Greg Osby: Unplugged

Alto-saxophonist Greg Osby has always skirted easy categorization. He began his career with mainstream heavyweights like Woody Shaw and Jon Faddis, but he gained greater notoriety for his funkified work with fellow alto Steve Coleman. He's experimented with electrified hip-hop grooves on two previous albums, Black Book and 3-D Lifestyles. Even now that he's settled into the more familiar terrain of acoustic jazz, both on the new disc Further Ado (Blue Note) and on stage at Scullers a week ago, it would be hard to peg him as a hard-bop clone.

Osby opened his first Scullers set with three tunes from the new album that showed off the probing intelligence and surprising twists of his coolly considered style. He phrases with surgical precision. His sense of time and his linear variety establish a unique relationship to the beat, whether it's hip-hop or swing. During his solo on the opening "Six of One," he diced phrases into tight, tiny fragments that pricked and poked at the underlying beat laid down by bassist Hill Greene and drummer Rodney Green. Osby eventually eased the tension with longer lines that skated over the rhythm section's fluid swing, but even these passages, bristling with sharp harmonic leaps, defied expectations of length and timing as they expanded and contracted. He softened the brassy glow of his tone with a slow throbbing vibrato on the ballad "Mentor's Prose," but its tenderness didn't entirely mask the stern intellectual rigor of his solo.

Osby has found an equal in the impressive young pianist Jason Moran, who delighted in setting himself challenges for the sheer thrill of working his way out of trouble. On "Transparency," his riffs set up regular patterns that he'd undermine with abrupt note clusters and asymmetric phrases before wending his way back home to the initial ideas. He never took the easy way out, yet he played with a joy and sensuality that kept his solos from being mere brainy exercises.

Bassist Greene and drummer Green were creative and responsive, but the spotlight remained on Moran and Osby. The latter may have unplugged for the moment. But his serious intent and the cultivation of his own musical voice make the continuities with his previous bands at least as important as the differences.

-- Ed Hazell