Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra: Pale Bechet

Jazz repertory performances tend to succeed better when they celebrate composers rather than soloists. When you play Duke Ellington's music, the band is the star. The older the music, the better. And how better to dramatize the radicalism of Ellington's 1920s "jungle band" than in the concert hall, where all the textures and voicings buried in those old recordings can flower and thrive. But with artists like Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, the soloists -- not the compositions or arrangements -- are the point. You can have all the sympathetic ensemble support in the world -- all the "idiomatically correct" renderings of 1923 New Orleans jazz ensemble detail -- but if the solo centerpieces aren't there, it's not going to happen. This past Friday at Symphony Hall, the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra did its best to recapture Bechet for a centenary celebration, but with little of Bechet's heat.

Bechet, who was born in 1897 and died in 1959, was a formidable character with one of the biggest, most distinctive sounds in jazz. He earned fame as a New Orleans clarinettist early, but we identify him now mostly with the soprano sax, which he took up in his early 20s. On it, his broad vibrato attack, combined with a highly rhythmic solo style, achieved a kind of manifest destiny, and he blew most trumpet players off the bandstand (Bechet and Louis Armstrong were career-long rivals). It was a swooping, shouting, almost rude sound, disciplined by a rich harmonic sense and a keen faithfulness to the narrative logic of the blues and standard song structure.

The LCJO took a worthy stab at Bechet. To play most of his clarinet features, it had Michael White, a New Orleans native and student of early jazz. On soprano was Bob Wilber, now 69, a celebrated Bechet specialist who studied with the great man as a teenager. The usually large orchestra was stripped down to 12 pieces, the better to serve Bechet's small-group settings. Nicholas Payton and LCJO artistic director Wynton Marsalis sparred with the reeds in the role of Armstrong or Tommy Ladnier or any number of other trumpeters who suffered Bechet's dominance. Other reed players occasionally spelled Wilber and White. Marsalis has stacked the LCJO deck with a strong New Orleans core crew, which also helped. Drummer Herlin Riley in particular has a mastery of Crescent City parade rhythms and all those idiomatic details, right down to the last choked-cymbal accent.

The LCJO dispensed with chronology, jumping all around Bechet's career, with White serving as MC and providing brief introductions for each tune (a practice that's guaranteed to throttle pacing in the midst of a bunch of three-to-five minute pieces). The typical Wynton-inspired ensemble details shone: Reginald Veal's slapping bass against Howard Collins's on-the-beat banjo strums in "Perdido Street Blues," Riley's rumba beat and the clarinet countermelodies against the trumpet theme of "Tropical Moon-Rhumba," the pianissimo ensemble coda of "Bechet's Fantasy," and, everywhere, trombonist Wycliffe Gordon's tasteful assortment of glisses, countermelodies, moans, meows, mutes, and open-horn figures to support whatever else was going on. On a tune like "Les Oignons," the group rhythmic steam and chattering cross-voices took on a hilarious edge.

But neither White nor Wilber conjured a Bechet-like presence. Wilber, crafty in the details, sounded pale overall, with none of Bechet's breadth or rhythmic force. White was most affecting on the slow blues "Blue Horizon," working deep in the chalumeau register, spinning long, dark legato lines. Joe Temperley played a beautiful soprano on "As-Tu le Cafard" that didn't stoop to showboating but linked choruses with long-lined phrases and ended on a pearly sustained high note. Otherwise it was the brass that brought the punch -- Marsalis, Payton, and Gordon making every solo moment count. Bechet, proud reedman that he was, would have been bummed.

-- Jon Garelick