Difficult Music, Easy on the Ears

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The New York Sun

Nothing about the music of Tom Harrell, the trumpeter and composer who is appearing this week at the Village Vanguard, is exactly what it seems. When he composed music for a large ensemble of horns and rhythm for his 1999 “Time’s Mirror,” it was hardly typical big-band swing; when he scored for strings in the 2001 “Paradise,” it wasn’t precisely chamber music; and when, for his most recent release, 2003’s “Wise Children,” he built an album around four well-known singers for whom he wrote songs with lyrics, it certainly didn’t sound like any pop vocal album I’ve ever heard.

Even now that Mr. Harrell has assembled a new book of tunes more or less in the bebop idiom, for which he is best known, it’s hardly a simple set of ballads, blues, and variations on familiar chord changes. Mr. Harrell’s compositions are both deceptively simple and surprisingly intricate, fitting in unusual forms and taking all sorts of unexpected twists and turns. Needless to say, they’re not the kind of thing you can stick in front of a journeyman musician and expect him to sight-read on call.

This is why Mr. Harrell makes a special effort to keep a working band together, and his current quintet — Wayne Escoffery on tenor saxophone, Danny Grissett on piano, Jonathan Blake on drums, and the longtime bassist Ugonna Okegwo — is one of his best.

Unfortunately, employing a crack band isn’t enough to overcome every obstacle. All did not go smoothly on the opening set Tuesday night: Mr. Escoffery was contending with a squeaky reed that failed him in the upper register, and Mr. Blake was either over-miked or simply playing too loud.

The leader, who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, was not having an easy time adjusting microphones and music stands, and struggled as he switched between trumpet and flugelhorn and various mutes; at one point he played holding the horn in his right hand and his lead sheet in his left.

Yet as the evening wore on, the group rose above most of these difficulties. Mr. Grissett, in particular, knows Mr. Harrell’s compositions well, and was especially helpful to the leader in holding the music together. They began on an international note with the Brazilian styled “Gronk” and the Middle Eastern-inspired “Architect of Time.” The latter has a long, loping melodic line that suggests a serpent slithering across the burning sands, supported by Mr. Blake’s playing polyrhythms on mallets.

As they moved into “The Fountain,” essentially an eight-bar melody with a circular feeling that the ensemble and soloists repeat and vary, it suggested the way a fountain continually renews and replenishes itself. Mr. Harrell stayed on trumpet throughout this number, yet even without using a mute he seemed to play two completely different trumpet solos with very different timbres — one tightly pinched, the other bright and wide open. Mr. Escoffery played his best solo here, starting sparely, just dropping a few notes in a measure here and there, but gradually getting more intense and filling up the open spaces with intense, scalar bursts of notes.

Mr. Harrell followed with two originals with a funk-oriented backbeat: the slightly Latinate “Party” and the faster, equally catchy “Va.” At this point, the leader seemed to need a break from the challenges of presenting his own complicated compositions, and spontaneously launched into Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz standard,”Woody ‘N’ You.” Both he and Mr. Escoffery played long, relaxed solos here, with Mr. Harrell using both horns, mostly “strolling” with just bass and drum accompaniment. Mr. Harrell, who turned 60 a few months ago (it’s hard to believe, but his first notable gigs were with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman), has always proved that though making his unique music can be difficult, listening to it never is.

***

Hidden beneath our eyes, there is an alternate jazz universe that is known only to the Japanese, often involving bands of American musicians who record prolifically on record labels we never even hear about stateside. Yet even in far away Tokyo, the Big Apple is universally regarded as the center of the jazz world; two of the most prominent groups playing on Japanese labels are the New York Trio (with Bill Charlap, Jay Leonhart, and Bill Stewart) and Manhattan Trinity, with Cyrus Chestnut on piano, George Mraz on bass, and Lewis Nash on drums. This week at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, the latter group, whose six Japanese CDs are listed on amazon.com for about $40 each, is making just its second appearance before a live audience.

Just as the New York Trio doesn’t sound anything like the Bill Charlap Trio, Manhattan Trinity could never be confused with the Cyrus Chestnut Trio. In his own groups (as on his new album, “Genuine Chestnut” on Telarc Jazz), Mr. Chestnut can’t help but dominate with his effusive personality and a down-home sound that suggests he just came from a revival meeting. In this very different Trinity, Mr. Mraz and Mr. Nash are equal contributors and share the responsibilities of composing originals, arranging standards, and soloing.

This is an extremely flashy group, almost dazzlingly so, like a trio of tap dancers working in perfect sync: Mr. Chestnut caught the Dizzy’s crowd off guard by starting the early show Tuesday evening with the famous opening vamp from “Waltz for Debby,” then segued quickly into “Love Letters,” customarily played as a slow ballad, here done as a boppy romper. “Charade” actually was done as a fast 3/4, although with a modal underpinning like one of John Coltrane’s waltzes. Mr. Mraz’s original,”Autumn Kisses” showcased not only an engaging melody (reminiscent of Ivan Lins’s “The Island”) but the composer’s formidable bass technique, in which he offers melodic variations, playing both arco and pizzicato, with the same fluency that I would have normally thought reserved for horn players and singers.

After Benny Golson’s 12-bar minor blues “Five Spot After Dark,” Mr. Chestnut surprised us with a free-form intro leading into a treatment of “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” that was anything but square, retaining a graceful ballad mood but changing virtually everything else. The Trinity climaxed with Mr. Nash’s showcase for his percussion, “NTB,” a soul-jazz number that allowed all three members to show off, and Mr. Chestnut to take us back home to church.

wfriedwald@nysun.com


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