A Relatively Rare Appearance by the Darkly Exhilarating Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra

Big band jazz composers may be the most pure artists in all of music. These people do what they do strictly out of love. When you’re done paying the band – if in fact there IS anything to pay the band  with- there is absolutely no money in writing original big band jazz. Even the universally respected Maria Schneider survives on Chamber Music America grants. So it would be a little misleading to say that the last time this blog caught a show by the Scott Reeves Jazz Orchestra, it was in late summer 2014 at a now-defunct Park Slope coffee emporium/wifi hotspot. The mighty ensemble might have played a couple of gigs since then. But what a fantastic show this one turned out to be! Considering how much of an individualist the bandleader is – his axe is the alto flugelhorn, sort of a higher-pitched valve trombone – it was no surprise to hear how distinctive his music for large ensemble is, a stormy, brassy blend of old and new, with a nod to the great Miles Davis/Gil Evans records of the late 50s and early 60s. He’s pulling the group together for a 4:30 PM gig on July 10 at Smalls; cover is $20 and includes a drink.

That Brooklyn show – at the old Tea Lounge, which for quite awhile was booked by a similarly estimable big band composer, JC Sanford – opened with deliciously bustling noir 50s crime jazz riffage and quickly hit a latin-infused swing fueled by an indomitable baritone sax solo, the brass punching in like a heavyweight with his nemesis on the ropes. A steady, apprehensively fiery trumpet solo handed off to sparsely dancing bass and eerily modal piano until the band rose again. It was like being at a Gil Evans show half a century ago, albeit surrounded by North Slope kids absorbed in their laptops and tablets.

Reeves kept the latin flavor going through the vampy second number, a brassy blaze finally interrupted by a wryly garrulous bari sax break, the composer taking a judiciously enigmatic, uneasily bubbling solo as the rhythm section crashed and burned. Catchy call-and-response between high reeds and brass dominated the trickily syncopated number after that, lit up by a tantalizingly moody alto sax solo.

A brooding midtempo clave number was next, Reeves soloing resolutely and steadily as the rest of the brass shivered, up to a neat if similarly uneasy round-robin brass chart, The band sank their collective teeth into a blustery early space-age Ellingtonian shuffle after that, And the trumpet solo on the eerily triplet-infused number that followed, wow. If memory serves right, the band also made their way through an Ellington tune late in the set (when you’re multitasking and letting your recorder do the heavy lifting, details like this grow exponentially elusive over time).

Oh yeah – one more thing – Reeves loves false endings as much as he loves noir latin grooves. There’s nothing more fun than getting the crowd to believe that every single one of the eighteen or so people onstage is finished, when in fact they’re not. At this late date, it’s impossible to remember who was in the band – Sanford might have been on trombone, maybe Ben Kono – a fortuitously ubiquitous presence in big band circles in this city these days – on alto sax, possibly Carl Maraghi on bari sax and Nadje Noordhuis on trumpet, among the group assembled back behind the couches along the space’s northern wall. What’s coolest about the Smalls gig is that whoever’s on piano gets to play the house upright rather than the electric piano the band was forced to make do with in Park Slope.

Svetlana and the Delancey Five Salute Ella and Satchmo and Put Their Own Sophisticated Stamp on Classic Swing

It figures that drummer Rob Garcia would grab the opportunity to kick off Svetlana & the Delancey Five‘s show at Lucille’s Friday night with a counterintuitive series of offbeats into a hi-de-ho intro, Mike Sailors’ spiraling trumpet solo rising to carnivalesque heights and foreshadowing a darkly lustrous, unselfconsciously erudite show. Why has swing jazz become so enormously popular again? Sure, you can dance to it, and many couples – as well as an exuberant, octogenarian tapdancer – were cutting a rug at this show. But swing is also escapist, and frontwoman Svetlana Shmulyian makes no secret that this is her her vehicle for finding solace and transcendence, and that everybody is welcome to get onboard. But what differentiates this band from the hundreds of others working territory that’s often been done to death over the years is that this group isn’t just a vehicle for vocals. In over four years together, this semi-revolving cast has built a cohesiveness, a camaraderie and a distinctively sophisticated sound largely unrivalled in their thriving demimonde.

