Blanchard's genius, from whisper to scream Trumpeter Terence Blanchard and his quintet deliver a spellbinding performance that is laced with the history of jazz.
by Richard Scheinin
Trumpeter Terence Blanchard is at the top of his game. The New Orleans native is 46 years old and has reached that point where every note is a boiled-down signature statement. His sound reminds listeners of the whole history of jazz, even as it defines the moment and points ahead.
Miles Davis and Art Blakey were gravity centers for jazz: Each found the best young players, forging them into state-of-the-art bands to seize the day. Blanchard now does the same. His quintet's performance at Stanford University's Dinkelspiel Auditorium -- kicking off the seven-week Stanford Jazz Festival -- was sobering in its power and economy, its spellbinding fineness.
The group opened with a tune called "Transform," which harkened back to Davis: a near-silent landscape, wide open and colored with hazy chords from pianist Fabian Almazan and lots of chatter-and-splash detail from drummer Kendrick Scott. Then, in the midst of this, piercing cries from Blanchard, whose tone is fatter than Davis's, flavored with buttery smears and vibrato.
He gave way to saxophonist Brice Winston, airy and dodging about, then building to throaty ascension-cries. Out of the crystal silence and into the maelstrom: A story had been told. And then another began, the music dying back down to absolute stillness and gradually opening, via a slow-build roll from Scott, toward a moaned chant, definitive of Blanchard's current sound.
That sound is steeped in black churches, drawing on spirituals, speaking of persistence in the face of tragedy -- namely, the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. The trumpeter scored Spike Lee's 2006 documentary about Katrina, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," and his latest record, "A Tale of God's Will (A Requiem for Katrina)," is laced with sadness.
As was the group's performance, as it moved into that moaned chant, composed by Winston and titled "In Time of Need." There was resignation and loneliness -- and so much pure nobility as to be uplifting. And amid this drama, there simply was a lot of great playing, and not a bit of over-playing.
Bassist Derrick Hodge rooted the slow rhythmic surge in very few notes, while Scott, a master of incendiary detail, sketched in the groove with washes of cymbals. (Blanchard added still more detail, clacking his wedding ring against a shaker). Then the band faded away and let Almazan play an alone-at-twilight interlude. It was all the best kind of minimalism: What you don't play is as critical as what you do play; another lesson from Davis.
In the concert's second half, there were some slinky grooves in odd rhythms, adding urgency to the music, but never overriding its sense of basic beauty. On Blanchard's "Funeral Dirge," things got really basic: the sparest, tapped-out rhythm from Scott (paying homage to Max Roach's "The Drum Also Waltzes"), then plaintive cries from Blanchard, whose playing became a sermon. Which was followed by "Bounce," a shimmying second-line blues on which Hodge finally let loose: Here's what I can do.
This band's success lies in its chemistry, which verges on the magical. But there's something beyond that: the sense that all five musicians feel privileged to be performing this music. It's a privilege to hear them.
