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	GREG OSBY TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL

Introducing his tune "Equilatigram" — the penultimate piece of his second set at Scullers a week ago Wednesday — Greg Osby explained that he had developed it in his student days at Berklee, back in 1980, basing the structure on numerological theories drawn from his birth date, time of birth, distance from the Sun to the Earth at that time, and so on. And then he apologized for sounding "too brainy."

That was understandable. The tune itself, though driven by hard, shifting accents from drummer Eric McPherson, was a rhythmic maze. After the set, Osby revealed to me that it was, in fact, 4/4, but with an "implied eight." Okay. But that also explains why it’s sometimes easier to appreciate Osby’s brainier explorations than to feel them in your gut. Even the set’s opening, Fats Waller’s "Jitterbug Waltz," de-emphasized both the jitterbug and the waltz in favor of glancing melodic extrapolations and abstract takes on the overall song structure. A "condensed" version of Ellington’s "East St. Louis Toodle-oo" (as Osby called it), with a fantasia passage for pianist Megumi Yonezawa, did pretty much the same.

As a saxophonist, Osby isn’t exactly "cool." His tone is too big and robust, and his melodic patterns are angular and unpredictable. But he likes to play strings of unvaried eighth notes, he doesn’t resort very often to typical saxophone emotional signifiers like high bent notes or split tones, and he mostly sticks to his medium and lower register.

That said, there were healthy portions of his 90-minute set that absolutely killed. For most of it he stuck to good old concrete straight four — sometimes taken at a medium-slow groove grounded by bassist Matthew Brewer’s hard walk, sometimes taking off into hyper-warp speed on top of Brewer joined by McPherson’s clattering ride cymbal and stuttering off-beat bombs in the kick drum. This was the perfect complement to Osby’s controlled solo style — his extended runs leapt over breaks and through the turn-arounds and dipped into his butter-rich lower register. Against the even flow of his lines, his few bends and held notes were all the more dramatic, and he seemed to find more rhythmic variety in his phrasing as the tunes heated up, breaking up those eighth notes with rests and staccato breaks.

The band played the whole first portion of the set — before "Equilatigram" — without a break, using Osby’s "Nekide," with its dramatic stops, as a segue between tunes. They played Lou Donaldson’s "Alligator Boogaloo" to good, funky effect and followed it up with another (unidentified) fast one. And on Ellington’s "In a Sentimental Mood," Osby took a wonderful cadenza, using his rests to let that fat tone work Scullers’ natural resonance, ending one long-breathed line on a held tone that built in volume, as if he had somehow found another breath at the end of his breath.