For example, Blue Skies is a swing staple, but Shmulyian didn’t sing it as straight-up exuberance – and essentially warned the crowd that she wasn’t going to. And then made good on that, with an uncluttered, balmy optimism grounded in the sense that there definitely had been a storm before the calm. The rest of the program was thematic, a characteristically ambitious celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of the mid-50s Louis Armstrong/Ella Fitzgerald collaborations. A potential minefield, but Shmulyian and special guest trombonist/singer Wycliffe Gordon rose to that challenge, indomitably and with a deeply bluesy edge echoed throughout the band.

Pianist Ben Paterson spiced his purist riffs with the occasional gracefully adrenalizing neoromantic cascade, while Garcia delivered grooves that roamed far south of the border, as well as from Buddy Rich splash, to a more chill, vintage Harlem pulse. And his arrangement of the Beatles’ Because brought out every bit of angst in Paul McCartney’s moody ballad, reinvented as a darkly bristling tango. Bassist Scott Ritchie kept his changes purposeful and low-key, and was having more fun than simply walking the changes. Saxophonist Michael Hashin alternated between sailing soprano and dynamic yet terse leaps and bounds on tenor.

But it was the chemistry between Shmulyian and Gordon that hit the highest points of the night, whether his masterful and deceptively subtle plunger work, or his droll, tongue-in-cheek vocals and effortless shifts into falsetto, or the night’s most hilarious moment, at the end of a solo toward the end of the show. As obvious and vaudevillian as that was, Gordon waited patiently to make that moment as ridiculously amusing as it was. And the reliably dynamic, eclectic Shmulyian was pretty much jumping out of her shoes from the git-go, rising to the very top of her register, vibrato going full blast. Yet it was a simmering take of the midtempo ballad Under a Blanket of Blue that arguably carried the most impact.

Likewise, the best song of the night might well have been a brand-new Shmulyian original, a bittersweetly swaying, guardedly optimistic New York-centric ballad allowing for a flicker of hope in the face of omnipresent bad news. Although she also grinningly acknowledged the results of the Brexit referendum, drawing some pretty wild applause from throughout the club. Grounded in the here and now, Shmulyian and her band played a show to get lost in: not bad for somebody who grew up in Moscow spinning Ella Fitzgerald vinyl on her family’s turntable and arrived in New York without knowing a soul here. The band’s next New York gig is a free show on July 23 at 8 PM at the auditorium at Kingsborough Community College, 2001 Oriental Blvd. in Manhattan Beach; the closest train is the Q to Brighton Beach.

Eden Lane Bring Their Misty, Haunting, Lynchian Jazz Songs Back to the West Village

Stephanie Layton stood tall and resolute, a tinge of mist in her voice, in front of her jazz combo Eden Lane at Caffe Vivaldi late last month. “If it was up to me, I’d only sing sad songs,” she told the crowd, concise and to the point – and half of them roared their approval. If there ever was a market for depressed music, New York in 2016 is it.

“But that wouldn’t be well-rounded,” she explained gently. As you would expect from a vocalist who’s in demand as much as she is, Layton is actually very well-rounded. And one suspects that her similarly well-rounded bandmates in the Tickled Pinks – arguably New York’s most irrepressibly fun swing harmony trio, who will be on West Coast tour this August – share her preference for dark material. Karla Moheno leads one of this city’s most mysteriously cinematic, haunting bands, Karla Rose & the Thorns, while Kate Sland sings and plays bass in uneasily swirling rock group Merit Badge. Layton’s other gig is playing piano alongside her singer sister Susanne in honkytonk power trio Dylan Charles & the Layton Sisters. And in a stroke of serendipity, Layton is bringing Eden Lane back to Caffe Vivaldi on July 29 at 9:30 PM.

Last time out at that venue, Layton was in her element. In her auburn bangs, retro red-framed glasses, black top and smart vintage print skirt, she had the David Lynch ingenue persona down cold, a perfect match for her blue velvet vocals. Her purist, inspired backing unit also included Charles on guitar along with bassist Larry Cook, tenor saxophonist Janelle Reichman and pianist.Yan Falmagne. They slowly made their way into My Baby Just Cares For Me, Layton giving it an understated nuance with a nod back to Nina Simone, Reichman’s sax matching Layton’s understatedly pillowy delivery. Then she completely flipped the script with the first of two state-specific songs, a coyly shuffling, wordy rarity from the Blossom Dearie catalog,  Rhode Island Is Famous for You, Charles plinking wryly through a verse when Layton threw one his way.

