Tone poetry of jazz heard at Bears

Sara Caswell and her band took the stage Thursday at Bear's Place to celebrate her first CD, First Song, recently released on Double Time Records. The concert featured a mix of songs from her CD and old standards.\nAt its heart, jazz is a series of tone poems, with the music evoking other senses: a rainy night, a sunny day, a bittersweet parting, a playful kitten, a hipster swinging down the street. This tone poetry came through well in front of a crowd of 80 or so patrons at Bear's.\nCaswell, a recent IU graduate, is becoming a master at playing the violin, arranging songs and mixing them into sets, at bringing out the best in her band and at letting them bring out the best in her. As she has accumulated experience, Caswell's playing has gotten progressively more confident. \nOver the course of the few years since her undergraduate days at IU, she has gone from a talented, but sometimes tentative and shy person, to someone in command of herself, her music and her surroundings.\nHer vibrato was very evident on "When Sunny Gets Blue," helping to evoke a slide from sunniness to discouragement. Perhaps most noticeable was the ability she has to match her sister Rachel's voice with her violin. During "Charms of the Night Sky," Rachel's scat singing blended with the smooth ligato of Sara's violin until it became, at times, hard to tell the two apart. Both sisters managed to achieve an eerie quality that evoked images of a beautiful night sky and the pleasures of sitting back in the grass and watching the moon and the stars.\nIn "Sneezin'" Sara used a lot of detache (quick bow movements) to produce crisp articulation, matching Rachel's bouncy scat of "dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dub-dooah-duh."\nRachel and Sara's mother, Judy Caswell, commented on this, "Mark O'Connor said he's tried for years and years to blend voice and instrument. But it has to be a family thing."\nThe mixing and arranging of the songs was also impressive. In addition to the tunes from First Song, Caswell mixed in old standards such as "Sneezin'," "Got a Match?" and "Oleo." In Chick Corea's "Got a Match?" the opening bars sounded vaguely like a Slavic folk dance. In "When Sunny Gets Blue" the band achieved a low, mellow, almost bittersweet tone. One could almost imagine a sunny, cheerful person made blue by a streak of bad luck. It faded out with a C minor.\nIn "Anna's Song," written in memory of the Caswells' cat, Jack Helsley on bass and Luke Gillespie on piano had a nice little duet, evoking the pitter pattter of a cat's feet. Helsley, the ubiquitous bass man, has quick hands. After Helsley strummed and picked for most of the song on "Ifsahan," this reviewer looked down for an instant only to look up to see him with a bow in his hands deftly finishing off the song.\nLuke Gillespie got way down low in the register on "Bemsha Swing" and helped evoke the image of swinging down the street. David Miller, in addition to some very mellow mute work on the trumpet, also brought a flugelhorn for the songs in the second set. Pete Wilhoit, also a music school employee, did a nice steady job of background on the drums, though it would have been nice to see him get a chance to solo.\nIt might not have been a real weakness, but although the sisters achieved uncanny tonal similarity on the whole, they did not do so on "Useless Landscapes," a ballad from the CD. This is not to say they did a bad job individually, only that the tonal similarity was missing on this tune.\nThe only other weakness is that the announcing of the songs was inconsistent. Why not just run off some copies of the two set play list and put them on the tables with copies of coming attractions? This reviewer had a list, but the patrons didn't and that would have been a nice touch.\nBut these are minor quibbles. It was a well-matched group. The band's rapport was great and the band members seemed to complement each other in all the right places.\nOne watcher, a tall blond fellow, put it well as he stood in the cool of the evening after it had just finished raining.\n"She smoked it"