by Angela Sutton
Monday night found Mikarimba at dromNYC in the East Village, bringing their music back to a club setting after a recent performance at Carnegie Hall. The basic band is a four-piece consisting of Eddie Gomez, bass; Duke Gadd, drums; Teriver Cheung, guitar; and Mika Yoshida-Stoltzman, marimba. The members rotated on and off, sometimes including Mika's husband, Richard Stoltzman on clarinet, forming a variety of combos from duo to quintet.
With a few exceptions, the tunes were a conservative mix of swing, be-bop, and Latin jazz, all of it wonderfully executed. Yoshida-Stoltzman's grand marimba dominated the stage: she bopped up and down its length, her energy never flagging. She primarily used four mallets, changing up the instrument's tone with a variety of mallet heads.
The centerpiece was Yoshida-Stoltzman's arrangement of Maurice Ravel's Pavane for a Dead Princess, for marimba and clarinet. The marimba's ghostly bass ringing several octaves below Ravel's melancholy melody in the clarinet was both creepy and wistful at once.
Stoltzman, to his credit, seemed to relax into the music effortlessly. In the jazz standards, such as a group of Thelonious Monk tunes he played with Gomez, he also showed an uncanny ability to coax saxophone sounds out of the clarinet. Gomez's bass playing was perhaps the least traditional of anyone: harmonics, bowing on the wood, slapping strings, and other possibilities of bass sound all showed up somewhere in the set. His work in the traditional Japanese tune he shared with marimba was particularly thrilling.
Mikarimba actively solicits compositions from jazz composers worldwide, so I am sure we have not heard the last from this group.