The New York Times, Review: Uncivilized Defies Conventionality in Concert
By Ben Ratliff
Oct. 30, 2015
The guitarist Tom Csatari leads a 10-piece, more-or-less jazz band called Uncivilized, and the name seems exactly half a joke. You get it when you see it.
On Wednesday night at Bizarre Bushwick, in Brooklyn, the band had two drummers, a generative idea which can produce hypnotic or scrimmage-y or over-the-top results. But this was different, because each drummer had only two items: a floor tom and a cymbal. (They sometimes put other things on their drum heads to alter the sound: various kinds of shakers, dampeners and little cymbals, and an overturned saucepan.)
The band had two bass-clarinet players: Who has two bass-clarinet players? It had a flutist, whose sound was not thin or light or incidental but a robust part of Mr. Csatari’s slow, open-throated, semibucolic melodies. It had a tenor saxophonist playing fluent solos. It had a cellist, whose role shifted according to the demands of the songs and his own excitement: He played bass notes and top lines, long-tones and figurations, and at one point grew so expressive that he stood up and smiled at the ceiling as he played. It had a keyboardist who also used a laptop, making subtle, real-time adjustments to the music’s textures. And it had two guitarists, Julian Cubillos and Mr. Csatari, both soloists, serving the songs but not necessarily playing in tandem or closely following arrangements.
This fall, Uncivilized has been playing the last Wednesday of each month at Bizarre. Its gigs are a bit raw, from general to specific, but raw on purpose. (Its recent album, also called “Uncivilized,” on the Tiny Montgomery label, is much the same way.) This past Wednesday, on tunes like “Blues for Robbie” (after the guitarist Robbie Basho) and “Sherwood” (after the writer Sherwood Anderson), the arrangements were carefully layered and casually executed. The players were after resonance and a communal feeling; they weren’t in search of virtuosity. Likewise, Mr. Csatari’s guitar playing has a bumpy, clanky rhetoric and a rich sense of harmony. He’s stern with himself. His songs sometimes ended without ceremony, and he consistently cut short his own most powerful gestures, as if refusing to be grandiose.
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There is a contradictory feeling in Mr. Csatari’s playing — organized dissonance, loose concision, meticulous roughness — which makes it special. (This can also be said for Mr. Cubillos and most of the rest of the group as well, so I’ll name them here: the cellist Nick Jozwiak, the saxophonist Levon Henry, the flutist Tristan Cooley, the bass clarinetists Casey Berman and Ben Katz, the keyboardist and sound-alterer Dominic Mekky, the drummers Derek Baron and Rachel Housle.)
So everything was slightly and knowingly out of joint. The band was its own fuzzy, folky, big-hearted thing, but it had plenty of correlatives: Charles Mingus (the band played the theme from Mingus’s gospel-ish waltz “Better Git It in Your Soul” as a closing outro for one of its songs); Albert Ayler (especially the Ayler group from 1967 with two rhythm-section instruments — basses, in Ayler’s case — and a cello); maybe even shape-note singing or Charles Ives’s rowdy fourth symphony. This is a band that knows its history, even if it wears it lightly.
Tom Csatari and Uncivilized will play again on Nov. 25 at Bizarre Bushwick, 12 Jefferson Street, Brooklyn; 347-915-2717, bizarrebushwick.com.
A version of this article appears in print on Oct. 30, 2015, Section C, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: Listen Carefully: They’re Hard to Pin Down.
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