Then she went back to disarmingly direct, bittersweet mode for Happiness Is a Thing Called Joe, less Peggy Lee ballad than angst-ridden wish song lowlit by wee-hours piano underneath Reichman’s long, moodily spiraling solo. Layton duetted with Charles on a briskly swinging, almost defiantly contented take of Mississippi Mud, then went back to geographical jazz with a rare Erik Frandsen tune, the vividly affecting Unique New York. Eight million hearts just can’t be wrong, and she gave voice to every one, hoping they won’t lose their apartments to speculators looking to make a quick flip before the market crashes.

The band kept the wistful, grey-sky mood going, with a knowingly wounded, mentholated tropical tinge, Falmagne leaping in to keep the volume up when Charles added an aptly stark solo. Layton’s resigned interpretation of Rodgers and Hart’s Little Girl Blue was just plain shattering: her “Just sit here and count your fingers,” was enough to get tears from a stone. Likewise, their bittersweetly swaying take of When Sunny Gets Blue echoed the classic Jeanne Lee version, emotionally if not rhythmically. From there they picked up the pace, bouncing their way through No Soap, No Hope on the wings of Reichman’s rapidfire riffage.

Layton matched an anxious, brittle vibrato to her opaquely enveloping low register in an enigmatic take of When the Sun Comes Out, Charles’ rain-off-the-roof solo capping it off. Julie London’s Nice Girls Don’t Stay for Breakfast was next, keeping the heartbroken mood front and center over Falmagne’s judicious phrasing. They closed with a tongue-in-cheek, hungover Sunday pancake afternoon version of Give Me the Simple Life. Some laughs, plenty of goosebumps and enough empathy to pull just about anybody out of the abyss. Dare you to go to Caffe Vivaldi on the 29th and find out for yourself.

Hot Jazz on a Hot Summer’s Day

The party at Saturday’s slate of hot jazz bands at Central Park Summerstage was out back, on the lawn behind the arena. The picknickers and snuggling couples who’d made that spot their destination were on to something. There are no sightlines back there, unless you sit on somebody’s shoulders, maybe, but the grass has grown in since the hurricane, making a comfortable return to a time that for awhile seemed gone for good.

Inside, a mostly white, monied, youngish crowd slowly grew, milling around aimlessly, lethargic as the sun beat down oppressively on the astroturf. The bleachers to the left and right were packed, especially in the shade of the trees. The tented spaces directly behind the sound booth – which these days is situated at the back of a wide, fenced-off path to the stage – are paid seats reserved for ticketholders who fork over thousands of dollars to sit there, according to one of the many, many ushers working the show. But those seats remained empty for the duration of a concert that went on for over four hours. Then again, hedge funders are not known for their fondness for dancing, or their taste in music, or for any kind of fun in general. What would have been fun would have been to organize a posse to occupy those seats since all that space was going to waste. Needless to say, plenty of people would have jumped at a chance to do that in, say, 1988, when the arena was funded by taxpayer money rather than hedge funders trying to dodge the IRS. Then again, that was also before antidepressants and post-9/11 security paranoia.

On one hand, this concert was a bunch of familiar faces playing familiar material. Then again, that’s a spoiled New Yorker’s view. Many of the creme de la creme of the New York oldtimey swing jazz scene made their way up to the bandstand as the sun made its way slowly across the sky. Trumpter Bria Skonberg served as emcee for the New York Hot Jazz All-Stars, an aptly named pickup band featuring – in no particular order – Anat Cohen on clarinet, Wycliffe Gordon (who’d just played a raptly fun set with Svetlana and the Delancey Five the previous night) on trombone and vocals, Jerron “Blnd Boy” Paxton on banjo, Dalton Ridenhour on piano, Vince Giordano on bass, vocals and bass sax and Joe Saylor on drums. With dixieland flair and expertly bluesy chops, they made their way through a New Orleans-heavy set, Gordon channeling Louis Jordan with similar erudite, unselfconscious verve.

