Jazz: Wynton Marsalis
The trumpeter Wynton Marsalis insists on understatement. In the quintet he’s leading through Sunday at the Joyce Theater, 175 Eighth Avenue, at 19th Street, every phrase is neatly tucked in, every arrangement carefully planned, every note burnished.
Such meticulousness can rob a jazz performance of spontaneity, but on Tuesday night the quintet sometimes broke through its own decorum.
Although Mr. Marsalis likes to toy with musical form, Tuesday’s first set used straightforward theme-solos-theme structures; the second set was an uninterrupted string of tunes, with a few unexpected touches. The simpler forms allowed longer solos all around, an opportunity that Mr. Marsalis used to advantage. His trumpet solos were poised and songful – particularly in ballads, where he virtually crooned. The quintet had a light touch – with Don Braden on tenor or soprano saxophone, Robert Hurst on bass, Jeff (Tain) Watts on drums and the pianist Marcus Roberts, who mixes Wynton Kelly’s openness with Mal Waldron’s way of ruminating on certain phrases – but its members’ solos didn’t always earn their length.
The group breezed through Mr. Marsalis’s tricky original compositions and revamped standards, including a brisk ‘‘Autumn Leaves’‘ that kept shifting gears and a ‘‘Cherokee’‘ with a trumpet obligato dancing around the piano’s melody. Yet it didn’t kick around ideas or make dynamic changes in the manner of a seasoned band; one arranging touch, a rhythm-section crescendo behind a solo, usually steamroller the soloist instead of spurring him. But if the rest of the quintet could cut loose as Mr. Watts does now and then, the music would benefit.
by: Jon Pareles
Source: The New York Times