If anyone can show why some kinds of jazz belong in a lounge-size room and not a concert hall, it's Barry Harris, the Detroit jazz pianist. On Sunday, in the company of locals Dave Green (bass) and Steve Brown (drums), Harris - 75 next week - once again made the Broadway songbook sound like music that still irresistibly tickles him to a shiver or a chuckle, even after all these years.
It's not that Harris can't make plenty of noise when he chooses, or that he plays an enigmatic or impenetrable music that you have to be close up to appreciate. Having worked with some of the biggest names in the jazz tradition over the years, Harris knows most things worth knowing about standard songs, chord changes and swing. But at times he likes to muse at the keyboard, rather than perform in the regular, audience-oriented sense.
He loves gliding standards together and, as a dedicated jazz teacher, he revels in the sharing of information. Accordingly, his shows can be more like witty, casual seminars than tightly packaged concert recitals. In a medley of standards that included This Nearly Was Mine, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square and Would You Like to Take a Walk?, he eased the harmonies into one another so fluently as to make the passage sound like one melody-rich composition. Then he toyed with snatches of them all again while murmuring their titles, almost to himself, while his two partners looked on appreciatively.
Harris had begun the evening in the same spirit, springing a mixed-time account of Tadd Dameron's Casbah out of a softly evocative Out of Nowhere, then Tea for Two with its harmonies wildly displaced, racing over Brown's fizzy hi-hat and ride-cymbal patterns. The pianist hummed and hawed his way through an account of Like Someone in Love, in which every chorus seemed to glow with its own special melody, and took Just One of Those Things at flying tempo over the tireless stride of Dave Green's bass. What Barry Harris does is as familiar as the seasons - and, like them, a fascinating mystery at the same time.