Hot Sardines frontwoman Elizabeth Bougerol, decked out in a dazzling orange pantssuit, sang the most apt song of the afternoon. The wistfully swinging title track to the band’s new album French Fries and Champagne may speak to those on a beer budget with a taste for bubbly, but it’s as much of a guardedly hopeful anthem for those who’ve weathered the past several years’ blitzkrieg of gentrification. Bougerol didn’t mention the UK’s secession from the European Union – Svetlana did that the previous night, with relish – but that’s the first domino. The real estate bubble can’t last much longer. Meanwhile, the band – musical director Evan Palazzo on piano, Jason Prover on trombone, Mike Sailor on trumpet, plus sax, rhythm section and a full string quartet – partied like it was 1929. Bougerol toyed with the beat in a brassy, sometimes languid, sometimes come-hither mezzo-soprano, through a set composed mostly of original, period-perfect continental 1930s style swing numbers. The best of the standards was Bougerol’s insightful bilingual rendition of an old chestnut, titled Comes Love in English, but whose French chorus translates loosely as “Love Is Fucked Up.” They also took a rather farfetched stab at horn-driven countrypolitan along with a misguided remake of a wretched 1980s cheeseball pop hit. Then again, that song was huge in France, and that’s where Bougerol hails from.

Butler, Bernstein & the Hot 9 headlined. By then, the turf had really soaked up the heat and was throwing it back up, and the band onstage reflected that. This is basically trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s return to his roots playing the lively New Orleans-centric swing and pre-swing repertoire he cut his teeth on in Berkeley and then New York before making his own indelible mark as an avatar of noir, and film music, and Jewish jazz. So it was no surprise to hear him leap and snort and fire off one explosive burst after another as pianist Henry Butler boogied and rumbled and barrelhoused, guitarist Matt Munisteri jangling and clanging through every hip voicing in the book as the horns and strings wove an endlessly joyous lattice of southern-fried revelry. Inside, the crowd’s energy level had picked up to the point where it was hard to find a space out of the sun that wasn’t forbidden. Out back on the lawn, there was plenty of space, and relaxation, a good place for starting over when the time comes. And it will. Bring it on.

Irresistible, Cleverly Sardonic Fun with Uri Caine and the Lutoslawski Quartet

If you missed pianist Uri Caine with the Lutoslawski Quartet at National Sawdust last night, you missed a really fun show. Caine is one of the great wits in music, a category-defying player equally adept at jazz, classical and klezmer. He’d been commissioned by the organizers of the Jazztopad Festival to collaborate with the enterprising Polish string quartet, and the results were obviously contagious. In between numbers, cellist Maciej Miodawski couldn’t resist breaking into a smile, and while his bandmates – violinists Marcin Marcowic and Bartocz Woroch, and violist Artur Rozmyslowicz – were more stoic, there was no mistaking the cameraderie between the five players onstage. An album of their work over the past year together, both in Poland and the US, is due out soon.

The performance was about album-length, half a dozen pieces in total clocking in at around the fifty minute mark. Caine nimbly negotiated long, rapidfire cascades and arpeggiated flurries, interspersed with seemingly haphazard leaps and bounds that sounded like improvisation even though they were obviously not: this group keeps it fresh. Meanwhile, the quartet alternated between gracefully paced circular motives, steady pizzicato and shiftting sheets of atmospherics.

And Caine’s signature sense of humor was ubiquitous: in the wry round-robin of pizzicato that concluded one number, a similarly droll series of glissandos later on, and in the surrealistic juxtaposition of gleaming, Schubertian neoromanticism and increasingly errant variations that were sort of a more elegant take on what Spike Jones might have done with the theme. Caine led the group into the most trad piece of the night, lowlit with his barrelhouse lefthand and gospel allusions, to close the show  The crowd roared for an encore; they didn’t get one .

What was a little surprising was the choice of venue. National Sawdust has world-class sonics and is a perennially enjoyable place to take in a show. On the other hand, the expat Polish community a little to the north and west in Greenpoint is fiercely supportive of their indigenous sounds. A guy as far out as Tomasz Stanko can sell out any one of the wedding halls there. Considering the size of the Polish contingent that made it to this one, the crowd would have tripled in size closer to Greenpoint Avenue.

