Tenor madness

Horns and history color this year's Newport Jazz

by Jon Garelick

If you were, like me, hedging your bets on the JVC Jazz Festival -- Newport this year, you picked last Saturday as the day to make the gig. Aside from the commercially necessary, and often appealing, jazz pop of the Bruce Hornsby Band and Manhattan Transfer, Saturday was Tenor Sax Day. You could catch the two crown princes of under-30 hornmen, James Carter and Joshua Redman (they're also featured in Robert Altman's Kansas City). Carter had labelmate Javon Jackson sit in with him for a couple of numbers. Michael Brecker, a wizened veteran at 47, played with the McCoy Tyner Trio. Later that night, David Sanchez, who's been pushing Afro-Latin explorations with pianist Danilo Pérez, led a jam session at the Hotel Viking in town. And if you were lucky enough to stow away, you could catch Argentine romantic Gato Barbieri, 62, plying his lush tone and danceable rhythms on the QE2 (parked in the harbor as part of a five-day jazz cruise that included the festival).

There were no sweeping conclusions you could draw from this menu. After all, jazz's extreme left wing (Charles Gayle, David S. Ware) was excluded from the tenor conclave. There was no David Murray (an apparent outcast at US festivals), no Joe Lovano, no Sonny Rollins. The emphasis was on Young Tenor, straight-ahead division.

Carter's was the first set of the day, and he continues to garner the kind of hoopla Redman was getting a couple of years ago. Unlike Redman, Carter "doubles" on an array of reeds -- alto and baritone sax, bass clarinet, and, at the festival, clarinet. Also unlike Redman -- who's no slouch -- he seems to have unlimited technique. He can execute flawlessly and with depth in any register on any horn he picks up. And, as has been said, his playing encompasses the whole history of the instrument. Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Rollins, Coltrane, David Murray, the honking and shouting of R&B -- they're all part of his sound. If Carter has any flaw, it's that his playing, especially in fast tempos, can be frenetic. He rips around the horn, slicing up pitches, making Murray-like slashing intervallic leaps, apparently not content to let any phrase, any note, just be.

On Saturday, Carter and Jackson joined forces for a headlong, exhilarating "Lester Leaps In," trading eight-bar breaks, then fours, until at times their playing flowed into a single, rushing stream. More often their ideas remained distinct -- Jackson picking up on some of Carter's devices, such as swallowing the microphone with his horn for near-feedback guffaws, or marking his phrases with tongue-slapped pops. Most of the time the exchange was more subtle: melodic and rhythmic fragments traded, turned this way and that, contrasted, dropped.

On "Body and Soul," Carter showed flash and creative focus. He took his solo from broad-toned roars to a high-register whisper without losing the narrative of the melodic line. When he pushed the horn to the upper end, he avoided the rasp of a "false" register, playing an extended passage in a pure, beautiful legato. Oddly, his best work of the day may have been on a slow blues, Buddy Tate's "Blue Creek" -- a clarinet solo that went into avant-garde squeals before settling into a slow, molasses-thick pace, until he brought it down to a single quarter-note per bar and a final series of tongued clicks against the fading sound of the band.

If Carter leaps around in jazz history, Michael Brecker hears it filtered through John Coltrane. On Saturday, playing with former Coltrane sideman McCoy Tyner's trio (on Sunday he was to play with Herbie Hancock), Brecker built his solos to dramatic peaks but without any of Carter's show-offy restlessness. Coltrane's system was clearly audible -- the four-note groupings in his arpeggiated runs, the squalling repeated triplets, even the up-down two-note braying exclamations. But it was honest playing; Brecker does nothing merely for effect. When he played "Impressions" with the pianist who recorded it with Coltrane, they weren't merely playing a style but seeking something Coltrane never finished looking for.

Redman, meanwhile, is touring with pianist Chick Corea's "Remembering Bud Powell" supergroup that played the Boston Globe Jazz Festival in June. Serving both Powell and Corea, and working alongside trumpeter Wallace Roney, bassist Christian McBride, and ageless drummer Roy Haynes (who got one of the day's biggest ovations for an earth-shaking solo), Redman, like Carter, seemed calmed down. Eschewing some of his crowd-pleasing R&B licks, he appeared to hear every solo freshly. On "Dusk and Sandy," he began by stringing eighth notes against McBride's fast-walking four, working a four-note figure and then following it into the basement, doing some Rollins-like rhythm shifts, picking up speed and riffing against his own phrases in different registers before climaxing in some high wails. It was as honest a performance as Brecker's, and with a system Redman hasn't quite figured out yet. Which is part of the fun. Like Carter, Redman hasn't settled into a style. You can't ask more of a jazz player than that he or she remain unpredictable.