Wallace Reaches Back To Find an Unlikely Guide
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

I never would have thought of it, but Bennie Wallace, who is appearing through Sunday at the Jazz Standard, is a perfect candidate for paying tribute to Coleman Hawkins, the man widely recognized as the first great jazz saxophonist and essentially the father of the instrument.
In the 30 years that Mr. Wallace (who turned 60 last week) has been on the national scene, he has played both a more accessible kind of avantgarde jazz and a more adventurous kind of “commercial” jazz; he’s also conceived projects that have looked forward to the past and back to the future. Ever since the 1970s, when most saxists of his generation assumed there was only one way to play the tenor — John Coltrane’s way — Mr. Wallace has had an original sound and approach, a big tenor tone at once smoother and more scabrous than anyone playing today.
Mr. Wallace first put together this band, Disorder at the Border (named after Hawkins’s most famous blues) two years ago to mark the Hawkins Centennial, and recorded it live in Berlin in November 2004 for an album “Disorder at the Border — the Music of Coleman Hawkins” that is about to be released by Enja in January. His chief collaborator is the arranger and guitarist Anthony Wilson (best known as a permanent member of Diana Krall’s Trio), although when the 10-piece group kicked off the late show of their first night Wednesday I wondered if an arranger was even necessary. They began with a jam-session version of “All the Things You Are,” with virtually no group playing to speak of, just a very brief head and solos primarily by Mr. Wilson, alto saxist Brad Leali, and the leader.
The first four numbers alternated between raw, up-tempo jams and exquisitely-orchestrated ballads. The second and fourth tunes were the lovely “Self-Portrait (of the Bean)” from the Hawk’s 1962 collaboration with Duke Ellington (actually a slower version of the Ellington-Billy Strayhorn “Grievin'”) and “La Rosita,” played by Hawkins on his 1957 encounter with acolyte Ben Webster. Mr. Wilson’s treatment of this 1923 tango is something of a moody masterpiece, with Mr. Wallace rhapsodizing over the song’s surprisingly long verse and brief chorus, as accompanied by wonderfully atmospheric harmonies from the remaining horns.(It’s the same level of quality writing Mr. Wilson brings to his own new album, the fine “Power of Ten.”) In between the two slower tunes, the Tennessee tenor and his four-piece rhythm section careened fast and furiously over the chords to “It Could Happen to You.”
It wouldn’t have been a Hawkins tribute without the Mighty Man’s signature song, “Body and Soul,” one of the most celebrated jazz improvisations of all time. Mr. Wilson’s arrangement begins with a piano solo by Donald Vega, and leads to a feature for Mr. Wallace, who solos both unaccompanied — in the manner of Hawkins’s famous “Picasso” — and with the other five horns as a choir. Disorder at the Border climaxed with the Hawk’s swinging reconstruction of the traditional “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho,” a rare spiritual in AABA format. Originally done by just Hawkins and his three-piece rhythm section (on his 1962 Village Gate album), the extended orchestration for 10 pieces builds up to an exciting, free-jazz style duo by Mr. Wallace and drummer Alvin Queen. Mr. Queen is, like the group’s outstanding lead alto saxophonist Jerry Dodgion, one of those rare musicians who doesn’t have to solo for you to know he’s on the bandstand.
Regrettably, not all these charts are on the new CD, although the album does include “Bean and the Boys,” Hawkins’s variation on “Lover, Come Back to Me,” and “Honeysuckle Rose,”as re-arranged by Benny Carter for himself and Hawkins. The project could have been even better had Mr. Wallace and Disorder also recreated some of Hawkins’s 1944 saxophone quartets, but as it stands, it’s a pretty perfect confluence of the new and the old.
***
Normally, when a show opens with the sidemen doing a number on their own before the star makes her entrance, it’s regarded as a mere warm-up to quiet the room. But when the guitarist Ed Cherry and the pianist George Mesterhazy (with the drummer Carl Allen and the bassist Doug Weiss) introduced singer Paula West’s set on Tuesday night at the Oak Room, they performed the absolutely essential task of laying down the groove. The piano and the guitar lock into each other in a way that is immediately reminiscent of the great Grant Green quartet albums of the 1960s, in which the late, brilliant plectarist would conjoin with a master keyboardist — like McCoy Tyner or Herbie Hancock — to produce a rhythmically-irresistible, minor-key soul-jazz groove that could be applied to anything from standards to contemporary pop to country and western.
That precisely suits Ms. West, who is becoming ever more focused as a jazz singer who does her best work with material from outside the Great American Songbook. While she did do many standards on opening night, including a “Bewitched” in the languorous style for which she was once known, the high points of her Algonquin set typically come from the various permutations of the blues and country traditions, such as the early R&B hits “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere” and “Man Wanted.”
Though she sang “Why Was I Born” and “Thanks for the Memory” wonderfully, for me the high points were Hank Williams’s celebratory “Honky Tonkin'” and Bob Dylan’s accusatory “Like a Rolling Stone,” which she reconstructs as a faster and more tongue-twisty update of Bessie Smith’s “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” The most moving slow ballads of the opening show on Tuesday were not from Broadway but, rather, two slices of traditional Anglo-centrism, “Loch Lomond” and “Danny Boy.”
You couldn’t go so far as to say that the source material doesn’t matter, because Ms. West gives full weight to the lyrics and never distorts their meanings. And she does so while digging into what might be the purest, most clearly defined hard-swing groove I’ve heard a singer achieve since the halcyon days of Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O’Day. Just as “scatting” seems too trivial a term to capture the rapturous, wordless flights of fancy proffered by Dianne Reeves, the term “swinging” increasingly seems inadequate to describe what Paula West does. I’ve reached the point where I’d rather hear her sing Hank Williams and Bob Dylan than Rodgers and Hart, but unlike Mr. Dylan’s famous rolling stone, she knows well the direction home.