Terence Blanchard made his choices clear Saturday night at the Gem Theater: Keep contemporary jazz alive and vibrant, and make sure its lineage by employing a new breed of young lions.
And more than half his program would only have to be three instrumentals because each of the five distinct pieces lasted from 15 to 20 minutes.
The 15-minute opener, “Wandering Wonder,” from the album "Flow," gave the near-capacity crowd of about 500 people a dynamic preview of the evening.
Tenor saxophonist Brice Winston’s solo was a hard-driving fluidity of post-bop cascades. Blanchard followed with a post-Marsalis display of slurs amid a unique, highly developed phraseology that built to a fortissimo crescendo before the smooth decrease in volume for the piano solo.
Consider that solo a birthday present from Fabian Almazan, whose 27th birthday it was. Almazan began with wisps of motifs over spare drums from Kendrick Scott and quiet bass lines from 19-year-old Joshua Crumbly. Almazan’s solo gained intensity with two-hand chord improvs evolving into right-hand ideas that were developed over shifting left-hand voicings.
“Choices,” the title track from the album, included spoken-word voice-overs from writer, speaker, educator and activist Cornel West. In the way that the album is sprinkled with West’s recorded words, the concert was, too. At times, the voice-overs were intellectual rants, but rants nonetheless. At other times, they were prose that complemented the music.
“Choices” began quietly with a sax solo that could have been called “Brice’s Mood,” with its muted-screech sustain changing to arpeggios that built to a climax before drums and bass set a lower dynamic for Blanchard.
His trumpet was enhanced by a delay, or echo, a Miles Davis-like effect he sometimes used during the concert. As Blanchard developed his solo, even the younger players followed him into a compositional maelstrom where the band became one instrument.
The Terence Blanchard concert was the culmination of a two-day 18th & Vine Jazz Festival, a partnership between Metropolitan Community College-Penn Valley and the American Jazz Museum, which featured 45 middle, high school and college bands.It was a good choice for this Jammin’ at the Gem event.
| Robert Folsom, Special to The Star
Just watched probably my favorite movie again last night, "Inside Man". Great music, not sure what he did or just assembled the score, but it was very good and fit the movie.
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btw, Terence Blanchard's music featured in Spike Lee's follow-up doc to his earlier Katrina film, which I believe gets released on DVD next week.
Posted by: pellboy | April 21, 2011 at 12:58 PM