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Dan Coren
Verizon as a living room for jazz
DAN COREN
Imagine a jazz singer who combines the rich mezzo of Sarah Vaughn, the laser-like focused pitch of Carmen McRae in her prime, the improvisatory scat-singing ability of Ella Fitzgerald and, while you’re at it, throw in a big dose of Aretha Franklin. What you’ll get is Dianne Reeves, who presented all these gifts with grace and intimacy in a long, generous set at Verizon Hall. Along with her trio— pianist Peter Martin, bass player Rueben Rogers, and drummer Greg Hutchinson— Reeves treated her audience to an hour of lucid, swinging jazz in the grand classical style.
Pianist-composer Jason Moran and Bandwagon, with Tarus Mateen on electric bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, opened with a well-received set of what I take to be the cutting edge of modern jazz.
Moran employed some fascinating ideas and techniques. One number in particular worked particularly well. He uses a fair amount of pre-recorded material and, in one number in particular, a looping sample of a woman’s voice reading a statement about modern jazz ideals. As time went on, the verbal content of the voice faded into the background as Moran and his colleagues improvised around the pitch content that almost all spoken words contain. It’s certainly not a new technique– composers have been doing this sort of thing since the invention of the tape recorder– but Moran made it work particularly well.
Despite my desire to accept new ideas, Moran’s style remains alien to me and represents a sort of jazz playing that I simply can’t warm up to. In contrast to Reeves’s set, where every note could be heard with crystalline clarity, Moran’s esthetic involves relentless runs on the piano embedded in non-stop loud drumming and electric bass playing that sounds to me like throbbing noise through the wall next door to my house.
In all honesty, this sort of jazz playing has bothered me for a long time. I’m a Milt Jackson, MJQ kind of guy; I never have been able to get beyond the surface of John Coltrane’s and McCoy Tyner’s “sheets of sound” style. So I’m perfectly willing to allow that the problem lies with the limits of my ears, not with the music. Moreover, Moran obviously sees himself as tied to the classical tradition that Reeves embodies, and in fact to classical art music in general. His wife, the classically-trained soprano Alicia Hall Moran, made cameo appearances at the start and end of the set. She opened the final number with a startling brief excerpt from Turandot; equally startlingly, this same number finally settled on and ended with the peace and quiet of Moon River— as my wife so felicitously put it as the set ended, “from Puccini to Mancini.”
During her set, Reeves commented that she felt she was sitting in somebody’s living room, and indeed I was struck by how well jazz sounds in Verizon Hall, even from the reaches of the D-level balcony. On the other hand, the hall was barely half-filled, although there were many late arrivals after the intermission. The concert would have been much better suited to the Perelman Theater. And while I certainly don’t begrudge Ms. Reeves her ability to command top dollar, $42 is a great deal to pay for a balcony seat at a jazz concert, especially when “1807 & Friends” is charging only $17.
DAN COREN
Imagine a jazz singer who combines the rich mezzo of Sarah Vaughn, the laser-like focused pitch of Carmen McRae in her prime, the improvisatory scat-singing ability of Ella Fitzgerald and, while you’re at it, throw in a big dose of Aretha Franklin. What you’ll get is Dianne Reeves, who presented all these gifts with grace and intimacy in a long, generous set at Verizon Hall. Along with her trio— pianist Peter Martin, bass player Rueben Rogers, and drummer Greg Hutchinson— Reeves treated her audience to an hour of lucid, swinging jazz in the grand classical style.
Pianist-composer Jason Moran and Bandwagon, with Tarus Mateen on electric bass and Nasheet Waits on drums, opened with a well-received set of what I take to be the cutting edge of modern jazz.
Moran employed some fascinating ideas and techniques. One number in particular worked particularly well. He uses a fair amount of pre-recorded material and, in one number in particular, a looping sample of a woman’s voice reading a statement about modern jazz ideals. As time went on, the verbal content of the voice faded into the background as Moran and his colleagues improvised around the pitch content that almost all spoken words contain. It’s certainly not a new technique– composers have been doing this sort of thing since the invention of the tape recorder– but Moran made it work particularly well.
Despite my desire to accept new ideas, Moran’s style remains alien to me and represents a sort of jazz playing that I simply can’t warm up to. In contrast to Reeves’s set, where every note could be heard with crystalline clarity, Moran’s esthetic involves relentless runs on the piano embedded in non-stop loud drumming and electric bass playing that sounds to me like throbbing noise through the wall next door to my house.
In all honesty, this sort of jazz playing has bothered me for a long time. I’m a Milt Jackson, MJQ kind of guy; I never have been able to get beyond the surface of John Coltrane’s and McCoy Tyner’s “sheets of sound” style. So I’m perfectly willing to allow that the problem lies with the limits of my ears, not with the music. Moreover, Moran obviously sees himself as tied to the classical tradition that Reeves embodies, and in fact to classical art music in general. His wife, the classically-trained soprano Alicia Hall Moran, made cameo appearances at the start and end of the set. She opened the final number with a startling brief excerpt from Turandot; equally startlingly, this same number finally settled on and ended with the peace and quiet of Moon River— as my wife so felicitously put it as the set ended, “from Puccini to Mancini.”
During her set, Reeves commented that she felt she was sitting in somebody’s living room, and indeed I was struck by how well jazz sounds in Verizon Hall, even from the reaches of the D-level balcony. On the other hand, the hall was barely half-filled, although there were many late arrivals after the intermission. The concert would have been much better suited to the Perelman Theater. And while I certainly don’t begrudge Ms. Reeves her ability to command top dollar, $42 is a great deal to pay for a balcony seat at a jazz concert, especially when “1807 & Friends” is charging only $17.
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