Svetlana and the Delancey Five Bring Their Sophisticated, Cosmopolitan Swing to Midtown

For the past four years, Svetlana and the Delancey Five have been recreating a magical, cosmopolitan world that time forgot with their Monday night residency at swanky Norfolk Street speakeasy the Back Room. Singer/bandleader Svetlana Shmulyian has fearsome chops, but she uses them very subtly, and her band follows suit. In a demimonde full of cookie-cutter swing jazz bands, she stands out with an approach that on one hand is completely trad yet is also completely individualistic, a sophisticated, globally-inspired take on a revered American sound. And it’s as romantic as you could possibly want: lots of couples make it a date with this band. She and the group have a show coming up this Friday, June 24, with two sets at 7:30 and 9:30 PM featuring special guest trombonist Wycliffe Gordon at Lucille’s, adjacent to B.B. King’s on 42nd St. Advance tix are $20 and still available as of today.

Last night, the band were on top of their game, everybody seeming to be in a goodnaturedly conspiratorial mood. Trumpeter Mike Sailors’ rat-a-tat solo against tenor saxophonist Michael Hashin’s more balmy lines on a deeply bluesy take of It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing set the tone immediately. The bandleader then joined them, decked out in a simple but striking black evening dress, heels and a big pearl necklace. Midway through the set, she left the band by themselves to play a blues while she made the rounds of the room, schmoozing and catching up with a circle of admirers that numbers as many women as men. It was as if this was 1952 and she was the mob moll in charge of the joint, teasing and toying with the shady dudes who made the secluded spot a favorite place for their own conspiracies, reputedly for many decades.

Shmulyian’s delivery is charmingly precise: there’s a distinctive Russian erudition and craftsmanship to how she constructs a phrase. While you can tell that she’s immersed herself in Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday, and Sarah Vaughan, she doesn’t sound much like any of them. Shmulyian’s voice is extraordinarily mutable; she can be misty on one number, and then disarmingly direct and crystalline as she was on her first one, a vividly uneasy swing through But Not For Me. She saved her vibrato for the very lowest and highest notes she’d hit all night, with a Powerglide fluidity, and made it look effortless.

Rather than scatting, Shmulyian keeps her improvisations within the lyrics, matching her interpretation to their mood, as she did with the coy melismas of the jauntily shuffling bounce after that. Likewise, she reached for the rafters with some blissful leaps to the top of the scale and then hung on for dear life throughout a pretty sizzling, uptempo take of Blue Skies over pianist Ben Paterson’s gritty, clenched-teeth phrasing underpinned by bassist Scott Ritchie (whose credits reputedly include Lady Gag) and Freddy Cole drummer Conerway Henry III. The low-key ballad after that gave the dancers a chance to get cozy with a slow drag, but also gave Shmulyian a launching pad to show off her forceful, poignant low register. Then she closed the set with an triumphantly smoky take of Exactly Like You that put KD Lang’s to shame.

And that was just the first set. The band are doing a couple of sets on Friday, so you can expect a more expansive look at the colorful personalities of everybody involved. And you can dance if you feel like it.

The Momenta Quartet Illuminate Per Norgard’s Haunting, Pensive String Works

Per Norgard is iconic in his native Denmark, and deserves a global audience. The lucky crowd at Victor Borge Hall at Scandinavia House on Park Avenue Friday night got to witness the Momenta Quartet turn in a purposefully flickering, often sepulchral, genuinely transcendent performance of string quartets, a suite of miniatures and a chilling violin/cello duet.

Norgard’s music is minimalist in the sense that everything counts for something, and that his melodies tend to be spare and follow a careful, meticulous path. But there’s a great deal going on, much of it rhythmic: constantly shifting meters, persistent wave motion and all sorts of oceanic and water imagery, unsurprising for someone from an archipelago nation. An unease on the brink of terror often lurks in the background, or in the distance. On the rare occasion that it takes centerstage – as in the coda of the duo suite Tjampuan, inspired by Balinese mysticism and waterways and performed with a hushed intensity by violinist Alex Shiozaki and cellist Michael Haas – the result can be spine-tingling, whichever way you want to imagine that.

