Slide Hampton, leader of the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band
Jazz Fest closes with a bebop feast The Detroit International Jazz Festival closes with a celebration of modern jazz’s bebop musical style.
by Mark Stryker
Though it wasn't billed as such, closing night at the Detroit International Jazz Festival morphed into a de facto celebration of bebop, the modern jazz movement of the '40s spearheaded by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell and a few others. Jazz has gone through a lot of changes in the last 60 years, but bebop -- whose sleek lines, complex syncopation and sophisticated harmony expanded the options for improvising musicians -- remains the music's lingua franca.
But it's one thing to hear musicians who learned the language in school and another to hear first or second generation beboppers who absorbed this music when it was new. There's an authenticity of phrasing, rhythm and articulation in the playing of the latter that young musicians find impossible to duplicate unless they've apprenticed with an elder statesmen.
No one plays more authentic bebop than Barry Harris, the Detroit-born pianist who started the trend with bassist Rodney Whitaker and drummer Lewis Nash in tow. At 78, Harris channels the fundamentals of Parker's generation through his own distinct rhythmic rumble, harmonic imagination and foxy wit. On Powell's deliriously lyrical "I'll Keep Loving You," taken at a molasses tempo, you could practically hear the pianist thinking out loud as he waited until the last possible moment to strike some of his chords, often landing on surprising harmonic colors that startled the ear.
A famous teacher, Harris has seeded several generations of students. One of the best known, alto saxophonist and former Detroiter Charles McPherson, 69, made an unannounced guest appearance with his mentor. The quartet set a roaring tempo for the the anthem "Cherokee." McPherson played rhapsodic streams of fresh melody and animated rhythm cut from Parker's language but way beyond cliche. On the walking ballad "Darn that Dream," McPherson's tone glowed luminously and the rhapsodies turned to rapture.
Harris and company were followed on the Waterfront Stage by the Heath Brothers Quartet, a showcase for the two surviving members of the first family of Philadelphia jazz: tenor and soprano saxophonist and underrated composer Jimmy Heath, 81, and drummer Albert (Tootie) Heath, 73. (The third brother, bassist Percy, died in 2005.) Pianist Jeb Patton and bassist David Wong, musicians some 40-50 years younger than the co-leaders, completed the band.
Jimmy's clever "Winter Sleeves," a reworking of the basic harmonies to "Autumn Leaves" was cleverly built from shifting Latin rhythms, a sinewy melody, vamps and breaks. The saxophonist's trademark on-the-beat phrasing and meticulous approach to harmony and melody remain intact. And his tone on both tenor and soprano is still warm and round, though the strength of his articulation and weight of his sound have diminished some with age. Still, his intonation remains flawless on both instruments. He was at his best on soprano when essaying another bebop anthem, Thelonious Monk's "Round Midnight." Surprising long tones and stuttering fragments gave variety to his phrasing. Patton, an assured soloist, and Wong were mostly in the right place at the right time throughout the set. But the star was Tootie, who spread the rhythm around the drum kit with great wit, no-nonsense swing and blue-flame intensity. He's lost nothing from his fastball.
The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band brought the festival to a high-spirited close at the main amphitheatre at Hart Plaza. The band, led by trombonist-arranger Slide Hampton, is stocked with a charismatic mix of veterans (like tenor saxophonists James Moody and Heath and trumpeter Claudio Roditi) and younger guns (like trumpeter Roy Hargrove, alto saxophonist Antonio Hart and trombonist Steve Davis). Many of the players have direct connections to Gillespie, who died in 1993. But what is most important is that the band's ebullient personality embodies the blend of uninhibited joy, serious musicianship and humor that always defined Gillespie. The trumpeter not only proved that bebop could be big band music but that the heady style could also entertain the masses.
The arrangements by Hampton, Heath, Quincy Jones and others wink at the classic combination of muscle and lyricism in the charts Tadd Dameron, Gil Fuller wrote for Gillespie's big band in the '40s. Hampton's arrangement of Dameron's "Hot House" opened the set like a stiff drink -- Hampton played tricks with the slippery chromatic melody, tossing cascading fragments around the ensemble. Execution wasn't always supple or tight, and I wondered whether the poor sound engineering at the stage was affecting the musicians' ability to hear each other; certainly the periodic amplification, balance problems and feedback took away some of the pleasure for listeners.
But the band overcame the issues. It has a lot of weapons: keen arrangements, sharp soloists, scat-singing hi jinx, vocalist Roberta Gambarini, a brassy bite that means business and a true esprit de corps. The remarkable Moody -- who first played with Gillespie's big band in 1946 and might be the hippest 83-year-old on the planet -- approached his solos like a tiger stalking his prey. He played ideas more harmonically advanced than some of the young turks sitting next to him in the saxophone section. He also broke up the house with his trademark vocal shtick on "Moody's Mood For Love." Jokes aside, when the band tore into Fuller's original 1946 arrangement of "Things to Come," an ever-fresh work of blistering tempo, wild intensity and minor-key expression, you might still be convinced that bebop is the music of the future.
