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Body English
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You can have your guitar power chords and your latest slam-bang piano virtuoso, but nothing makes music more visual than a vibraphone. Lionel Hampton brought a grunting, jumping, manic athletic glee to the instrument, and Milt Jackson lorded it over his mallets with a restrained, graceful elegance, but in both cases those flying arms and sticks described a visual one-to-one correlation between motion and sounded note that’s just about unequaled. Stefon Harris, who played the Regattabar a week ago Tuesday and Wednesday, matches excitable body English with brainy musicality. That’s in part because he likes to set up stationed in the right angle formed by a vibraphone and its cousin the marimba, moving from one to the other, sometimes playing them simultaneously. At the late set Wednesday night, he began playing Sting’s "Until" with both arms fully extended, beating a waltz rhythm on the marimba with a pair of mallets in his left hand, sketching out the chords on the vibes with another pair in his right. It’s too bad the show was so poorly attended (there were about 40 people in the 200-plus capacity room for the Wednesday late set). Harris is virtuoso soloist, sophisticated composer, and ingratiating bandleader. His music is both accessible and chewy with content, and his band are a sharp, seasoned ensemble. Harris mixed strong originals with a savvy selection of hard-bop covers — the set opener, Joe Henderson’s "A Shade of Jade," segued without pause to Duke Pearson’s "Minor League." Harris favored the richer-toned vibes, with their namesake motor-powered vibrato, for comping or stating the theme, the wood-plated marimba, with its drier tone, for solos. Here he’d fashion beautiful long-arced bebop melodies, à la Jackson, accented with churchified R&B licks, like a percussive six-note upper-register phrase repeated several times in rapid succession, then reduced to three notes and repeated again. It was great testifying — soulful, rhythmic, kinetic. Harris’s band, Blackout (featured on his latest Blue Note release, Evolution), helped him realize his conception of jazz funk, making his angular start-stop themes jump with danceable rhythms. The Harris original "Nothing Personal" even sported a bridge with an unambiguous hi-hat/snare/kick-drum disco beat by Terreon Gully. Gully also sparked some great fake-ending stop-time exchanges, especially in the set closer, "Titi Boom" (by sometime Harris bandmate Taurus Mateen). This line-up (the rest being alto-saxophonist Casey Benjamin, keyboardist Marc Cary, and bassist Darryl Hall) understands that the displaced accents of funk are all about the notes you don’t play. Those rests create a vacuum that sucks the next solo forward and brings listeners to the edge of their seats.
BY JON GARELICK
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