There’s also a mathematical precision that sometimes brings to mind Steve Reich, but with vastly less playfulness and more foreboding. The awestruck terror of Messiaen’s most dramatic works also figures into the picture, if from a somewhat greater distance, as it did during the surreallistic time-warp of Norgard’s String Quartet No. 10. A contrast between calm if not exactly cheery harvest imagery, seemingly loaded with subtext, and a contemplation of time out of mind, it offered violist Stephanie Griffin a rare opportunity – at this concert at least – to vent, if only guardedly. There was no lack of cruel irony in how vexing such a concept can be to mere mortals, and Norgard seized on that.

His String Quartet No.3 – Three Miniatures, dating from 1959, juxtaposed brief, swinging, occasionally carnivalesque allusions with a dirge theme. Likewise, Playground, the suite of brief, flitting pieces, brought to mind a more mathematical, modernist take on Bartok’s Mikrokosmos etudes. The Quartet got to bring the most dynamism to the String Quartet No. 8- Night Descending Like Smoke, a World War I-themed piece based on a Norgard chamber opera, offering an offhandedly savage look at karmic payback to warmongers and their sympathizers. It’s characteristic of the relevance of Norgard’s repertoire, which really ought to be performed with this kind of meticulous attention far more often in this city.

One such performance to look forward to will be on July 29 at 8 PM when pianist Jacob Rhodebeck plays Norgard works at Mise-En Place, 678 Hart. St. in Bushwick. The other is by the Momenta Quartet June 23, with a delicious homemade vegetarian dinner at 6, show at 8 featuring Norgard’s String Quartet No. 3, Henri Dutilleux’s Ainsi La Nuit and Beethoven’s String Quartet, Op. 135 on the fourth floor of 67 Metropolitan Ave. (Wythe/Kent) in Williamsburg. Sugg. don. is $20, BYOB, sharable food/drink are highly encouraged!

Rising Star Singer Brianna Thomas Brings Her Purist, Soulful Jazz Approach Back to Harlem

For the past couple of months, jazz singer Brianna Thomas has had a series of engagements at Ginny’s Supper Club uptown. Her next gig there is this Saturday night, June 18 with sets at 7:30 and 9 PM; cover is $20. The secret to this place is to grab a space at the bar; otherwise, there’s a minimum if you want to sit, and it’s not cheap. During the week, the place draws a loud afterwork crowd: if it’s the same here on the weekend, Thomas is one of the few acts who could actually work an audience to the point where they’d listen, or at least holler back at her.

None other than Will Friedwald – the guy who wrote the book on jazz singing – anointed her as the best of the current crop of up-and-coming voices in jazz. Her formidable arsenal – a strong, expressive delivery, expert command of phrasing and a love for swing and the classics – is unquestionable. This blog caught her onstage most recently a couple years back at Tompkins Square Park, where she opened the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival, leading a quintet featuring similarly soulful guitarist Russell Malone.

Thomas and the rhythm section gave a joyous, cha-cha-influenced groove to All of Me to open the concert, wasting no time to launch into a jaunty stairstepping scat solo, the piano following her leaps and bounds, sax rising from low-key contrast to a bustling exuberance. That set a tone for the rest of the show, purist and packed with gospel fervor and blues grit, as in the swinging next number’s sax/bass/vocal intro, foreshadowing a coolly slipsliding bass solo midway through. “Say ‘Joy!’ Thomas entreated the crowd, and got the response she wanted. It capsulizes her appeal.

The band hit an Afro-Cuban shuffle from there, bringing a nocturne out into the daylight, Thomas leaping in on the offbeat and leaping even further from soulful melismatics to towering heights through an all-too-brief vocal solo. From there she explored airy, vampy balladry, to a hard-hitting detour into the blues, then funky soul and finally back to classic swing as the band rose and fell behind her, with alternately ebullient and pensive solos all around. The highlight of the set – and the afternoon, as it turned out – was a haunted, dynamically charged minor-key duet with Malone, an original song akin to a 21st century update on Nature Boy.

