Nov. 13--To the accomplished young artists playing the Jazz Showcase on Thursday night, music of Count Basie and Duke Ellington may seem about as historic as scores of Beethoven and Brahms.
But they performed this repertory with care and panache, thanks to the two pros who were leading them: Scott Hall, director of jazz studies at Columbia College Chicago, and Benny Green, a seasoned pianist who has fronted his own band at the Showcase often through the decades.
In jazz, of course, education occurs not just in the classroom but on the bandstand, and the residencies of the Columbia College Jazz Ensemble at the Showcase remind listeners of the nature of jazz tutelage. Tradition gets transmitted from master to apprentice in the heat of performance, where anything can go wrong and a savvy audience is there to bear witness.
This time, though, the collaboration between the Columbia students and their guest star was all the more striking, for pianist Green didn't just sit in for a few select pieces. On the contrary, he anchored the band's rhythm section throughout the first set, playing solos but also accompanying his young colleagues in nearly every passage they played. Years from now, many of these students will look back on this engagement and marvel at the moment when they basked in the spotlight, while an artist of Green's stature kept time at the piano.
The young musicians' fidelity to how age-old scores ought to be performed was apparent from the outset in "Vine Street Rumble," from the "Kansas City Suite" that Benny Carter composed for the Basie orchestra (recorded in 1960). This music celebrates the blues-based swing the Basie musicians perfected in the 1930s, and the Columbia students nimbly followed Hall's easy-breezy tempo. If the solos were less impressive than the ensemble playing, that's about par for the course for young jazz musicians, who spend years learning to craft a cadenza.
The spirit of Basie rang out still more boldly in one of his band's signatures, "April in Paris," taken here at a bit of a clip. Conductor Hall clearly was interested less in warm nostalgia and more in keeping the music fresh and alive. If the repeated codas were a little ragged and the reprises a tad jarring (couldn't someone have shouted out "one more time" and "one more once," as Basie famously did?), these were minor flaws.
Not everything in this set, however, carried a retrospective flavor. Hall and friends reinvented Duke Ellington's "Thanks for the Beautiful Land on the Delta," from the "New Orleans Suite," with a decidedly contemporary rhythmic backdrop. Ellington purists might have been appalled, but the Ellington repertoire gets played straight all the time. So there was something invigorating in hearing these musicians putting their own spin on a classic.
A Columbia student, guitarist Perry Cowdery, gave the evening one of its high points with an original score, "The Super Clarity Collider." This smartly conceived work evoked the lean, rhythmically taut writing of Lalo Schifrin, giving rise to one of pianist Green's most effective solos. Throughout the evening, Columbia vibist Jalen Baker produced vigorous, technically assured work, showing considerable promise.
Green excelled in his solo account of the ballad "My One and Only Love," played at a whisper, as the band and the audience listened intently. The pianist's delicate touch, silvery tone and intricate figurations offered a soft-spoken contrast to the rest of a mostly rambunctious evening. And there was plenty of fire in the Basie-band finale, "Jumpin' at the Woodside," the young musicians building steadily to an ebullient climax.
More power to them.
Howard Reich is a Tribune critic.
hreich@tribpub.com
When: 8 and 10 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 4 and 8 p.m. Sunday
Where: Jazz Showcase, 806 S. Plymouth Court
Tickets: $20-$35; 312-360-0234 or www.jazzshowcase.com
