by Chris Kelsey - Jazziz, November 1997
"If New York’s downtown jazz experimentalists ever decide to appoint a missionary to proselytize among the uptown traditionalist masses, they’d be wise to choose Thomas Chapin for the job. The Knitting Factory’s most-favored altoist speaks the neo-cons’ language at least as fluently as they themselves, and adds new words to the vocabulary besides. Chapin adopts the all-encompassing view of jazz performance propounded by his acknowledged model, Rahsaan Roland Kirk. Like Kirk, Chapin draws upon the length and breadth of jazz history in his playing and composing without repeating any of it verbatim. He’s done exactly what jazz’s more conservative element says a player should do: He’s inhaled the music in its entirety, from Armstrong to Parker to Ayler to Braxton, and leavened it with the force of his own distinctive personality.
During its final night, August’s Panasonic Jazz Festival featured Chapin in duet with his long-time bassist, Mario Pavone. The par’s performance began with the reading of an Ubik Eskimo song by poet Steve Dalachinsky. Its refrain, “I do not have a drum” – taken well out of context – might have been a coy explanatory lead-in to the music, for Chapin and Pavone are normally two-thirds of a trio with drummer Michael Sarin. Thanks to the deep and complex relationship between Chapin and Pavone, however, the absence of a drummer mattered little. Their set was a paradigm of creative empathy. Highlights were many, beginning with the very first tune – a mid-tempo, riff-based blues. Chapin, on baritone sax, first played the repetitive head figure, then assumed the role of time-keeper, playing a waling bass line underneath while Pavone improvised blithely above. The saxophonist’s bari sound is huge, as befits the big horn. Chapin’s solo work was characteristically solid, swinging, and bluesy. He began very much in the pocket, both rhythmically and harmonically, going progressively further out as the improvisation developed. Bassist Pavone plays the blues like a first-rate tenor saxophonist: hard, fast, and heavily inflected. His sound is clear and complaisant, his time sure, his intonation flawless. Like Chapin, Pavone invests every solo with ah over-abundance of ideas."