Baritone Sax Goddess Moist Paula Henderson Explores Her More Devious Side

by delarue

Moist Paula Henderson is one of the world’s most distinctive and highly sought after baritone saxophonists. She got her nickname as the co-leader of legendary downtown punk-dance sax-bass-drums trio Moisturizer. She’s toured the world with avant jazz collective Burnt Sugar, noir rock crooner Nick Waterhouse and oldtime blues marauder C.W. Stoneking, among others. She’s also the not-so-secret weapon in Rev. Vince Anderson’s ecstatically careening gospel-funk jamband. But she’s not limited to baritone sax: like Marshall Allen of the Sun Ra Arkestra, she also plays the electronic wind instrument, a.k.a. EWI.

The last time this this blog was in the house to catch one of Henderson’s “GPS” gigs, as she calls them, was last month at Troost in a trio with multi-instrumentalist and film composer Dorothea Tachler and inventor/guitar shredder Nick Demopoulos. The three played music to get lost in, improvisation on the highest level, throughout a mix of themes that seemed at least semi-composed.

And the music was as fun as it was enveloping and trippy. Henderson is one of the world’s great musical wits: she takes her art very seriously, but not herself. She introduced a couple of long, kaleidoscopically unwinding soundscapes with wry P-Funk-style wah-wah basslines. Throughout about 45 minutes of music, Henderson got just about every sound that can be conjured out of an EWI, further enhanced by Tachler’s constant looping and shifting the riffs through an serpentine series of patches on her mixers. When she wasn’t occupied with that, Tachler sang calm, balmy vocalese, played and then looped all sorts of catchy, warpy riffs on a mini-synth, and on the night’s most ornately assembled sonic adventure, played and then looped a series of austere violin phrases.

Waves of gentle countermelodies, droll marching band cadenzas, artful pairings of fuzzy lows and twinkling highs from both EWI and the rest of the instruments, a rapturous quasi-Americana hymn and twinkling trails of deep-space dust wafted through the mix. At the end of the set, Demopoulos joined the duo, adding shifting tones on a couple of home-made analog synths as well as a custom-built, brightly color-coded keytar called a SMOMID. Silly vocoder-like phrases mingled within an increasingly warmer framework, the bassline growing gentler and more pillowy. They brought the morass of shifting textures down to the just that bassline and a few upper-register sparkles, then took it up again, building a starlit backdrop peppered with woozy Dr. Dre synth. They faded it down with a couple of mini lightning bolts and an echoey bubble or two. Henderson’s next show is with the Rev. – as the dancers who pack his Monday night residency like to call him – at Union Pool on April 10 at around 10:30 PM.

Advertisement