It’s billed as the Frank Morgan Quartet, but the sublime alto saxophonist isn’t the only one driving the music this week at the Jazz Showcase.
With Chicago piano powerhouse Willie Pickens egging him on, Morgan is producing some of the finest playing of his career, as he established during his first set Tuesday night.
As jazz lovers know, Morgan has been enjoying a career rebirth in recent years, having put to rest various demons and vices that once got in the way. With his health returned and his intellectual energies focused, he clearly has re-emerged as one of the most original and persuasive alto players in jazz.
But if Morgan’s radiant tone, fervent lyricism and mesmerizing, incantatory rhythms already command attention, his work attained new eloquence on this occasion, thanks in large part to Pickens’ hyper-virtuoso pianism. Unwilling to allow Morgan to linger too long on a phrase or take too much rubato in unreeling a melodic line, Pickens relentlessly kept pushing the altoist forward.
With his large and complex chords, his great splashes of color and dissonance in the right hand and his barrelhouse octaves in the left, Pickens never let the dramatic intensity flag. The driving force and fury of his accompaniments proved precisely the right counterpart to Morgan’s alto playing, which benefited greatly from this surge of energy.
Without doubt, the evening’s high point came in Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints,” which Morgan and Pickens made into an extended tone poem running well past 20 minutes. Yet with each restatement of the main theme, the two players transformed the music by changing the color, texture, context and melodic contour of Shorter’s original. Blues riffs, be-bop variations, hard-bop utterances, unexpected key changes, unpredictable syncopations–hardly a musical device went unused in this tour de force of the jazz improviser’s art.
There were other pleasures in this evening, as well, beginning with Morgan’s solo, horn-call opening on Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia.” Once Pickens, bassist Larry Gray and drummer Wilbur Campbell had joined in, the band established that this was going to be no ordinary reading.
Beyond the unusually relaxed tempo, Morgan and friends put their own spin on the classic tune by downplaying its taut rhythms and emphasizing instead the long, lovely contour of its melodic line.
With bassist Gray and drummer Campbell providing incendiary solos of their own, this quartet virtually could do no wrong.
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The Frank Morgan Quartet plays through Sunday at the Jazz Showcase, 59 W. Grand Ave., Chicago. Phone 312-670-BIRD.
