Debut may mean new territory for Alexander the great
Prodigy ‘s Wortham performance thrills crowd
Close your eyes while Joey Alexander plays the piano and you can easily imagine an old man, a veteran of bebop who maybe grew up in the clubs of New Orleans, who’s plunking away for the millionth time but never gets bored and always gives the show his all. In fact, Alexander is 13, and he’s barely taller than the instrument he commands with a captain’s confidence.
The Indonesian prodigy — I usually avoid this overused word, but let me just this one time — has lit up the jazz world like no one since the Pat Metheny Group in the 1980s. His playing, like the playing of any jazz great, embodies contradictions that complement rather than clash with each other. It’s muscular yet subtle, deliberate yet relaxed, brighteyed and vivacious like the young talent he is yet wistful and knowing, like a ghost.
It was no surprise that the audience Friday night at the Wortham — brought to Houston by the Society of the Performing Arts — was ecstatic. They cheered and yelled and clapped anytime they felt Alexander’s big energy fill up the room. Drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. and bassist Dan Chmielinski were kings of the stage in their own right, spiraling out from Alexander’s melodies and patterns like a rocket venturing beyond its orbit, then whipping back into recognizable, cathartic territory. And of course the crowd was with them.
But the night was Alexander’s Houston debut, so there was an element of courtship as well. Is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship? It was as if the audience was hungry for this young man they’ve heard all about (Alexander, a Grammy nominee, has played with many of the best jazz players in the world) yet were still curious what he had to offer. Because they knew the stereotype of young virtuosos, the hotshot conservatory kind, who can play their brains out but forgot to stop and ponder, too obsessed with showing off to let the music’s slow poetry marinate.
But Alexander doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He has Monk, and friends. On Friday night, Alexander played tribute to old gospels, Thelonious Monk and “real book” standards of the swing era. Because each historical homage also contained moments of innovation — Alexander likes to treat time like taffy and stretch and savor it as he pleases — they blended lyrically with the more manic original compositions.
“Soul Dreamer,” off of Alexander’s 2016 LP “Countdown” (Motema Music), for example, begins with a sorrowful, ambling introduction whose soft rubato crystallizes into harder-pressing grooves. Listen to his solos, and think of how young players typically choose to play more notes, in faster tempo, with predictable accelerandos that build up to a usual climax. Notice how Alexander instead makes deliberately light choices, evoking that old adage “jazz is about the notes you don’t play.”
I don’t know how Alexander reached the pinnacle of artistry which he now embodies, nor can I predict the heights he may reach in the later decades of his career. But to see him lead “Countdown,” performed as an encore to the voracious audience, with such precision was to feel like being in the same room as history.
The piece was, like the entire concert, an evocation of both past and present, a sizzling double-time tune that draws inspiration from both bebop and stranger, darker places. It begins with Owens Jr. on the snare with the rigid, cubic patterns of a marching band drum line, which builds itself up into a fiery, swing-y mess that invites hollers from the crowd. Then the baton’s passed to Chmielinski for a fierce and lyrical solo, and then to Alexander to guide the melodic vehicle to a soft landing.
What precision. Can a group of three be spontaneous together without losing their sense of individuality? Modern jazz seems to be more and more about answering that question, and Alexander, bebop nerd though he may be, is entirely in tune with the current song-meets-improvisation vernacular.
The end of the concert didn’t feel like a conclusion but a beginning. Where is Alexander headed now? With two albums under his belt, and a roster of collaborators to make any jazz artist envious — Larry Grenadier and Chris Potter just to name two — Alexander could seek to make jazz accessible the way Wynton Marsalis has, or perhaps to push it into new territory. Because even if he is a sensation, Alexander is not yet creating new music. The Friday night concert presented a zenith of execution, but not genre-challenging ideas. This may matter later.
On Friday it wasn’t the point. The point was simply to play some great music. But Joey Alexander may outdo himself yet.