When Kenny Garrett, the former Art Blakey and Miles Davis sideman, turned a lullaby-like soprano sax melody into a slow, unaccompanied meditation on tone colour and pitch changes, he sounded like the saxophone master he is. When he played long stretches of dance-sax funk licks over a backbeat that threatened to demolish the drum kit and the stage together, he sounded like every saxophonist who has ever heard a Hank Crawford or Dave Sanborn disc.
Striking a balance between drivetime jazz and improvisation is what this powerful and imaginative player is about. Since the release of his comprehensively populist Happy People disc this year, Garrett has firmly shifted his priorities in the drivetime direction, but he is too good for this choice to undermine his power to surprise. He is also a much better composer of gregariously grooving music than most jazz virtuosos who try their hand at it.
Early in his show, Garrett defined his present approach with a medley that included a Beatles song, a soul-sax hit, some Thelonious Monk and the 1980s Miles Davis theme Jean-Pierre. Then he got everybody clapping to Christopher Dave's increasingly manic backbeat. By the climax of this episode, Dave was on his feet at the drum kit, whacking his cymbals like a man dementedly trying to cut a big tree with a blunt axe.
Garrett then set his jazz credentials straight by bouncing off a catchy pop-jazz motif into flat-out double-time bebop, with the dark murmur of Vincent Archer's bass rumbling under it. The saxophonist mingled the idiom's classic Parkeresque phraseology with an edge-of-the-instrument raucousness from both gospel music and free-jazz. Ain't Nothin' but the Blues (a Miles Davis reference to a subtle, time-juggling Garrett original) deftly spliced a steady, repeating McCoy Tyner-like piano riff with an intricately wayward Latin-flavoured drum figure. Dave took the piece out by keeping up the same taxing pattern on his own for some minutes, gradually dropping his volume to silence. But Garrett's soprano-saxophone duet with pianist Vernell Brown on a selection of Japanese themes was the improvising highlight, showcasing the leader's melodic inventiveness and clear, penetrating tone.
