By Mike Faloon | Photos by Michael Bogdanffy-Kriegh / Studio MBK
The centerpiece of the stage at Quinn’s is the lava lamp Christmas tree. It’s tall and plastic and illuminated, lights slowly changing, rising and falling, undulating like a jellyfish. The consensus is that it needs to stay up year round. I’m not saying I want one at home, but here it belongs and there’s something about that tree that fits with the Welf Dorr unit.
Welf Dorr is part Johnny Carson, part Rick Wakeman. He’s a jovial host, grinning beneath his pork pie hat, genuinely amused and motivated by those with whom he shares the spotlight. He’s also fond of his effects, delay and phaser. Watching him hold his alto sax with one hand, twiddle and modulate with the other, brings me back to my prog rock days.
I heard something about the Welf Dorr Unit has me ready for sharp sounds, jagged sounds that jut out, get caught on anything that happens by. I expect sounds that don’t leave an easy-to-follow path. That will come later. Right now Dorr and guitarist Dave Ross surf whole notes. Ross is Dorr’s wingman. Maybe co-pilot is more apt. Ross has dozens of credits on his website. He lists the numerous types of music he’s played over the years, among them punk and hardcore. It’s a subtle distinction but it merits bonus points. (Kind of like that line from The Blues Brothers: “We have both kinds of music, country and western.”) Just to be clear, Ross is certainly more Doc Severinsen than Ed McMahon. Together Dorr and Ross sustain ideas that ease against the grain of the rhythm section, awash in the sounds of those effects boxes.
Dorr breaks out a bass clarinet for the next number, “Dixie,” which increases the sonic distance between he and Ross and points the band in a different direction. Drummer Joe Hertenstein swells on the cymbals, rising but not bursting. Along with the traditional line up of cymbals—hi-hat, crash, ride—he’s added some unusual characters. One is a 5” mini-cymbal mounted on his hi-hat stand. Dangling from an unused rack tom mount is the other, the remains of a battered and torn (crash?) cymbal. The thing looks like a chunk of shrapnel. I don’t know how he avoids slicing himself every time his arms pass near it.
***
I flash back to yesterday, when I took my daughter to Dia:Beacon. It was her first museum visit. She was amped up. She wanted to draw everything she saw and write captions and copy down the artists’ names. This was all her, no prodding—or even hoping, initially—on my part.
I followed her lead most of the afternoon. Until we came to Robert Smithson’s “Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis).” That’s when I wanted to rush her along. As the title implies it’s made of broken glass. What the title leaves out is that the glass is laid out on the floor and piled high, a good foot, foot and a half, with an area of twenty by fifteen, just lying there. It’s meticulously crafted and, no doubt, reflects ample deliberation. But it’s still broken glass on the floor. A trap ready to spring. There’s no border, no barrier. It’s you and the glass. The late Smithson claimed “map.” I say “menacing mound.” It creeped me out. Maggie maintained a level head. She took her time, laughing and sketching. She wrote, “Glass! Glass! Run away!”
I did my best not to urge her along—model patience, man, model patience!—but even when we moved on I kept looking back. I knew the mass wasn’t going to mobilize. I assumed that no one trip and fall. Still, I looked back just to check.
***
Hertenstein dodges tragedy time and again, avoids clashing with that cymbal. He locks in with bassist Dmitry Ishenko. I expect Dorr and Ross to follow suit, succumb to the rhythm section’s gravitational pull. But they don’t. I should know by now.
“Dixie” gives way to “Sympaticus,” flows so smoothly that I’m unclear whether it’s one song or two. If the first part of the set was “Songs That Echo,” then we’re now in the midst of “Songs That Swell.” The rhythm section builds tension while Dorr and Ross resist, persist with their cough syrup ways.
Dorr holds for a bar here, two there. He adjusts the effects boxes, though less often now. Ross leans back and into the sound. This is where he and Dorr dive in, right? Not yet. Instead they remain the relative calm at the center of the storm, reveling in the subtle, unresolved tension. This could go wrong—easily, horribly. But it’s less like a ballgame that ends in a tie and more like a short story's ambiguous ending; there’s work to do, things to sort out. It’s a welcome process.
The next number is a different tale. Dorr introduces it as a “free take on Mal Waldron’s ‘Left Alone.’” Despite the tune’s keyboard origins this version belongs to Ross. In short order he renders it a “Song That Rocks” ramping it up and sailing a sea of pyrotechnics, pulling the room together in “Holy crap!” awe.
Dorr smiles, laughs. He looks for someone to revel with. He turns to Ishenko but I think his eyes are closed. Dorr scans the crowd, seeking a “Can you believe this?” connection.
Between songs Dorr introduces the band. He lingers on Ishenko, and deservedly so; he’s a remarkable talent. His style is easy going, from his right hand resting on the body of his bass to his eye glasses/ beard/Chaucer-thesis-brewing-in-the-back-of-the-brain appearance. Some take life in stride. Others, like Ishenko, do so standing still.
“We thought he was Russian, but he’s Ukrainian. We seriously thought of renaming the band Free Ukrainia.”
(Too soon? Is Dorr on pace to be the Gilbert Gottfried of the free jazz world?)
The band’s best comes last, in the second set. (How often does that happen at Quinn’s, the first set paving the way for the second? Onset and rhyme. Set up and punch line.) There are fewer effects in “Flowers for Albert,” more traction, more grit, less grease. It’s a more conventional funk and it’s great. Ross accents. Hertenstein thumps a cowbell. “Flowers” is treated to a slow, gradual landing, getting better as it downshifts, the music mixing with clinking pint glasses and laughter.
“Out Cry” offers a different kind of contrast. Ishenko motors on. Hertenstein swings. They seemed headed for the conventional but Ross counters with an angular approach, launching shards of guitar Sonny Sharrock style. The dude next to me simply says, “Wow.”
The Welf Dorr Unit brings a similar game plan to the closer, “Blood.” Hertenstein places that menacing sword of Damocles of a cymbal on the end of a stick and spins it, twirls the damn thing. It sounds cool, but I’m relieved when he tosses it to the floor and the band clicks into another funk tune. Hertenstein and Ishenko outline. Ross provides the details and Dorr finishes with the text features—title, photos, captions, etc. Meanwhile the tree pulsates. It’s another night at Quinn’s.
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