Performance review of Working Proccess from the East Bay Express,
January 14, 2000, Volume 22, No. 14.

		WORKING PROCESS: DAMON SMITH, JEFF CHAN, MILO FRANCIS At Cafe da Vinci, Tuesday, January 4, 2000 Bassist Damon Smith has brought jazz to vat rooms, laundromats, street corners, shoebox theaters, and more coffee houses than even Piedmont Avenue can support. For those left without a place to drink tea and speak the avant-garde kabbalah in the post-Beanbenders era, one rule should be to follow Damon Smith: he'll lead you to a place where good music is played. Cafe da Vinci certainly fits the bill. In its first month of operation, the cafe already feels like an Oakland institution, what with Anthony HoldsworthÕs paintings of city landmarks and owner Kyong Suh's decision to keep holiday decorations up as long as it takes for crowds to arrive. On 40th and Broadway, across the street from Mama's Royal Cafe, the wide-open storefront drew onlookers all evening, and the acoustics make this the best room to host Smith since the dearly departed Coffeehead. Working Process deserves a larger stage, but for Tuesday's over the next two months Cafe da Vinci will do. The opportunity to watch three young improvisers - Smith, tenor man Jeff Chan, and drummer Milo Francis - work out their craft while taking the next big leap as composers is one not to be missed. Bringing new cool to the old school in the Asian Improv Sax Summit, Chan is among a recent wave of young players leading and writing for big bands. His big fUn philharmonic debuts this spring. In large ensembles like Adam Lane's Full Throttle Orchestra, Chan walks the bar or rocks the Casbah like any bop-derived soloist. When he's the only horn in the room, as on Tuesday night, he starts with a Coltrane-derived measure and intensity, pushing out a few choice notes that split into new sonorities. Whether heÕs turning a hard bop expression into a river of notes, or blues calls into the cords that bind African and Asian diasporas, the effect is always spellbinding. Milo Francis proved an ideal accompanist to these changes. Each song brought a lesson in percussion, with Francis using different instruments (mallets of various sizes, brushes, hands) and different angles of attack to explore the tonal possibilities of a drum set. The purpose was simply to find the right tone for the right moment - and the moment was constantly changing, as Francis used the space between notes to displace beats, making air percussive. Understatement and intimation often can yield more excitement than bashing skins, and Francis delivered both in a world tour of rhythm. With Smith's bass establishing the setting (from hip walks to free-for-alls), the trio did two sets of originals. For me, the most enduring joy was the most unexpected: a version of Ornette Coleman's "Lonely Woman" that succeeded, as few do, in distilling the song, slowing it to the tempo its blues cry calls for, stripping layers of rhythm without reducing the tune to schmaltz. While pizzicato bass and brushed cymbals blew farewell kisses, Chan sang mournfully for the lonely women (and many others) who missed the show. - Aaron Shuman
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