Dazzling replay of Carnegie classic
Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra Barbican ★★★★★
If any ensemble in the world can claim to be jazz’s custodian, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra is surely it. Together with its founder/director, the great trumpeter and band leader Wynton Marsalis, they keep the great tradition of jazz in constant circulation.
The question facing such an enterprise is: should respectful recreation or bold reinterpretation be the guiding principle? Marsalis has always leaned towards the former, and never more so than at the orchestra’s concert on Tuesday night at the Barbican. It was a recreation of that extraordinary night in 1938 when the “King of Swing” Benny Goodman led his own orchestra and a clutch of top-rank, mostly black guest jazz musicians in a concert at Carnegie Hall. It was a huge symbolic assertion of jazz’s status as an art rather than low entertainment – an idea hardly less pertinent now – and of the possibility of racial harmony in a country disfigured by segregation.
So an event heavy with significance, but Tuesday’s concert, like the event it commemorated, was far from heavy musically. On the contrary, the whole evening vibrated with fabulously tight swing rhythms and blazed with astounding virtuoso talent. We heard almost every number from the 1938 concert, each one packed with subtle reminders of that night, in a way that caught its spirit without imitating the letter. For instance, the delicious Ellington blues number Blue Reverie had beautifully eloquent solos from soprano saxophonist Walter Blanding and baritonist Paul Nedzela, which echoed the immortal ones from Johnny Hodges and Harry Carney. Like the original concert this one was peppered with guest appearances, on this occasion from starry British musicians who all shone, above all vibraphone player Jim Hart (on terrific form in Stompin’ at the Savoy).
On a night so packed with dazzling, breakneck instrumental virtuosity that it seems invidious to pick out individuals, pianist Dan Nimmer’s dazzling left-hand vamps in When My Baby Smiles at Me deserve a mention, as does saxophonist Ted Nash’s shapely solo in The Man I Love. Wynton Marsalis’s solo in Life Goes to a Party may have been less flashy or sinuously seductive than these, but the subtly intelligent way it pushed and probed at the music’s rhythmic and harmonic constraints actually topped the lot.
Marsalis’s determination to cede the limelight to his band was noble, but one sensed it was disappointing for his many fans to hear so little of the JLCO’S star player.
The Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra appears at the Barbican tonight (020 7638 8891). Returns only