While fielding applause at her Symphony Center show on Friday, harpist Brandee Younger made a dazed confession.
“I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking about the music just now,” she admitted. “I remembered that the very last show I played before the pandemic was here — literally the last.”
You can hardly blame her. What a stark contrast it must have been, remembering when halls like this were empty — or, during the pandemic’s plodding arts recovery, half-empty. Meanwhile, Symphony Center (capacity 2,500) sold out on Friday to hear her trio and pianist Hiromi Uehara, who performs mononymically as Hiromi, in a double bill.
The proggy, hyperactive aesthetic of Hiromi’s most recent music, via her Sonicwonder band — trumpeter Adam O’Farrill, bassist Hadrien Feraud, and drummer Gene Coye, an Evanston native — takes cues from video game scores. (If you’re unfamiliar, “Sonicwonderland,” opening Friday’s set, is a good entrée: Incandescently virtuosic, it brandishes the crew’s strengths right away, with a hurtling bass-and-synth groove that screams “final boss battle.”) A notably age-diverse crowd packed the venue, with some fans even standing in the back row of the terrace to get a better view of the exuberant bandleader.
Hiromi’s Sonicwonder had just released an album earlier that day, fittingly titled “Out There.” Its four-movement suite of the same name dominated most of Friday’s set, in a live account that was, naturally, far more freewheeling than the album’s. The first movement, “Takin’ Off,” leads with an uncanny unison between synth, trumpet and electric bass. The tune detours into skittering blues, via Hiromi, and a half-time, funkalicious breakdown.
That segued directly into “Strollin’,” a deceptively easygoing title for a tricky tune. It starts with irregularly spaced rests, as though daring the band to step in them. They didn’t, of course — a feat of ensemble tightness that was every bit as impressive as any blazing solo.
There were plenty of those. O’Farrill reared up on sky-high trumpet runs; in the following movement, “Orion,” he duetted with himself with the help of a loop pedal. Hiromi and Feraud coyly dialogued in the same movement: Feraud strummed way up the neck of his electric bass, and Hiromi, ever witty, mimicked him by flicking the strings of her Yamaha concert grand.
All set long — but never more than in “Out There’s” rousing, gospelly closer — an inexhaustible Hiromi danced between three keyboards: the Yamaha grand, a Nord Electro 6 keyboard, and a smaller Nord synth perched atop the grand piano. It’s rare to see a juggling act this effortless by anyone whose name isn’t Herbie Hancock.
The band bid Symphony Center farewell with a double encore. First was “Pendulum,” a solo meditation off “Out There”; Hiromi imbued the simple tune with sweet sophistication. After it came “Balloon Pop,” an irrepressible — and also game-indebted — melody poked out by a cutesy synth. Here, it became a vehicle for parting solos from each member of the band.
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Hiromi performs with her band Sonicwonder on April 4, 2025, at Symphony Center in Chicago. (Vincent Alban/for The Chicago Tribune)
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Hiromi performs with her band Sonicwonder on April 4, 2025, at Symphony Center in Chicago. (Vincent Alban/for The Chicago Tribune)
While Sonicwonder celebrated their new album, Younger and her trio ginned up excitement for their own, the forthcoming “Gadabout Season” (formally announced this month). The album was recorded at Younger’s home in upstate New York and produced by the trio’s profoundly in-pocket bassist, Rashaan Carter. Its title track puts all three musicians at attention immediately, tersely pecking around the shape of the tune until it fills out steadily.
That controlled growth was a theme in Younger’s set. The band had a miraculous way of swelling together, s-l-o-w-l-y. It was only until they reached several dynamic levels higher than the one at which they began that one would register that they were getting louder, like an organism gradually awakening.
Younger’s set included “Unrest,” a two-movement composition which she said was commissioned to “commemorate ‘the time’ — you know which time.” But while writing, she said, she hit a hurdle: It turns out it’s really, really hard not to make the harp sound pretty.
Where Younger landed with “Unrest,” released as a single in 2022, is just right. A churning, low accompaniment to the main theme morphs into ambivalent pentatonic harmony. When her rhythm colleagues join her for the second movement, the unrest bubbles to the surface more unequivocally, Carter and drummer Allan Mednard posting up on a galloping pulse.
Mednard’s solo especially was a force of nature. Rimshots and stickshots gave his solo a viscerally violent quality, organic and unsettling as thunderclaps.
Among the sneak peeks from Younger’s forthcoming album was the cheekily named “BBL,” named for a popular cosmetic surgery this writer would rather let you Google. The tune is inspired less by the procedure itself than by a chatty friend who, in Younger’s telling, “doesn’t let the other person get a word in.” (Perhaps while extolling the BBL’s virtues?)
In any case, that scenario finds musical expression in an unyielding melody, hardly resting over off-kilter meters. There’s no hint of the speaker’s apparent annoyance in this delightful, whip-smart number. Then again, when Younger is the one doing the talking, it’s always worth hearing.
Symphony Center Presents Jazz continues with Eliane Elias and Edmar Castañeda, both playing with quartets at 8 p.m. May 9, 220 S. Michigan Ave.; tickets $39-$299; more information at cso.org.