A few years ago, Dawn of Midi — pianist Amino Belyamani, upright bassist Aakaash Israni and percussionist Qasim Naqvi — rehearsed, recorded and mixed a full version of what became “Dysnomia,” their highly acclaimed 2013 album.
Then they tossed it out.
“I was in Australia, mixing that record,” Israni told CTNow, “and I had a negative epiphany one night that it just wasn’t nearly the thing we were trying to make, or as good as we could do. We scrapped the whole thing, just threw it in the trash and started over.”
It was, in retrospect, the right decision. The album version of “Dysnomia,” which they’ve since performed hundreds of times (and will do so on Sunday, Sept. 28, at the Space in Hamden), is a continuous, trance-like suite that’s completely through-composed. Through repetitive figures and extended techniques — Belyamani, for example, reaches inside the piano to mute the strings while depressing keys with his other hand — “Dysnomia” shifts gradually, almost imperceptibly, through interlocking textures and grooves, like a long-lost Steve Reich piece.
“We’ve all composed music in other contexts, and as a band we were an improvising band before this,” Israni said. “So I think something occurred where we wanted to do something different than what we were doing. [‘Dysnomia’] was born of that.”
The musical language, which is based on West and North African models, involves the delicately complex interaction between the two pitched instruments (piano and bass), creating subtle key and mode changes; Israni refers to them as “colors,” specifically intended not to overpower.
“We experimented with how much tonality should be there or not, and we sort of designed the color of the piece to be a little more static than tonal,” Israni said. “We did that by choosing intervals that have color without too much ‘major’ or ‘minor.’ We stayed away from anything that was too strong of a signpost of tonality. The piece changes, but it didn’t sound right to us when we tried things that were overtly tonal.”
The metric “grid,” meanwhile, stretches out almost exclusively in groups of four, without odd meters or metric modulations. “That way of using ‘four’ is so African that it sounds exotic,” Israni said. “Some people say cerebral, which is always interesting to hear because it’s really far from that.”
Dawn of Midi got started in Los Angeles around 2007; they released an improv-heavy album, “First,” in 2010, and followed it up with a live EP in 2011. At some point, when the group was in Berlin, a friend introduced them to the music of Ghanaian highlife musician Dr. K. Gyasi. “We didn’t get deep into studying that music, but it did reaffirm how impressive Ghana is musically,” Israni said. “We’ve spent a lot of time studying the percussion music of Ghana, the traditional drumming music. A lot of [‘Dysnomia’] is inspired by that, and also Moroccan music.”
Now, when they perform “Dysnomia,” Israni said it’s perfectly normal to slip into something like a meditative state. “The performing of any music does that to me, but this is particularly designed for that,” Israni said. “It allows the audience to get into that state as well, if they’re receptive to it, not only the musicians… In the West, it’s more the trance than the dance, because I think people in the West find it so confusing that they are a little unsure how to dance to it, but it’s actually coming from dance music.”
As an improvising group, Dawn of Midi once belonged to the jazz piano-trio tradition, perhaps, but no longer. And since its release in 2013, much of the acclaim for “Dysnomia” has come from pop and indie-rock circles, not from jazz critics and audiences.
“The jazz world has taken very little interest in it, which is actually not all that surprising,” Israni said. “I think there’s a bit of mutual disinterest. That’s why we’ve gone in this direction to begin with: We wanted to make something that was closer to the music that was inspiring us, which was this African music.”
DAWN OF MIDI performs on Sunday, Sept. 28, at the Space in Hamden, with Cookies and MEX-EM. Showtime is 7 p.m. Tickets are $10. Information: thespacect.com.
