Hampton Storms the Village
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This week marks the climax of the Fifth Annual Festival of New Trumpet Music, and, overall, the festival is a very good thing. That’s why it was with some surprise that I realized that the brass-centric event that had me the most jazzed this week involved neither trumpets nor new music. This was the Slide Hampton Trombone All-Stars, featuring five trombonists and three rhythm pieces, which is appearing this week at the Village Vanguard.
The veteran trombonist and orchestrator Locksley Wellington Hampton turned 75 earlier this year, but he is actually one of the younger musicians to have spent virtually his entire career in the field of big bands. The swing era was over when he was a teenager, but he continually found big bands to play in and write for, from Buddy Johnson and Lionel Hampton (no relation) to a reputation-establishing gig with Maynard Ferguson. Although he wrote extensively for Jon Faddis’s Carnegie Hall Jazz Band, continues to write for the Vanguard Jazz Orchestra, and still directs the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band, Mr. Hampton does his best writing for all-trombone bands.
His current five-bone group — which features, in addition to the leader, Steve Davis and Michael Dease on the standard tenor instrument, plus Max Seigel and Jonathan Voltzok on bass trombones — is actually a streamlined version of his nine-bone group World of Trombones, which recorded the excellent “Spirit of the Horn” in 2002. (The rhythm section is Michael Weiss, piano, Dwayne Burno, bass, and Greg Hutchinson, drums.)
“I hope you’re ready to have a lot of fun,” Mr. Hampton announced as he launched his opening set on Tuesday. The All-Stars played five well-known jazz standards, and oddly, not one was a Hampton original. He began with 1958’s “Milestones,” announcing it was “actually written by Miles Davis” (whose name had a habit of appearing on other people’s tunes), in which the trombone quintet sounded glorious on the famous 6/8 vamp-like tune. For the second song, “Blue Monk,” four trombones phrased Thelonious Monk’s famous 12-bar blues in tight harmony while Mr. Siegel offered tailgate commentary on his bass horn.
Joe Henderson’s bossa nova, “Recorda Me” (a Hank Jones perennial), gave Mr. Hutchinson a chance to exhibit his Brazilian chops. In Mr. Hampton’s arrangement, the use of trombones playing Latin polyrhythms suggested an extension of such famous Stan Kenton pieces as “23 Degrees North-82 Degrees West.” Mr. Hampton’s last standard was Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Somewhere along the way, this melody in F, which was originally intended to depict the exotic Middle East, has somehow morphed into a standard vehicle for Afro-Cuban jamming and drum solos. Lately it’s also become the most overplayed of all numbers in the Ellington songbook. Mr. Hampton’s arrangement was refreshing in that he finally broke down and gave us what we had been waiting for: a trade of fours and then twos between the five trombones.
For J.J. Johnson’s “Lament” — the most famous modern trombone ballad — the five horns did not play together until the very end, but rather divided the melody among them, with each player taking eight bars. (A very different version of “Lament” appears on “Spirit of the Horn.”) After “Lament,” Mr. Hampton announced that his chart on the piece wasn’t finished and that he and the band had just improvised that whole routine. They could have fooled me.
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In addition to old trombones and new trumpets, the twilight of September also brought an aggressive onslaught of tenor saxophone colossi, starting with Sonny Rollins at Carnegie Hall and a spectacular, if very noisy, salute to John Coltrane at Symphony Space on Sunday (featuring Dave Liebman, Joe Lovano, Ravi Coltrane, and 13 more horns from the Manhattan School of Music). None of it, however, means that we should overlook the comparatively quiet playing of Johnny Griffin, who was once regarded as almost an equal of Coltrane and Mr. Rollins, and who succeeded them in Monk’s band. Back in the day, Mr. Griffin was known as the fastest saxophonist around, with the biggest sound in town (in stark contrast to his diminutive 5-foot-4-inch frame), a cutthroat competitor on the level of Sonny Stitt or his own frequent sparring partner, Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis.
After experiencing the heyday of hard bop as a Jazz Messenger, a Monk collaborator, and a creator of a dozen or so classic albums on Blue Note Records (one of which, “The Congregation,” features cover art by a young Andy Warhol) and Riverside Records, Mr. Griffin relocated to Europe, where he has lived for the last 45 years. His occasional appearances at the Blue Note (the last was in 2005) are major events, even though several strokes have severely diminished his blowing power.
For Mr. Griffin’s last show on Sunday night, his accompanying trio — the brilliant Bill Charlap on piano, Sean Smith on bass, and Kenny Washington on drums — gave us a taste of its impending engagement at the Village Vanguard by playing four selections before Mr. Griffin alighted the stage. Once there, he played only three numbers, and assigned parts of those to the trio and to a guest tenor saxist, his young disciple Ron Blake. Mr. Griffin spent virtually the whole set playing in the upper register, which requires less lung power; although wind is now a resource that must be carefully allocated, he never played a wrong note or a flat one. The tendency to play less and to play higher now gives his solos a quality more like one of his original inspirations, Lester Young.
Mr. Griffin began by calling a blues in F, for which he spaced out his solo into three distinct interludes and surprised us occasionally by blasting out a note when we least expected it. He then called “Cherokee,” and shared the head and several choruses with Mr. Blake, and the two tenors were more playful than aggressive. They wound up with the ballad “Body and Soul,” on which Mr. Griffin played most of the melody while Mr. Blake cleverly offered quotes from “Prisoner of Love,” based more or less on the same chord changes, as a countermelody. Mr. Griffin’s solos were especially tender here, and showed remnants of his celebrated tenor toughness.
When it was over, around midnight, I realized I had traveled more than 100 blocks and would travel another 100 blocks back home, merely to here Mr. Griffin solo for roughly 20 minutes. It was more than worth it. Breath may be in short supply in his 79-year-old body, but soul is in abundance.
wfriedwald@nysun.com