Hot blowing

The Verve JazzFest clocks in

by Jon Garelick

The Verve JazzFest last Friday in Symphony Hall was an oddly shaped beast, but it breathed plenty of fire. Charlie Haden's Quartet West, the Joe Henderson Trio, and the rollicking Kansas City All Star Band (the latter drawn from the Robert Altman film) all played tightly scheduled 45-minute sets. For a satisfactory dramatic climax, two short sets of intimate club music would have been followed by a longer big-band blowout. But the evening ended at 10:45, to avoid Symphony Hall overtime charges. So even after two hours and 15 minutes of music, a lot of folks in the audience felt cheated, and cheers were mixed with boos. (A recent Keith Lockhart Pops concert ran into similar trouble.)

That said, you couldn't fault the players. Haden, an original jazz rebel with the Ornette Coleman Quartet, has with Quartet West been making frankly nostalgic albums that avoid compromise -- his band are a collection of beboppers with a very broad romantic streak. On Friday night they played four songs -- "Hello My Lovely," "Child's Play," and "First Song" (all by Haden) and QW pianist Alan Broadbent's "The Long Goodbye." Broadbent swept the full keyboard with classical references as well as bop (Bill Evans is his spiritual father). Tenor-sax Ernie Watts reeled off speedy Coltrane runs, but his keening tone conjured an alto, and even his overblown squeals and shouts had a burnished sheen. Drummer Larance Marable was a swinging, unfussy timekeeper sensitive to dynamics.

Haden favors a huge, lumbering sound. And yet, with his attack and tone, he's capable of a more durable, less "percussive" legato line than flashier speed-demon bassists. On "First Song," his extended solo was one long arc of melody fashioned from quarter-notes and half-notes and rests. Listening to Haden make such a pure lyric music with that plunking, deliberate attack has a poignant effect -- it's like watching the clumsy fat boy in school sing a love song. While Haden sang, Broadbent suggested a few chords behind him, and Marable marked each bar with a single light cymbal splash.

Quartet West make craft and lyricism their hallmark. Joe Henderson is an idiosyncratic, often avant-garde cult hero whom Verve has turned into a romantic lead, beginning with an album of Billy Strayhorn material (Lush Life, 1992) and continuing through albums of Miles Davis and Antonio Carlos Jobim. This program has made Henderson a crossover star, but the pianoless trio at Symphony Hall (George Mraz on bass, Al Foster on drums) showed just how demanding Henderson can be. The tunes (Strayhorn's "Isfahan," "Lush Life," and "Take the `A' Train," Sam Rivers's "Beatrice," and Henderson's "Y Ya La Quiero") all had a pop-song familiarity. But whereas the QW's Watts spun out long arcing lines that were as legible and self-contained as a prose paragraph, Henderson spoke in alternately lyric and gruff exclamations, knotty poetic epigrams.

Henderson's art was all in the digressions, in a little two-note rhythmic figure on "Isfahan" that started in the bottom of his horn, climbed in register, and then evaporated. Or in his exchanges with Foster on "Beatrice," where he worked a low-register trill over and over, moving it up the scale, shredding it with increasing intensity against Foster's snare and tom-tom rolls. Instead of giving "Lush Life" the standard bel canto ballad treatment, Henderson broke it up into out-of-tempo excursions, abbreviated waltz-time choruses, and bizarre pow-wow drum beats from Foster. It's hard to guess how well all this translated in the back of the hall, but from row G it was mesmerizing.

No such problem with the Kansas City band. They opened with their Verve album's "Blues in the Dark," which was supported by the seasoned R&B of David "Fathead" Newman's alto and driven over the edge by a soprano-sax solo from James Carter full of endless-breath runs and high, false-register trills that broke up into cubist cross-hatching. After the concentrated listening required by Haden and Henderson, this '30s-era pop was tonic indeed. On "Tickle Toe," Don Byron's flawless daredevil clarinet runs challenged Carter's supremacy, and the Panavision expanse of brass answering reeds on the theme emphasized once again that big-band music is the one jazz that demands to be heard live. The Nicholas Payton/James Zollar/Steve Bernstein trumpet chase on "Lafayette" coiled the tension yet tighter, but that was as far as the overtime constraints would let things go. Bandleader Bernstein (who, along with tenor-sax Craig Handy, wrote all the arrangements) had time only to introduce the band and then say good night. If Verve can make a second tour with the JazzFest, here was proof that the All-Stars don't need help making a big hall rock.