PLENTY: Guitarist Jake Hertzog rocked Berklee night at the Beehive. |
WFNX’s Jazz Brunch Top 5
1. Pink Martini, Hey Eugene [Heinz]
2. Sam Yahel, Truth and Beauty [Origin]
3. Spanish Harlem Orchestra, United We Swing [Six Degrees]
4. The Bad Plus, Prog [Heads Up]
5. Club D’Elf, Perhapsody [Kufala] |
As usual, there was too much to see in a week that included venerable avant-gardist Burton Greene at one end of the spectrum and crossover darling Diana Krall at the other. Here are three other shows that provided good listening.At Ryles on Saturday July 7, saxophonist Tim Mayer fronted 5LMN2, an outfit that had its inception at Wally’s in 1993 and has been around in one form or another ever since. The 5LMN2 agenda has been Afro-Latin jazz or standard jazz played in Latin arrangements. (The name, if you read it in Spanish, comes out as “five elements.”) In the middle set of three at Ryles, the band mixed it up with Cedar Walton’s “Bolivia,” Monk’s “Evidence,” Joe Henderson’s “Serenity” and “Inner Urge,” and Puerto Rican composer Pedro Flores’s standard “Obsesión.”
The Monk expert Steve Lacy once described all of Monk’s tunes as dances, so it was no surprise to see the band make the most of the displaced accents of “Evidence” with the 3-2 clave beat. Pianist Marcello Casagrandi emphasized rhythmic chording throughout the set, and he was so inventive in his change-ups that for a brief moment in his “Bolivia” solo he even threw off the otherwise imperturbable rhythm team of drummer Pablo Peña and conguero Paolo Stagnaro (son of Boston bassist Oscar). In the first couple of tunes, the details of Mayer’s tenor playing got buried in the heavy rhythmic mix (Fernando Huergo played electric bass), so it was good to hear him slice through on alto in “Evidence.” But he really came to the fore on Joe Henderson’s “Inner Urge,” clapping off the clave rhythm until piano came in with a repeating staccato cross-rhythm, then bass, then percussion, then finally tenor. Casagrandi built up to a staccato climax in his solo and then Mayer entered, slower and with lighter percussion underneath him, mixing up his phrasing, alternating short-phrased groupings and arpeggiated runs, reveling in a fat lower register that hadn’t been evident in the first couple of tunes, taking his time. It was beautiful. He was equally relaxed on the slow cha-cha-cha of “Obsesión” and on “Serenity,” which was a light rumba. There was plenty of abstraction in all of these, and plenty of rhythmic hurly-burly, but at their best, the band (who play Wally’s every Thursday night) reminded you why Afro-Latin jazz is so popular: they’re all dances, and the dance beat will draw you in no matter how far out the band take everything else.
The Beehive in the South End has been much, uh, buzzed about since opening a few months ago — a swank “bohemian” subterranean bar/restaurant (with one of the co-owners being Darryl Settles of Bob’s Southern Bistro) in the BCA complex with a no-cover live-music policy, heavy emphasis on jazz. Tuesdays have been “Berklee nights,” and last week (July 10) was the end of an eight-week run that featured bands from The New Old School on the student-run Revelation Records. As Boston singer-songwriter, Berklee prof, and series supervisor Thaddeus Hogarth told me between sets, “These are all bands, not just random groups of students we recruited.”
Problem was, it’s not so easy to hear those bands at the Beehive. The space is cool as all-get-out — brick-lined catacombs, with a bar on the upper level that overlooks the music area downstairs. But unless you’re lucky enough to get into the small area fronting the bandstand, you’re out of luck. All that brick makes for a noisy place — a constant din of conversation — and anyone sitting in the main part of the dining room won’t be able to hear the music in any detail.
Sitting in the dining room for the first set, I could tell that the pan-American-jazz band Tantanakuy had a tight rhythm section and singer Eleonora Bianchini a soaring voice. When I was able to move into the stage area, I heard impressive flamenco-style picking from guitarist Michel Gonzalez. But the work of Tantanakuy — led by Argentines Marcelo Woloski (drums) and Andres Rotmistrovsky (bass) — is better heard on The New Old School. (Tantanakuy play the Roxbury Center for the Arts at Hibernian Hall July 25 at 6 pm. Bianchini returns to the Beehive August 21).
In front of the stage for the second set, I got a much better earful of guitarist Jake Hertzog and his trio — and was glad of it. The wiry, diminutive six-stringer, his unruly locks tied back, has many of the Metheny earmarks that you’ve maybe come to love and fear at once: the daunting fingerwork, the harmonic inventiveness, the organic, riff-based melodic freedom, the folk-like melodies. Along with the wow! factor comes the fear of just too damned much.
