By Peter Gerler
Notes
shifting inside chord changes, combos leaping along—jazz is the
sound of freedom. The notes move easily because Western harmony has
no hierarchy: no key rules another. Musically speaking, it is a
democracy. Jazz is, too, in that “Everybody plays his own song, but
everybody plays the same song.”
You never know
where this stuff will pop up—but it did Wednesday night, May 25,
2011, when the quintet Lost in the Sauce played Bemis Hall in
Lincoln, MA. It was the annual closing concert for the Classic Jazz
at Lincoln Library (CJALL) seminar series. The quintet’s name would
work well as a directive for any jazz band: the best place a player
can be is “in the swing” (the sauce) of the unit. In New Orleans
jazz, the big noise came from the whole band rather than from the
occasional solo. The swing arose out of agreement.
(The great New
Orleans bassist Pops Foster recalled,
“If the rest of the world was like musicians, this would be a great
world. You should see musicians back stage when one band comes back
to see another. Jesus, there’s some noise and talk.”)
But the music
talks as well—just out of itself. The many standards in this band’s
repertoire reveal the “fearful symmetry” in the Great American
Songbook. The personnel—Jeff Hughes, trumpet and flugelhorn; Craig
Ball, clarinet; Rich Giordano piano; Ken Steiner, bass, and Dave
Bragdon, drums--serve it up in elegance.
They opened on
a New Orleans note, in a tribute to the late Ed Williams, CJALL
co-founder and ubiquitous recorder and archivist of New England trad
jazz. The band’s languorous reading of the New Orleans Rhythm Kings’
1923
Tin Roof Blues
put us on the shores of the
Mississippi. They then snapped into righteous swing on Artie Shaw’s
Back Bay Shuffle,
its tiptoeing
melody held up by a boogie piano/big bass/cymbal rumble.
With I Cried
for You, recorded by everyone from Billie Holiday to Ray
Charles, the quintet again lived up to its name, romping over Ken
Steiner’s solid-four walk, clipping with Bragdon’s skins. Then
Giordano’s excellent stride—on the hall’s century-old heirloom
Steinway--followed with Do You Ever Think of Me, his solo
mellow but flowing.
The band took
Johnny Mercer’s I Thought About You at an unusual medium-up
tempo, drums choo-chooing into a solid swing. Later they brought in
Ray Noble’s The Very Thought Of You as a near-minuet between
would-be lovers—singing different songs, looking for the same song.
###
By Peter Gerler, updated June 1, 2011
Videos by Harold Mcleer
