Marlsais’ young players bask in the spotlight
It may be a bit early to place Wynton Marsalis firmly in the same role as drummer Art Blakey, whose Jazz Messengers band helped launch the careers of many great young artists (including Marsalis himself).
But Marsalis has cast a spotlight on so many emerging players simply by hiring or otherwise featuring them that he virtually has picked up where Blakey left off. Were it not for Marsalis, after all, the work of pianist Marcus Roberts, trumpeter Nicholas Payton and saxophonist Wessell Anderson, among many others, might not be as prominent as it is today.
The young band that Marsalis brought to Orchestra Hall over the weekend underscored the trumpeter’s passion for finding and nurturing new artists. Apart from longtime Marsalis collaborator Walter Blanding Jr. on saxophone, Marsalis’ quintet was staffed by players of a younger generation. And by featuring the 19-year-old vocalist Jennifer Sanon, a bona fide discovery, Marsalis reminded a capacity audience that jazz constantly replenishes itself with waves of inspiring new talent.
Because Marsalis’ small groups rarely feature a singer, Friday night’s performance by Sanon was noteworthy. From the outset, she disarmed her audience with a buoyant personality and an uncommonly supple instrument, the singer as evocative in vintage ballads as she was searing in traditional blues.
Bringing a gauzy tone and utterly unpretentious manner to the standard “Comes Love,” Sanon recalled the work of the young Ella Fitzgerald in the days of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket.” Fitzgerald in the late 1930s hadn’t yet developed her hyper-virtuoso scat technique, and Sanon, too, has a great deal of work ahead of her along these lines. But Sanon’s gorgeous, slightly grainy tone color and wide-open way with a phrase proved a feast for the ear.
Her breakthrough moment came in “Alabama Bound,” a down-home country blues that Sanon dispatched as if she were performing in a Southern roadhouse. Crying out her phrases with clarion force, fleshing out the tune with shouts and wails and sighs, she conveyed an emotional maturity one does not typically encounter in singers so young.
Marsalis’ current band sounds unlike his earlier small groups, in that its work is lighter and more translucent than, say, the deep-blue shadings of his septet. The current setting casts Marsalis’ trumpet in an intriguing light, enabling him to play softer, faster and more delicately than listeners may have come to expect from him.
So even though Marsalis produced all kinds of blues-based whinnying and whooping on his “Free to Be” (from “The Magic Hour” CD), the rest of the band played so discreetly that the music-making came closer to a whisper than a roar. On his sublime jazz waltz “Sophie Rose-Rosalee,” Marsalis used a Harmon mute to produce an extraordinarily refined, quicksilver timbre. And few trumpeters have tested themselves on the venerable “Cherokee” as rigorously as Marsalis did, taking an outrageously fast tempo yet articulating every fleeting note.
With bassist Carlos Henriquez bringing Afro-Latin soul to his solos, Aaron Goldberg offering a classical touch on piano, Ali Jackson excelling in New Orleans street beats on drums and saxophonist Blanding standing toe-to-toe with Marsalis on the front line, this quintet blew in like a warm Caribbean breeze.
By Howard Reich
Source: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2005-04-18-0504180150-story.html