and jazz; and the relatively younger duo of drummer Koko Bermejo, like many of his predecessors educated in a music school abroad and founding member of the space jazz oddity, Wdouji, and pianist Elhmir Saison from the family with rhythm running through their veins.

Johnny, as expected of a guy with an inner ear, writes all but one of the songs on the CD, Groove, where Dela Calzada takes credit. The fourth song in the program, Wind and Water/Stones of Intramuros, tips the band’s collective hat to the late national artist Nick Joaquin, certainly no strange bedfellow to the music of Affinity, which for the most part is a delicate blend of aural dynamics balanced on a high wire, each player knowing when to weave in and out much like that green volume monitor in the dark.

Guardian Angel, song two, could be just that. The playful Jazzhound, which follows, has Johnny wearing his influences on his sleeve, all the favorite things he’s learned from Akasha lane to the present Uncle John’s Band –the Crusaders, Stanley Clarke, Geroge Benson, et al. He and the band got jive alright.

Other times Alegre, whose name sounds like a musical notation, pays tribute to the more progressive school of Ornette Coleman, as heard on the sustained guitar distortions on the cut Vertigo, or of Coltrane as evidenced in the lush glimpses of introspection pervading sections of songs, and where the band become more than the sum of their parts.

Groove we might have heard Dela Calzada do a rendition of in the old Monk’s Dream on Jupiter Street, and helps explain why jazz sounds like a world removed in a smoky club, and why the bass is the glue that holds the ether together.

Apparently we can’t say enough about Affinity, neither Alegre who keeps a lower profile than a Metheny, nor Saison who constantly dreams of ivory; neither Dela Calzada whose road to redemption can be found in the frets of the thick-stringed bass, nor Tolentino coloring our world with shadows and light, even Bermejo who first made us understand that there is no Pinoy, American or Cajun jazz, only jazz.

Good things come to those who wait, far and away from an apartment on Arayat Street, Cubao where Alegre pounded the table while being interviewed for Jingle magazine, to the CCP where the guitarist magically turned an art exhibit into a classical concert, to a beach in Boracay where the nude bathers presented to no Johnny-come-lately a version of epiphany, to a second floor university mall off De La Salle where this genius and arrogant madman pounded the table again over pitchers of beer because he got rhythm, man, he got rhythm, all we have to do is listen.