On Monday night Joanne Brackeen, the California-born jazz piano virtuoso, was wearing a hat that made her look as if a mole on a red parachute had bailed out on to her head. But that was the only distraction in an astonishing display of musicality in her performance with the Scottish saxophonist Tommy Smith. Brackeen, who has been as much involved in education as performance, is one of the great underrated jazz pianists of the past 30 years. She has an almost uncanny ability to pick up on the ideas of her partners, and a comprehensive grasp of contemporary jazz styles. Her performance with Smith was a quintessential display of the art of collective jazz improvisation.
Smith sometimes seemed overwhelmed by his partner's fluency and speed of anticipation, and this led to an occasional tendency to rush his phrasing. But for the most part this increasingly mature musician's lyricism and tonal command, particularly in a delicate high register, was an ideal complement to Brackeen's sweeping, orchestral style. Give-and-take went on continuously, but never descended into the kind of smug jazz banter that just sounds like musical ping-pong. The saxophonist would resolve a solo in a caressing series of spaced single notes and Brackeen would come in right after him with the same notes enveloped into sonorous chords. Each message took the music somewhere else.
When Smith played Someday My Prince Will Come as if he were blowing through a clarinet rather than a tenor sax, Brackeen buoyed him up with runs and billowing chords. Then she appropriated the long, feathery sounds at the end of his solo and batted them back at him as clipped, staccato phrases.
John Coltrane's Giant Steps began as a tumbling, unaccompanied sax overture before the pianist began a churning rhythm underneath it. It was a tribute to both Smith's secure control and Brackeen's fizzing swing and density of sound that the piece could sustain the breakneck tempo of the original without a rhythm section.
Piano/sax improvising duets are a hard way to make a living, but this one made it all sound easy.
