[JPL] A Fresh Flip Through the Pages of Swing

[r durfee]

November 19, 2007
Music Review | 'Best of the Big Bands'
A Fresh Flip Through the Pages of Swing 
By BEN RATLIFF
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra has been around
long enough to have its regulars, in the form of
audience members and paper on music stands. Both
showed up for “Best of the Big Bands,” the orchestra’s
speed tour through American dance-palace ingenuity at
Rose Theater on Friday night.

A lot of the set had been played in various Jazz at
Lincoln Center concerts over the last 19 years,
programs that have centered on single figures: Duke
Ellington, with “Satin Doll” and “Solitude”; Count
Basie, with “Li’l Darlin’ ”; Woody Herman, with “Early
Autumn”; Dizzy Gillespie, with “Things to Come”; and
so on. Pulled loose from their contexts, reshuffled as
a set of greatest hits, each one carried a distilled
power.

The house was full on Friday, the second of a
three-day run, and maybe that was holiday related;
more likely it was because most people want jazz at
beginner levels, or at least famous levels, and the
concert’s premise looked sufficient. But the band
didn’t go lightly on the music. It sounded as good as
it ever has, igniting and expanding old and familiar
songs with fresh improvising, a strong rhythm section
and some shrewd, veteran singers.

Ernestine Anderson was one of them. When she sang “I
Got It Bad (and That Ain’t Good),” she phrased in bold
bursts, giving almost every note a few extra curves.
By contrast Freddie Cole, in “Solitude,” worked his
singing into the groove by delivering clipped phrases,
squinting at the crowd as if trying to glimpse a truer
meaning of the words, bouncing slightly at the knees
between lines, as if shaking each ending note
silently.

The soloists sometimes followed the disposition of
this music from the ’30s, ’40s and a bit of the ’50s:
Joe Temperley’s baritone saxophone solos had the
light, sure, melodic feeling of players from that
time. But they were also inventing and personalizing,
writing their own signatures. The saxophonist Ted Nash
had a good night, making his improvisations strange
and provocative: long-held single notes, repetitions
of a phrase, clean and urgent high-register playing. 

And Wynton Marsalis played two memorable solos at
extreme tempos. One was in the extra-slow “Li’l
Darlin’,” a talking-trumpet solo with a mute that was
full of melodic information and didn’t turn into pure
wah-wah gesture. Another was in “Things to Come,”
superfast, expressed in strong, tumbling ideas: two
bars with dozens of notes, followed by two more of
simpler, stretched-out phrases. 

This was a piece in which the band narrowed into
quartets and trios for solos. Mr. Nash and the pianist
Dan Nimmer each had room to expand with the bassist
Carlos Henriquez and the drummer Ali Jackson, doing
what all the best jazz performances secretly promise:
rendering the composer and style of the material,
famous as they might be, pretty much beside the point.


http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/arts/music/19rose.html?_r=1&ref=music&oref=login

Roy Durfee
P.O. Box 40219
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87196-0219
rdurfee2003 at yahoo.com


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