Triple crown

Redman, Lacy, and Douglas

by Jon Garelick

If Boston occasionally goes through jazz droughts, it's now experiencing a minor boom. The area's two established commercial jazz rooms, the Regattabar and Scullers, are being complemented more often by alternative venues. The result: important shows last week from Dewey Redman at the Middle East (appearing with Swiss guitarist Harald Haerter's quartet), Steve Lacy at the Regattabar, Dave Douglas at the Dante Alighieri Cultural Center, and Oliver Lake at the Green Street Grill (see "Live and on Record," for Michael Freedberg's report on the Lake show). If there was a common theme at these shows, it was that jazz continues to thrive through multifaceted approaches to the tradition. And that the music is in no short supply of vibrant individual voices.

The 66-year-old avant Texas tenor Redman has been working with Haerter's group intermittently for three years. In the first set at the Middle East a week ago Monday, the band alternated free-time, open-structure "interludes" with straight-ahead grooves and accessible song structures. There were two pieces by Monk and none by Redman's old bandmate Ornette Coleman, but you could hear both Monk and Coleman throughout the set. Sturdy, angular, folk-like tunes built on short rhythmic motifs were the springboards for improvisation, so you didn't need to take much of a mental leap from Monk's "Mysterioso" (the set's opener) and "Children's Song" (with its "knick-knack-paddywack" playground strain) to Redman's "Mushi Mushi" and "Walls Bridges" or even Haerter's funk-driven "Ball."

But Haerter was the news here. A stout, black-haired, mustachio'd man, he shimmied and shook as he squeezed out his solos. At times his hot tone and sitar-like clusters recalled Tony Williams/Miles Davis-era John McLaughlin. But his arsenal of bends, slurs, choked chords, and other unidentifiable effects also recalled Sonny Sharrock (Haerter said between sets that, like Sharrock, he prefers to mimic horn players rather than other guitarists). He didn't work with guitar-hero long sustains; instead he favored short-meter figures, stacked broken phrases. Sometimes he'd build tension with a series of figures that rose in speed and pitch and then release it with one long, deep rattling note in the bass register -- like a boulder pushed uphill and dropped off a cliff. He was really something.

The following night, the European-based Lacy, now 63, ended a 31-day, 30-concert US tour at the Regattabar with a trio drawn from his longstanding sextet: himself and bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel and drummer John Betsch. Unlike other saxophone stars, Lacy doesn't build his solos through the tension and relaxation of speedy sheets of sound and overblown histrionics. Rather, he draws deliberate, stepwise, one-note-at-time solos reminiscent of the minimalist visual artists and poets he alludes to in his titles and dedications. Think of Matisse's late cutouts, or Galway Kinnell's "Prayer," which Lacy recited before performing his musical equivalent. Throughout the first set, Lacy varied his attack with high piping squeaks, curlicued legato lines, little jets and eddies of notes that floated freely over the pulse laid down by Avenel and Betsch. Lacy's music manages to be earthy and swinging even as it maintains its Zen-like poise.

The sextet Douglas brought to the Dante Alighieri Cultural Center in Kendall Square last Sunday has dedicated two albums to the music of, respectively, postbop trumpeter Booker Little and saxist Wayne Shorter. Douglas's music for the sextet is based on episodic structures with deliberately shifting tempos and time signatures -- just when you think you've heard the whole songlike structure and are preparing yourself for the typical string of jazz solos, another theme enters for trumpet, trombone, and sax.

Douglas's trumpet lines have a clean, uncluttered quality. Like Lacy, he sometimes seems in conversation with himself, veering off from a given chord sequence for laughing-trumpet asides or deep growls. He'll make his way up the register with a sequence of runs, then stop at a plateau for a series of smeared held notes before working his way down. He'll add a phrase just when it seems he's expended all his breath, giving a line a garrulous, "just-one-more-thing" quality. At one point Sunday, he brought the band to a stop while he went off on an a cappella flight -- all full of piercing runs, and half-valved squeezed accents. Then he lingered on several notes in the lower register, working the sound of soft-blown air out with his pitch. And then he went lower still, his conversational phrasing now directed at the audience -- as if he had something he were trying to explain to us, something at once deeply funny and deeply serious.