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JIM HALL AND DAVE HOLLAND
SIMPÁTICO

Jazz musicians lead wandering lives, and their paths are continually crossing in one-off sessions or occasional groupings. Most of the time, the music in these one-offs is competent, with individual moments of excitement but little more. On rare occasions, if the chemistry is right, something much more profound happens. Guitarist Jim Hall and bassist Dave Holland don’t play as a duo often — both are among the most in-demand leaders and sidemen in jazz — but when they do, something very profound indeed happens. From the first notes of the opening set a week ago Thursday at the Real Deal Jazz Club and Café at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center, the music was magical: intimate, finely crafted, intelligent, touched with a rare grace and empathy.

They sidled up to the melody of "My Funny Valentine" from different directions, growing closer together as they swapped phrases and echoed each other’s lines. By the time they’d established the melody, they were in that state of effortless freedom in which whatever one played was simultaneously an independent, self-sufficient statement and a perfect complement to what the other did.

For two musical personalities so idiosyncratic and sophisticated, this is no small feat. Hall’s elliptical solos follow their own logic. On Joe Lovano’s "Blackwell’s Message" and Holland’s "Rio," his sequences of richly voiced chords fell at oblique angles to the beat, then broke up into widely zigzagging lines that touched down at unexpected moments into a smooth groove, then skittered away again. None of this fazed Holland, whose own path through the tunes evinced a tuneful momentum, with each phrase building on the previous one to create a coherent forward thrust.

They played two blues — Holland’s Mingus dedication "Blues for CM" and Hall’s "Careful"— and it was a measure of their creativity and their compatibility that they consistently turned up some of their greatest surprises on this most common of jazz forms. Holland’s relaxed walking on his tune laid down a deep-pile carpet for Hall, who played soft chords that swung like brushes on a snare drum. Holland’s solo, full of explosive runs and throbbing low notes, was one of the highlights of the set. On "Careful," Hall’s solo was full of ambiguities that he resolved into discrete, funky riffs.

Every tune, whether a standard like "All the Things You Are" or one of their originals, was subject to their playful scrutiny, their determination to do something new with it — and to make it swinging and beautiful as well.

BY ED HAZELL

Issue Date: December 10 - 16, 2004
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