Teasing wit and agile interplay breathe new life into jazz standards
Eric Harland Quartet Village Vanguard, New York ★★★★☆
While live performance to an audience remains off-limits, a handful of jazz clubs are managing to broadcast live-streamed concerts. One of them is the most venerable club of them all, the Village Vanguard in New York. Since the first lockdown began it’s hosted a regular series of top-rank acts, all at the rockbottom price of $10 (£7) – and without public subsidy.
What’s missing in these streamed gigs is the energy that comes from a real live audience. To compensate, the Vanguard’s streamed concerts are on the short side. One certainly misses the unbuttoned sense you get in a live gig that the players have all the time in the world. On the other hand, an unbuttoned musician can slip into garrulous note-spinning, and in these streamed gigs the playing has a taut feel. Not a note is wasted.
That was certainly the case with this hour-long set from a terrific Newyork-based quartet, led by drummer Eric Harland. It seemed at the outset to belong in the experimental wing of jazz. Harland set up a busy pattern of metallic clicks and quietly deep thuds that edged towards a regular beat. Meanwhile, one’s ears dimly registered a strange glacial sound, emanating from Austin White’s inscrutable fiddlings with some electronic gadgetry. Vibraphonist Joel Ross danced around a fixed harmony by half-steps, while at the front saxophonist Chris Potter nudged at pithy phrases. These two interlocked ideas teased one’s memory. Were they almost quoting something?
Yes, came the answer, as Thelonious Monk’s famous standard Well, You Needn’t finally emerged from all the feinting and hinting, rose to a muted climax, and faded back
Engaging wit and agile interplay between the four was the keynote
to inchoate murmurs and drum-clicks. This opening gambit showed these four players have a love for the jazz tradition.
The three remaining numbers followed the same pattern. A much-loved jazz standard was gradually assembled from halfremembered fragments, before being deconstructed back down to its constituent parts. Engaging wit and agile interplay between the four was the keynote, though in the 1941 number You Don’t Know What Love Is they struck a deeper tone. In all it was a delight, and a reassurance to those jazz fans who worry that standards, the lifeblood of the artform, are in danger of fading away.