Despite her gifts as a singer, Thomas is hardly a diva, just a down-to-earth midwestern musician establishing an individual voice, finding new places to go where so many icons have gone before. From a concertgoer’s perspective, this show didn’t involve daydrinking – a hallowed Charlie Parker Festival tradition – but it did involve an awful lot of moving around, partly to stay out of the blistering sun, partly to dodge gaggles of chatty people in order to get something approximating a decent field recording. Exercise in futility: you’d do better to catch Thomas Saturday night or at a similar venue with a good sound system to fully appreciate everything she brings to the table.

Ageless Jazz Icons Battle With the Rain and Then Stop It at Central Park Summerstage

“I made the rain stop,” McCoy Tyner grinned, and the couple hundred or so diehards who’d stood patiently through three torrential hours at Central Park Summerstage last night roared in appreciation. As if by magic, the downpour finally abated at practically the second that the jazz piano icon and his quartet took the stage. Before the skies burst, there had been a couple thousand others, at the very least, who’d crammed themselves between the labyrinth of wire fences or stood longingly outside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the Coltrane collaborator as well as sets by a couple of other elder jazz statesmen, the slightly younger Ron Carter and his quintet, and an even older one, the ageless 91-year-old Roy Haynes and his Fountain of Youth Band.

Carter opened the show while the celestial drainpipe overhead got busy. There’s no press tent at Summerstage anymore, so pretty much everybody who went there to write about it went home afterward soaked to the bone. But the show was worth it. Intentionally or not, Carter set the tone for the night, segueing from one number into another, pushing an almost omnipresent clave groove with his dancing basslines as the group winkingly shifted from one meter into the next, holding the remaining crowd pretty much rapt in the process. Pianist Renee Rosnes distinguished herself with nimble, pointillistic cascades and thoughtful, lyrical pirouettes when she wasn’t finding deep blues in a slow, ambered, darkly latin-flavored take of My Funny Valentine. Carter’s percussionist took a droll talking-drum solo, later adding tongue-in-cheek flourishes on his timbales while the bandleader went deep into the murk. Trumpeter Wallace Roney joined them and spun through purposeful volleys of postbop as the rhythm section swung harder. At the end, they went back to the clave, a beat that’s typically associated with latin music but actually dates from the first civilizations in Ethiopia, a simple human heartbeat, tense and expectant and ultimately joyous.

Haynes was next on the bill. By this time, the rain was really out of control. Jazz Police‘s astute reporter and Shakespeare scholar Sheila Horne Mason dryly observed that most of the people who’d left actually had umbrellas; most of us who remained didn’t. The nonagenarian drummer is literally none the worse for the years, playing with the effortless vigor of a man a quarter his age, showing off some of his signature moves – lefthand-versus-righthand bicoastal time zone variations, and others – as he swung his brushes with a regal thwack. They opened with a sunny, upbeat trip to Bahia and made their way the golden age postbop the bandleader’s best known for after that. Out in front of the group, Jaleel Shaw played jaunty, spiraling soprano sax, then switching to alto as the groove grew more gritty. As Carter did, they began where they left off.

Tyner flipped the script with his misterioso modalities. His mighty left hand has lost none of its crushing drive; this time out, he began with a judicious chordal approach and as the groove loosened, his right hand went further into exploratory glimmer. Like Dave Brubeck before him, Tyner has always been more about melody and trajectory rather than blinding speed, although his attack is a lot harder. The set seemed to go by in a flash, although he got a full fifty or so minutes onstage. Uneasily vamping, circular passages moved purposefully, almost imperceptively toward majestic, otherworldly Northern African terrain, an area Tyner has explored more than anybody except maybe Randy Weston. He took the crowd to church with a blues and finally swung hard at the end. The crowd roared for an encore: considering overall exhaustion throughout the venue for crew and musicians as well as audueince, there wasn’t any.

Central Park Summerstage programs a wide variety of music, with the occasional jazz show. The next one is a hot swing triplebill on June 25 starting at 3 PM with trumpeter. Bria Skonberg and the NY Hot Jazz Festival All-Stars including Anat Cohen, Vince Giordano, Joe Saylor and Dalton Ridenhour, cosmopolitan female-fronted swing combo the Hot Sardines, and irrepressible slide trumpeter Steven Bernstein’s big blazing New Orleans-flavored piano-based nonet, Butler, Bernstein and the Hot 9. Bring a sun hat, sunscreen and a big umbrella – in the age of global warming, you never know.