Like a Tight Relay Team Handing Off the Baton

Photo: Erin Baiano for The New York TimesBy BEN RATLIFF

Jazz Gallery All-Stars, a group of bandleaders and composers, at Symphony Space on Friday, the second night of the CareFusion Jazz Festival.

At several points during Friday’s show at Symphony Space by an ad-hoc band called the Jazz Gallery All-Stars, an ancient ritual took place. Over a repeating cycle of chords, the saxophonist Miguel Zenón took a solo. Then the bassist Ben Williams took a solo, then the trumpeter Roy Hargrove, then the guitarist Lage Lund. It didn’t always happen in that order, and others were sometimes involved. The pianist Gerald Clayton. The trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire. The hand-drums percussionist Pedro Martinez. The drummer Kendrick Scott. The singer Claudia Acuña.
 
You get the point. It’s now well understood that any relevant jazz group is more than the sum of its solos. Strings of solos, in current jazz, sound old-fashioned. This concert echoed an idea from the Newport jazz festivals of the 1950s, when the all-stars tended to be swing musicians playing standards. Anyway, the Jazz Gallery All-Stars aren’t really a group, though some of the musicians have played together before. All are composers and bandleaders with serious résumés, even if few are well known outside jazz circles.

Friday was the second night of the CareFusion Jazz Festival, produced by George Wein, Newport’s originator. And despite the breadth of the material and the wild level of technical and conceptual power onstage — the All-Stars include four winners of the Thelonious Monk Competition and a MacArthur Fellow — the concert kept drifting back to a convention that most of these musicians don’t really live by. But for all that, they rose to it and made it work.

All nine have some association with the Jazz Gallery, a nonprofit space on Hudson Street in the South Village that opened in 1995 and started programming music full time in 2000. It has sought grants and donations that have gone toward commissioned pieces and workshops, but doesn’t feel like a school or an institution. It has been important to the scene.

Crucially, the All-Stars had prepared, and didn’t come to play standards. They aimed high. Mr. Clayton’s piece “Round Come Round” moved warily, a game of group hide-and-seek with a trickling melody and a droning tonal center. Mr. Akinmusire’s “Henya,” a crawling ballad performed without a drum kit, opened with clear trumpet long tones, and became disciplined gently into song with a slow rhythm on batá drums, piano, bass and guitar. It didn’t accelerate or rise in volume; it just walked on with unnerving confidence.

Ms. Acuña sang “El Derecho de Vivir en Paz” (“The Right to Live in Peace”), by the Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara; it was an example of what she does best, feeding the history of Latin American songwriting through the jazz process. And Mr. Zenón, originally from Puerto Rico, likewise achieved his trademark weaving of ancient and current in “Ichara Icha,” an expansion of a Cuban Arará song. Its full-band middle section, between slow and gorgeous voice-and-percussion parts, had a rippling 27-beat cycle; it felt good, even if when you stopped counting.

All hands, except Mr. Hargrove, closed with Herbie Hancock’s “Chameleon,” a frame for jamming that seemed at first like it might undo all the hard work and turn the concert into a canned good time. It didn’t. Mr. Zenón and Mr. Akinmusire played for real, tangling in short, dissonant alarms; Mr. Kendrick stuttered and gapped his beats, getting a rise out of Mr. Clayton; Mr. Lund’s lines leapt among different scales, enveloping the whole instrument. Both the All-Stars and the audience members got what they wanted.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/arts/music/21allstars.html?partner=rss&emc=rss