Leading a Crew of Energetic Youngsters, and Keeping Up With Them

Music Review | Terence Blanchard
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: July 24, 2009
The trumpeter Terence Blanchard runs an informal but important academy. Since the beginning of the 1990s his bands have always been strong, if sometimes overcontrolled. But now that he’s a full generation older than most of the musicians working with him — and those musicians have musically evolved from education and influences different from the ones that formed him — his music is feeling energized in a new way.

His quintet plays through the weekend at the Jazz Standard, and it’s worth a look. Mr. Blanchard’s other career is in film soundtrack composition, and for the last two years he has been performing music from his recent album “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina),” partly written for Spike Lee’s New Orleans documentary, “When the Levees Broke.” It did well by Mr. Blanchard: he won a Grammy for it. But he seems eager to move on. On Thursday night he acknowledged from the stage that most audiences still wanted to hear those slow, sad themes, but that he wouldn’t be playing them.

So he played pieces from a new record, “Choices,” which Concord will release on Aug. 18. Surprisingly, because it was so new, the band pushed hard against the music, warped it and expanded it.

Mr. Blanchard chose to add a few fiddly extras: at the beginning and end of some pieces he ran his trumpet through a chorus pedal and triggered samples of Cornel West, discoursing about individuality and the meaning of life. The extras didn’t feel particularly intrusive. Dr. West’s speech cadence is musical in itself, and the synthetic harmony connected to the plush, interior feeling of some of the music.

In the new ballad “Choices,” Mr. Blanchard showed off the prettiest part of his playing, evocative, meditative and sort of scene-setting: he calmly bends notes, muting his liquid sound without using an actual mute. But on another tune, “H.U.G.s. (Historically Underrepresented Groups),” he played harder, in quick, syncopated phrases, balancing cool long tones with hot bursts of ranting.

This is a band whose lineup changes have become significant — they swing attention toward young musicians — and as of this year its tenor saxophonist is Walter Smith III, who seized a couple of spots on Thursday to improvise with furious continuity. Mr. Smith’s own song “Him or Me,” with surprise rests, odd phrase lengths and opaque harmony, became the show’s peak: everyone in the band, including the pianist Fabian Almazan, the bassist Ben Street and the drummer Kendrick Scott, smoked through all that complexity. Mr. Smith’s solo ran through a few choruses with dam-breaking force and binding logic, using tension and release and working up to split tones. Mr. Almazan played a dense and imaginative solo, improvising with both hands around the center of the keyboard. The music already felt lived in, and open enough to keep changing.

The Terence Blanchard Quintet continues through Sunday at the Jazz Standard, 116 East 27th Street, Manhattan, with the singer Bilal as a guest on Saturday; (212) 576-2232, jazzstandard.com.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/25/arts/music/25terence.html?_r=1&partner=rss&emc=rss