After the advent

The launch of the EP compact disc of the veteran rock band Advent Call was almost rudely canceled by the Trillanes caper in late November. The five-song “Wonderful Things” was a conscious departure of the band from its heyday with Karl Roy, with the only remaining original member now being the keyboardist Henry Vitali. With the journeyman Rinky Muñoz listed as arranger, Advent Call is no longer the heavy metal band that drew crowds in the former Arts Venue; indeed they’ve turned a new almost radical leaf, relying more on keyboards and horns for texture in a kind of mini-bus purgatory. The listener might hear the usual references — Queen, Styx, Blood Sweat & Tears, even Rush — surfacing in the mix, honed from constant shuttling back and forth between the home country and Bahrain, where we heard the band has become quite a hit in the hotel lounge circuit. According to Henry V., they’ve spent half the time in Bahrain for the past six or so years, and this latest edition of Advent Call is the sixth or seventh. After listening to the EP, we can safely say that Roy is not even a dim memory, his tattoos all but evaporated into the thin desert air.

The CD launch held at a Makati sidestreet had to go into fast forward because of the instant curfew declared after the Pen standoff, but from the little we heard of Advent Call, they sounded better live than on disc, particularly on the title cut, where the horns could be appreciated full blast.

Another band that has perfected the art of constant shedding of skin is the Ely Buendia-led Pupil, whose second CD “Wildlife” was released late last year. After several turns at the CD player “Wildlife” has held up well with a number of memorable tunes, like Monobloc and Disconnection Notice, perfectly radio-friendly in typical post-Eraserheads style.

Yan Yuzon has graduated from bass to guitar, and the result is a pleasant surprise, in the mode of past bass players who turned to regular guitar, a la Ron Wood. And like the Stones guitarist, Yuzon has got the fundamentals down pat, always with a fine rhythmic sense.

Someone named Dok Sergio now plays bass, which made us wonder if he’s any relation to the Rivermaya bassist Japs. Whatever, both Sergios remain grounded on a solid foundation, laying down the parameters for each verse and coda.

But it’s Buendia, aka Dizzy Ventura, who’s the glue that holds it all together, mainly for the fine songwriting laden with hooks and melodic yet unpredictable phrases, with some cameo spots provided by his better half Diane Ventura on vocals for appropriate coloring and nuance.

If you want to find a good band just follow the songwriter, as Buendia has proven time and again from Eheads to Mongols to Pupil. Remember when he suffered from that mini-stroke sometime back and the radio played Poor Man’s Grave as a kind of preemptive tribute? That just shows that a good songwriter can’t stay down for long.

Looks like Pupil will be around for a while, certainly one of the best bands in the current scene along with Urban Dub and Kwjan.

The local jazz circuit got a much needed shot in the arm with a couple of releases late last year both on the Candid label, balikbayan Mishka Adams’ “Space” and guitarist Johnny Alegre Affinity’s “Eastern Skies.”

Adams comes fresh from a yearlong music scholarship in Britain, and has cobbled together a new band with cornetist John Hoare also playing a lead role. No longer the wide-eyed girl on the big stage in her first CD, Adams’ voice has matured and acquired a smoky, world-wise edge, and her songwriting — quite a few collaborations with Hoare — displays a more complex virtuosity with bebop-influenced key and signature changes.

There’s the unmistakable winsome Filipina in her in such compositions as Under a Brazilian Sky, and a gung-ho yet laidback attitude can be heard in Angel.

This also could be the best band she’s assembled yet, we presume comprised mostly of her British music academy schoolmates. They got technique but also have that rambling gypsy soul, and Mishka, she knows when to embrace a song and when to keep her distance. She gives her all and yet there’s a part of her that remains forever undisclosed, like a hidden jewel reserved for future dissimulation.

Alegre for his part keeps raising the musical stakes in “Eastern Skies,” a largely successful experiment of his regular band Affinity with the orchestral maneuvers of conductor Gerard Salonga. Past works in the same vein could be Miles Davis’ “Sketches of Spain,” where the trumpet fused seamlessly with full orchestra in a work originally written for guitar.

Such blurring of the cross-genres has been the signature of pertinent artists whether visual (Santi Bose) or heavy metal (Metallica), and Alegre, whose playing has aged gracefully and well, almost like wind on water, is no stranger to such spiritual conceits.

You can hear it at once on the full round tone of the guitar and how it weaves and bobs through the orchestra’s sheets of sound and Affinity’s propulsive yet subtle shadings. The guitar that grins like a guru and its player striving to be closer in sound to his masters Miles and Coltrane, who believed music was as close to spirit as one could get.